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HEADLINERS

**Hanif Abdurraqib** is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, *There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension* (Random House, 2024) was a *New York Times Bestseller* and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His previous book, *A Little Devil In America* (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Photo by Kate Sweeney.

Jamila Woods is a musician, poet, and multidisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago. Her critically acclaimed debut album HEAVN – an ode to Blackness, girlhood, and home – was released by JagJaguwar Records in 2017. Her sophomore project, LEGACY! LEGACY!, features twelve tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced the creator’s life and work – including James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Frida Kahlo. Her most recent album, Water Made Us, is a genre-blending song cycle on love and the wisdom of surrender.
Jamila has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She has shared stages with Corinne Bailey Rae, Rafael Saadiq, Bonobo, Common, Chance the Rapper, Brittany Howard, Macklemore, and many others. An award-winning poet, Jamila’s work often blurs boundaries between poem and song. As cultural critic Doreen St. Felix writes, “It makes you wish all singers were poets.”

Photo by Pidgeon Pagonis.

LITERATURE

**Uchenna Awoke** is a writer from Nsukka, Nigeria and the author of *The Liquid Eye of a Moon*. His short stories have appeared in *Transition*, *Elsewhere, Trestle Ties, Oyster River Pages, Evergreen Review,* and other publications. He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Vermont Studio Center. He is an Artist Protection Fund Fellow and was the inaugural Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Fellow, currently enrolled at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a 2019 Graywolf African Fiction Prize finalist.
Photo by Andrew Kilgore.

**Yu-Mei Balasingamchow** was born in Singapore and moved to Boston, where she was a bookseller at Papercuts Bookshop and where she teaches writing workshops at GrubStreet. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize special mention and been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. She has an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Singapore’s National Arts Council. *Names Have Been Changed* is her debut novel.

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s northshore, Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barry is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including the novel, The Unveiling, a work set in Antarctica and which Kirkus Reviews described in a starred review as “a terrifying must-read set at the ends of the earth.” The New York Times named her poetry collection, Auction, once of the five best poetry books of 2023. Barry is one of a select group of writers to receive NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction. Her first play production, The Mytilenean Debate, was staged in the spring of 2022.

Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, **Carmen Boullosa** was born in Mexico City in 1954. Boullosa is the author of nineteen novels (*Texas: The Great Theft* and *The Book of Eve* were translated by Samantha Schnee, *Before*, by Peter Bush), more than a dozen collections of poetry (*Hatchet*, translated by Lawrence Schimmel), two volumens of plays, and four of essays (*How Mexico and the USA Created The "Mexican" Drug Wa*r, cowritten with Mike Wallace). Carmen Boullosa has collaborated with visual artists and has done herself artists books since the late seventies. Some of her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries and other venues. She has lectured and read her poems in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She was a Guggenheim, a DAAD, and a Cullman Fellow, and the recipient of literary prizes in Mexico, Germany, Spain the Café Gijón, and the USA. Fellow of the NYIH (New York Institute of Humanities), and she presides the New York City branch of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Her books have been translated to fourteen languages. More than a hundred Doctoral Degrees Dissertations have been written on her work, as well as a dozen of books about her in several languages. The show “Nueva York” on CUNY-TV that has aired for 20 years, has won her seven NY-EMMYs. She was a visiting professor at the universities of Georgetown, Columbia, NYU, SDSU and Blaise Pascal in Clermont Ferrand, a Chair Alfonso Reyes at la Sorbonne, was a faculty member at the City College CUNY, and is a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. The New York Public Library houses her archive.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

**Lawrence Burney** is a writer, editor, critic, and the founder of True Laurels, an independent magazine covering Baltimore’s music and culture scene. His work has appeared in publications such as *New York Magazine*, GQ, *Washington Post* and *Pitchfork*. He has also worked as an editor at *The Fader*, a staff writer at *VICE*, and an editor/reporter at *The Baltimore Banner*. His first book, *No Sense in Wishing*, a collection of essays, was published in July 2025 via Atria Books. Follow him on Instagram and X @TrueLaurels.

Frank Campagna is the owner of Kettle Art gallery in Deep Ellum. Beginning with the music venue Studio D, through his statement murals that are still seen in Deep Ellum, and Kettle Art, which recently celebrated 20 years, he has been a trailblazer in Dallas music and art history.

**Afsheen Farhadi** is the author of the novel, FALSE PROPHET, which releases July 7, 2026 from Melville House. His short fiction and essays have appeared in *Ploughshares*, *The Georgia Review*, *Conjunctions, The Southern Review*, *Colorado Review*, *Catapult*, *Bright Lights Film Journal*, and elsewhere. He served as the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.

**Rodrigo Hasbún** is a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels *Affections* (Simon & Schuster) and *The Invisible Years* (Deep Vellum). Named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010, his short stories have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Words Without Borders, among others, and his work has been translated into twelve languages. He teaches Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

**Jason Hensel** is a writer, editor, photographer and musician with more than 25 years of experience writing for magazines, digital productions and live comedy performances. Originally from Granbury and a graduate of the University of North Texas, he has called Dallas home for more than 30 years.

**Karan Mahajan** is the author of *The Association of Small Bombs*, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by *The New York Times Book Review*. His debut novel, *Family Planning*, was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He has been selected as one of *Granta*’s Best Young American Novelists, and his writing has appeared in *The New Yorker*, *The New York Times*, *Vanity Fair*, *The New York Review of Books*, and other venues. He is an associate professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

**Robin Myers** is a poet and translator. She won the 2025 National Book Award in Translated Literature for *We Are Green and Trembling*, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (New Directions), which was also longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Award. Her latest translation for Deep Vellum is *Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat*, by María Paz Guerrero. Her poetry collection *Centro* is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

**Mike Nagel** is the author of *Duplex* and *Culdesac*, both from Autofocus Books. His essays have appeared in D Magazine, The Rumpus, Little Engines, and The Paris Review Daily. He lives in Plano.

**Anders Nilsen** is the author and artist of such award winning graphic novels and comics as *Big Questions, The End, Dogs and Water,* and Tongues. His work has appeared in *Kramer’s Ergot*, *The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine* and elsewhere and has been translated around the world. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. A native of Minneapolis and long-time resident of Chicago, Northern New Hampshire and Portland, Oregon, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. Endling is her debut novel and has been translated into nineteen languages. She also works as an opera librettist.

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