Tin House Scholars

Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose memoir excerpt, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected as a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays series. His short stories, essays, and works of translation have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, and American Literary Review, among other journals. He is the winner of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. He was also a 2024 National Magazine Award finalist in Canada and one of the two runners-up in the 2025 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. His writing has received support from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Vermont Studio Center.

Sammi Chiyao is a PhD candidate at Stanford University, originally from Boston. Her work has previously appeared in Peatsmoke and received the 2025 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She has been supported by Tin House, Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference, and Seventh Wave.

Magenta (she/they) is a Black queer writer, teaching artist and multidimensional artist from Brooklyn, NY. Their art is curious about shapeshifting, Black diasporic myths, love, horror, afrosurrealism and the elasticity of Black femme and nonbinary embodiment. Magenta is published (under their government, Alisha Acquaye) in Carve Magazine, The Iowa Review, Plentitudes Journal, Allure, Teen Vogue, and more places. As a teaching artist, Magenta curates imaginative writing spaces for Black writers to explore different realms within themselves. Magenta is a 2023 recipient of NYSCA’s Support for Artists Grant and has participated in The Bandung Residency, The Free Black Women's Library: Obsidian, StoryKnife Writers Retreat, Tin House and Rhode Island Writers Colony. Magenta loves to curate playlists, watch cartoons, bake pastries, dance in nature and talk to trees.

Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, erotics and the more-than-human in queer and speculative ways toward interspecies futures. Ama is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London, an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and a Research Associate at VIAD (University of Johannesburg). She was recently awarded a PhD is Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck University of London and is currently working on her first novel, a speculative meditation on sentient trees, queer erotics and isolation, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers of Colour.

A.B. Rafael is a writer from Manila, Philippines, now based in Los Angeles, California. Over her decade-long career in non-profit communications, she has crafted stories about climate policy, corporate sustainability, and responsible technology. A.B. is now pursuing her passion for creative writing to show her two young children what it looks like to follow their dreams. She received a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is a student of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Beste Filiz (she/her) was born in Istanbul, a city where two continents meet. She was a child asylum seeker and refugee at three years old when her family was forced to flee Türkiye to London, England. She is now a Turkish-British-American writer for young people. She received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University in 2025. She is a recipient of the 2023 Walter Dean Myers Grant from We Need Diverse Books and a mentee in the 2025 We Need Diverse Books Mentorship Program. She lives in Northern California with her non-binary partner and three cats.

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks: Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022); Unsprung (Newfound, 2023); and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

J.K. Tsosie is a member of the Navajo Nation — Bitterwater Clan, born for the Many Goats Clan. His work. His work has appeared in Shō Poetry Journal, the Yellow Medicine Review, and the Indiana Review. He is a recipient of the Oberon Herbert Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets. His work examines the engineered historical narratives of the Indigenous Americans through the neo-western trope — of redemption, moral ambiguity, vast and desolate landscapes, and the pursuit of justice. He resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Tiwa Territory) where he is completing an MD/PhD at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

Born and raised in Tokyo, M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller, puzzle nerd, and third-generation (at least!) speculative fiction fan. Her diverse work can be read in The Cincinnati Review, Epiphany, Seventh Wave, HAD, Luna Station Quarterly, Marvel Comics, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from communities including Tin House, VONA, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and International Thriller Writers. A finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship, the NYC Midnight competitions, and The Florida Review Editors’ Award in Creative Nonfiction, among others, M.E. holds a Creative Writing BA from Stanford University and an MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She lives in California with three sweet humans and two cats, Mimi and Potato; find her at curiousstoryprods.com, @memi_writes, and @memi-writes.bsky.social.

Naqiya Motiwalla is an organizer, fiber artist, and stray cat lover based in Brooklyn, NY. She's been writing poetry and failed novel drafts since childhood. Naqiya is also the founder of Khilna Collective (@khilnacollective), a fiber arts mutual aid initiative. She finds herself drawn to stories that have touches of fantasy, absurdism, and the radical acceptance of it all.

Brenna Yellowthunder is Diné, Hočak, and Standing Rock Lakota from Flagstaff, AZ and Black River Falls, WI. They are an award winning writer with publications in Saving Earth Magazine, the Timberline Review, and more forthcoming. They are a recipient of the Kay Snow Award for Fiction, the Michael Collier Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the LGBTQ Fellowship for Spring Residencies 2025 at the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Brenna’s upcoming novel, 10,000 Moon Could Never Be Enough was longlisted for the First Pages Prize in Fiction 2024, and an honorable mention in CRAFT First Chapters Contest 2024. Brenna lives in Oregon with their partner. They began their career fighting environmental racism in their tribal homelands from the age of 13. Since then, Brenna has focused their work on uplifting voices that often go unheard. This includes work in grassroots organizing with movements, museum consultation on behalf of Native communities, and a passion for working with Native youth. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Culture Studies from Whitman College, with a focus on Tribal Museums and the Politics of Display.

an chang joon was born in Seoul, Korea, but raised somewhere between Uzbekistan, Korea, and the eastern coast of the United States. He is the Korean translator for Nellie Hermann’s novel, The Season of Migration, and is the author of God-disease (Sarabande Books, 2025). His writing explores borders, not as a flat line, but as a liminal space of their own. He is never quite sure on how to navigate between his two and a half names.

Carolina Muriel is an artist, journalist and death doula. She covered immigration, food-and-bev and the arts for years, and now likes writing weird essays, teaching, and playing with clay. Her taller de vida, Barro y Luna, records Latin elders' oral histories for community preservation. Carolina has attended the Tin House and Macondo writers' workshops, and her work is in Audible, Spotify, NPR.org, California Sunday Magazine, the Undocupoets anthology "Here to Stay," and more. She cofounded Pizza Shark, a podcast studio working toward radical inclusivity in media. They've won Webbys, iHeartRadio Podcast Awards, and nominations for Peabody Awards, Ambies and more. Carolina is completing an MFA in creative writing at Louisiana State University.

Dalia Hatuqa is a bilingual multimedia journalist specializing in Israeli/Palestinian affairs, and regional Middle East issues as they pertain to business and economics, culture, art and U.S. foreign policy. She also writes about religion, minorities and immigration in the U.S.

Elaina Erola is a watercolorist, attorney, and member of the Blackfeet Tribe, currently a candidate for the L.L.M. program in Environmental Law at Lewis & Clark. She has received the 2023 Redwood Award in Creative Non-Fiction from Toyon Literary Magazine at Cal Poly Humboldt, the 2024 Maria Spiridonova Remembered Writing Contest, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in Alternating Press, The Bangalore Review, Yellow Medicine Review, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, Texas Tech Law Review, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation. In 2024, she was selected for PEN America’s Emerging Voices Workshop. In 2025, she joined the Tin House Winter Workshop.

Lisa Chen is a Taiwanese American writer based in Seattle. Her work has been supported by Mesa Refuge, Anaphora Arts, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and the Whitely Center. Deeply rooted in working class storytelling, she writes about generational grief and daughterhood. Her essays have appeared in The Seventh Wave, Moss, and more.

Maya Salameh is the author of MERMAID THEORY (Haymarket Books, 2026), HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.

Sara Z. Phelps (she/her) is a queer writer from Southern California. A former Buddhist nun, her work explores gender, sexuality, desire, devotion, illness, power, and control. Sara graduated summa cum laude from UC Davis, where she received the Leon H. Mayhew Award for outstanding achievement in the humanities and service to the university. A 2025 Tin House Scholar, Sara’s work has also been supported by the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Kitzia Esteva is a Mexican migrant, gender non-binary, DACAmented fiction writer and poet. They are a social justice organizer engaging in cultural work as imperative to sustaining and evolving social justice movements. They use storytelling as a place to shift narratives about queer/ trans, Indigenous, Black, migrant, and disabled people. Their documentary fiction contributes to our collective imagination of utopia and liberation while honoring the dignity, brilliance, and magic in marginalized communities. Two of their non-fiction essays published in the former Black Girl Dangerous online journal. Their first short story, Mixe’s Feather, was recently published in the Acentos Review.

Tyler King is a writer from Houston, TX. His work can be found in The Margins and has been anthologized in Best of the Net. He is a Tin House Scholar and currently is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Conyer Clayton is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, Kentucky living in Ottawa. Their latest book of surrealist prose poetry, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. won the Archibald Lampman Award. They are a Senior Editor at Augur and a member of VII, an Ottawa-based poetry collective, and you can find their fiction, essays, and poetry published in journals throughout the U.S. and Canada. Their third full-length collection of poetry is forthcoming in 2026 with Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn. They are working on a novel with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and Tin House.

Frances Ogamba is a 2025 Mercatus Center’s Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University, a 2024 Jacobson Scholar at the Hawkinson Foundation for Peace and Justice, and a 2024 Miles Morland Writing Scholar. She received the 2024 Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship, the 2024 COGS Research grant, and the 2022 College of Liberal Arts fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her awards include the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition, and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her work is forthcoming or appears in The Hopkins Review, Ambit, Ninth Letter, Channel, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, Lunch Ticket, Vestal Review, The Dark Magazine, Jalada Africa, in The Best of World SF and elsewhere.

Ashwini Bhasi is a bioinformatician and interdisciplinary artist from Kerala, India. Her hybrid work merges scientific data, poetry and visual art to explore the lived experience of chronic illness and disability. Ashwini has over 18 years of professional experience analyzing large-scale human genome datasets to identify genetic markers and mutations in hereditary disorders and cancers. She is the first-author of multiple peer-reviewed research articles that address the growing need for user-centered software design for scientific discovery. Ashwini is the recipient of the Shaw Memorial Poetry Prize from Dunes Review, a Good Hart Artist Residency, a Voices of Color Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a Room Project Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Redivider, Frontier Poetry, Honey Literary, RHINO, The Offing and elsewhere. Musth, the winner of the 2020 CutBank chapbook contest, is her first poetry collection.

Desireé Bewley Dallagiacomo is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is a poet and memoirist raised in the foothills of Northern California and the swamplands of Southeast Louisiana. She is the recipient of the 2025 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry, and she has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, The Harpo Foundation, Tin House Writing Workshop, and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, among others. Desireé received her BA in Feminist Studies and a certificate from the Visualizing Abolition Studies program from the University of California, Santa Cruz and she is a poetry candidate in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is writing about indigeneity, class, surveillance, and the carceral state. She is the founder of The Heart of It Writing Retreat & Residencies, and with a team of writers and organizers, she is procuring seed funding to steward land and creative space to house the retreat alongside other co-op creative projects. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Sink, was published by Button Poetry.

NOVA CYPRESS BLACK (dey/dem/NOVA) writes deir name in all caps as a reminder to take up space as a Black trans gender expansive lighthouse. Pre-transition, dey were a recipient of fellowships from Poets House, The Poetry Project, Willow Arts Alliance & Cave Canem. NOVA's poems have graced the pages of Strange Horizons, Fifth Wheel Press; 580 Split; Zone 3 Press; The Shade Journal; etc. This nomadic MFA dropout was also a writer on season 3 of Showtime's The L Word: Generation Q. NOVA is a genre-defying writer, movement artist, documentarian & educator who pledges allegiance to liberation & pleasure. 

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears in Poetry Northwest, Cincinnati Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Assistant Editor at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, VCCA, among others. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com.

Amy Olassa is from India and lives in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California. She is an alumna of the Community of Writers and Tin House Workshop, and was a fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Her work has been featured in the Oyster River Pages, Aster(ix) Journal, Jellyfish Review and Flash Frog.

Charles Stephens is an Atlanta-based writer and an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph College where he is a Nancy Craig Blackburn Fellow. His work has been supported by Tin House, VONA, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, AWP, Periplus, and the Hambidge Center. His writing can be found or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, StoryQuarterly, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and elsewhere. Charles has also published essays and criticism in Atlanta Magazine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Them, ArtsATL, and the Advocate. In 2014, he co-edited the anthology Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Lela Ruowei Yangni is a writer and tattoo artist from Brooklyn, NY. They recently completed their M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. They have received fellowships from Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Aspen Summer Words, Kenyon Writers Workshop; as well as residencies from Blue Mountain Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. You can find their tattoo work on Instagram (@baby.cleaver).

Omaria Sanchez Pratt (they/them) is a Black trans writer from North Carolina. They hold an M.F.A. from the University of Kentucky where they were a recipient of the 2018 Nikky Finney Fellowship. They have received fellowships from Periplus Mentorship Collective, Kimbilio for Black Fiction, Lambda Literary, Roots. Wounds. Words. and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Community of Writers and Tin House, for which they received scholarships. Their work can be found in Taint Taint Taint Magazine, StoryMagazine issue 9, and the Anthology of Appalachian Writers--VolumeXII, where they were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sirong Li is a writer from Xishuangbanna in Southern China. She holds a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and is currently pursuing an MFA at LSU. She serves as Associate Fiction Editor for New Delta Review and contributes to the Delta Mouth Literary Festival. Her work has received the AARC-PACH Creative Project Award and the Romulus Linney Award for Playwriting. She has also been twice nominated for the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, and her fiction has appeared in The Writing Disorder. She is currently at work on a novel in which local farmers wake up one day having forgotten how to use tools.

My writes strange fiction.

Kelsey Penrose is an award-winning journalist and speculative fiction writer who lives in the basin of the Sierra Nevadas. When not writing about the distant future or the all-too-real now, she can be found chasing her toddler, advocating for black bears, or championing high desert agriculture.

Karis Haewon Ryu | 류혜원 is a writer from many places. She grew up across North America and the Pacific as a U.S. military dependent of Korean descent, and her experiences inspire the stories she writes. She is deeply interested in how worlds get made, and in examining what/whose narratives hold the appearance of universality. She is currently based in New Haven, CT, where she is pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies at Yale University. She is working on her first novel with the support of Tin House and StoryStudio Chicago. Her other passions include acting, songwriting, and being an unabashed fangirl of many things. More about her and her work can be found at www.karisryu.com.

Emily Sun Li is a Chinese American writer and educator. She holds a dual MA/MFA in Children’s Literature and Writing for Children from Simmons University and an M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her nonfiction chapter book The Good, the Bad, and the Fluffy: True Stories of Animal Troublemakers (Scholastic Clubs & Fairs) was published in Fall 2024, and her picture book Mr. Chow’s Night Market (Penguin Workshop) is set for release in Spring 2026 in a two-book deal. Her poetry appears in Button Poetry, Molecule, and Rigorous, and her writing has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, Voyage YA Journal, and the City of Boston. Emily’s work has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Key West Literary Seminar, Centrum, the Sue-Je Lee Gage Residency for Human Rights and Social Justice, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Tierney Oberhammer is a writer based in New York's Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Swamp Pink, The Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Tierney is the recipient of generous support from the Nancy Craig Blackburn Program, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Indiana University Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Tierney is also an Anthony Veasna So scholar and co-founded the Wildcat Writing Group. She lives with Jamie and Wavy. Tierney is querying her short story collection and working on a novel.

Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. She has received support from GrubStreet, Lambda Literary, The Diné Artisan + Author Capacity Building Institute, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Sundress Publications. Between 2023-2024, she was the Associates' of the Boston Public Library's Writer-in-Residence. She has work published and/or forthcoming from swamp pink, Uncharted Magazine, Poets.org, Yellow Medicine Review, Thin Air Magazine, The Chapter House Journal, and others. Her writing centers healing, kinship, language-learning, and family. Residency Project: The idea for this poetry collection started as five short poems. Danielle wrote these poems as an ode to contemporary Diné life, language-learning, and loved ones. While at Tin House, she plans to work on a memoir-inspired collection of contemporary Diné poems, grounded in a clay-like voice, taking after the artists in her family before her, and incorporating the exploration of language-learning and revitalization. These poems are sincere odes towards familial, cultural, and community-based experiences as a young Diné girl growing up on The Navajo Nation. This literary work is an exploration of Dinétics (Diné Poetics), the intricate layers of language and place-based (Shiprock, New Mexico) poetry, and the breathing bonds formed between family, Diné culture, home, memories, and storytelling.

Cai Sherley (he/him) is a Black trans poet and educator with roots in Boston, MA. Cai is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, 2021 Winter Fellow with The Watering Hole, and 2023 Brooklyn Poets Summer Fellow. His work is published in Best New Poets 2022, Crazyhorse, and Peach Mag among others, as well as My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems from Ghost City Press. He is passionate about writing Black trans-masculine lives past & present and lives in Chicago, where he serves as a Poet in Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center.

Henry Hicks IV (he/him) is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and organizer with roots planted in the Deep South. His writing centers the people and communities realizing new visions of what our world can be. Henry has worked on both presidential and statewide electoral campaigns, as well as with issue-based advocacy groups. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, Teen Vogue, In These Times, The Drift, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. Henry holds a B.A. in creative writing and comparative American studies from Oberlin College and is a Harry S. Truman Scholar. His work has been supported by Tin House, The Porch, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA).

Kelsey L. Smoot (they/them/he/his) is a gender theorist, a committed Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their work and writings explore the process of identity formation at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. Selfhood and cultural constraints—such as masculinity and its associated expectations—coalesce in their writing. Their autoethnographic style has become a lens through which they understand their personal experience traversing the US sociopolitical landscape. Having grown up bicoastal and spending the majority of their adult life in a state of transience, Kels draws from his eclectic life experiences both deep fear and great optimism regarding what people are capable of. This tension is reflected in his published writing which can be found in Barely South Review, The Guardian, HuffPost, Voicemail Poems, The Amistad, and at their website, www.queerinsomniac.me When not writing, Kels can be found performing at The Space (a premiere open-mic based in Kennesaw, Georgia), perusing an antique store, or running the streets with their bois.

Korbin is a disabled nonbinary writer, educator, and former community organizer living in the Kansas City area with their service dog, Shell. They are currently working on a queer speculative short story collection, a novella, and an anti-imperial fantasy series. Their work has appeared in Yale University’s American Literature in the World, The Object, and Iceblink Literary Magazine. They were shortlisted for Speculative Fiction Foundation’s Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds Grant and are a Tin House Scholar.

Prachi Kamble was born in India and raised in Rome, Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, and Canada. She has been published in Five South Journal, The Indianapolis Review, South Carolina Review and Weave, a Kundiman zine. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Disquiet International Literary Prize and the 2024 First Pages Prize. She is completing her MFA in Fiction at New York University.

Farah Kader is based in New York. She received the 2017 Palestinian Youth Movement’s Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship and a 2019 Hopwood Graduate Award for poetry. Farah's work has been published by The Kenyon Review, Mizna, Orion magazine, Electric Literature, Narrative magazine, Persea Books, and Future Fiction press.

H.B. Asari is a Niger Deltan prose and poetry writer. Her work explores current and possible future climate realities, complicated familial bonds and the nuances of queer coming-of-age experiences. Her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2023, the Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize 2024. She has been published in CRAFT, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Consequence Forum and more. She is working on a short story collection and novel that seamlessly integrates all her interests. You can find her on Instagram as @draft_oroguitas.

Sabrine Amrov is a writer and geographer from Montreal by way of al-Khalil, Palestine. Her work centers on questions of home, belonging, and urban dwelling amidst a historical conjuncture characterized by deep global homelessness. After spending a decade in Istanbul, she writes about how the city-state, once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, became home to millions of Arab nationals. Employing a multiscalar perspective in her writing, her academic and public writing on home, intimacy, belonging, and reclaiming interiors has been published in the Jerusalem Quarterly, New York Times, The Funambulist, The Middle East Monitor, Scapegoat Magazine, and TRT World. Currently, she teaches Human Geography at the University of Toronto.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet/editor and the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick (Tram Editions), which draws from her past human rights advocacy work. Her poems have appeared in Four Way Review, Prairie Schooner, Adi Magazine, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander & elsewhere. In 2024, she served as the Sam Mazza Writer in Residence at San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center and an Artist-in-Residence at the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. Wathington sits on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

June Glass is a trans writer, filmmaker, and educator. Feature films she has written and directed have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Rooftop Films, The International Film Festival of India, and all over the world. She is a recent graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. June was a finalist for the 2023 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, an editor's selection for CRAFT Literary's 2023 Flash Prose Prize, and is a current nominee for Best Small Fictions (2024). She lives in Brooklyn and Santa Fe.

Agnes Chew is the author of the fiction collection, Eternal Summer of My Homeland (Epigram Books, 2023), which was longlisted for The Asian Prize for Fiction and the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Awards, and a national bestseller in Singapore; and the essay collection, The Desire for Elsewhere (Math Paper Press, 2016). Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia), and has been published in Granta, Necessary Fiction and Wildness, among others. She has received support and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House and Nuoren Voiman Liiton. Born and raised in Singapore, she is currently based in Germany.

Jessica Austin is a queer, trans woman who writes about deviant sex more than she should in the current socio-political climate. She has attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Tin House Winter Workshop as 2025 Winter Scholar. Her work has been featured in the inaugural edition of Lilac Peril. Outside of her writing, Jessica has received an Arts & Humanities Fellowship Program (AHFP) grant from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities (CAH) for her work as a gender-affirming voice teacher. A proud Jersey girl, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she helps facilitate the DC Center Trans Support Group and organize the DC Trans Book Club.

Summer Suleiman is a writer whose work explores the human experiences of existing between two worlds as a first-generation Palestinian-American. She began her career as a journalist with CNN, before returning to her native New Orleans to chronicle underrepresented founders and startups. Her previous work has appeared in CNN.com, NOLA.com and the New Orleans Review. She is currently at work on a memoir that explores themes of identity, belonging, and love.

Mays Kuhail is a writer born and raised in Ramallah, Palestine. Her writing grapples with nostalgia and memory, generational trauma, spatial politics, hope, and joy. Mays holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. A 2025 Best of the Net nominee, Mays’ work appears in SoToSpeak, Fahmidan, and Phoebe Journal. You can find her on Twitter @mayskuhail

Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, speaker, and creator of the one-woman show, A Map of Myself. Her writing interrogates exile, memory and matrilineal lineage. A former poetry fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, her work has been commended by the Forward Prize and was awarded the 2023 Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA. Sara’s writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, as well as the anthology A Land with a People and 9-12 ELA curriculum from McGraw Hill, among others. Currently, Sara lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is working on her first book or two.

Adrienne Keene is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She writes essays and books that explore how Native people are represented in contemporary popular culture, as well as themes of reclamation and reconnection to examine the impacts of settler colonialism on her family. She is the creator and author of the blog Native Appropriations, the co-creator of All My Relations Podcast, and the author of Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Stanford Magazine, Teen Vogue, Catapult Magazine, Indian Country Today, and others.

Mai-Linh Hong is a writer and scholar of Asian American and refugee literatures. Now based in the Central Valley of California, she was until recently a lifelong East Coaster and misses winter. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Minnesota Review, Crab Orchard Review, and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. Her essays and criticism can be found in Amerasia, MELUS, Verge, and other journals. Her writing has received support from Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, ACLS, and AAUW. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Virginia and teaches at the University of California, Merced.