Winter Workshop

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, Paris Match, Lire, Telerama, and The Sydney Press Herald, it has been translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO.

benedict nguyen (she/her) is a #freelanceflailing dancer, writer, and creative producer who's taught workshops for AAWW, Tin House, and at Louis Place. She’s danced in recent projects by Sally Silvers, Kris Seto, Monstah Black, among other choreographers, appeared in the short film “Don’t F*ck with Bà” (2024, dir. Sally Tran), and began developing the dance theater work “DEFENSE” with Sugar Vendil in 2025. As a producer, she's supported projects that have been presented at the New York Botanical Garden, tba21, ISSUE Project Room, Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project, and Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance!, among others. Her writing on labor and culture has appeared in The Baffler, BOMB Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Review of Books, and AAWW’s The Margins. A Publishers Weekly 2025 Writer to Watch, Benedict is the author of the [redacted] freelance labor zine nasty notes (2022). Her debut novel Hot Girls with Balls (Catapult 2025) was an ABA Indie Next Pick, an Aardvark Book Club Pick, and a USA Today National Bestseller.

Queer poet and writer Cass Donish was born and raised in Greater Los Angeles. They are the author of the poetry collection Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024), winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award.

Donish's two previous collections are The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was chosen by Maggie Nelson as winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition.

The daughter of Vietnam War refugees, Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s. She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. Black Sand, his first chapbook, was published Foundlings Press in 2022. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award. Tenderness was a finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and a Northern California Book Award. He is currently at work on a hybrid non-fiction book on ekphrasis.

Ghassan Zeineddine is the author of the story collection Dearborn (Tin House, 2023), named a Best Book of the Year by Electric Lit, Chicago Public Library, and Powell’s. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews praised the book as “A fantastic collection heralding the voice of a major new writer.” Dearborn was also named a Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the Writer’s Bone Podcast. He is also the coeditor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging (Wayne State University Press, 2022). His fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, the Arkansas International, Witness, Pleiades, Fiction International, the Common, Epiphany, FOLIO, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and the Iron Horse Literary Review, among other publications.

noam keim (they/them) is a trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur freak. Their non-fiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: reverence to the land, antizionism, queerness, colonialism, plants, abolition. They are a Lambda Literary ’22 Fellow, an RWW ’23 Fellow, a Tin House ’23 Fellow, a Sewanee ’23 contributor and a Periplus ’23 Fellow mentored by Grace Talusan. noam has received residencies from Nawat Fes, Citalledarte, Pocoapoco, Norton Island and others Their writing can be found in the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Foglifter, etc. Their first essay collection the Land is Holy came out via Radix in May 2024 and won the 2025 Evelyn Shakir Best Arab American Creative Non Fiction Award. Connect on IG: noamkeim or noamkeim.com.

Keeonna Harris is a writer, storyteller, mother of five, prison abolitionist, activist, and an academic gangsta.  She was an inaugural PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow in 2018-2019, and inaugural Haymarket Writing for Freedom Fellow in 2024-2025.  She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University.  Her debut memoir, Mainline Mama (Amistad Press, 2025) draws from her experiences as a Black woman, teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated person. This work interrogates mass incarceration from the perspective of a “mainline mama”-- someone who navigates the borderlands of the prison and the free world.  In Mainline Mama, Keeonna reflects on mothering and community building as acts of radical defiance against carceral institutions designed to dehumanize.  

Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from The Paris Review. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, will be published in June 2022 by Catapult in the US and Scribner in the UK.

Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts Are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, The New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. Maisy was born in Portmore, Jamaica, and raised in Queens, NY. She’s currently a public librarian and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Newark, NJ.

Born and raised in Southern California, Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She is a 2016 participant of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, a 2017 Tin House workshop, and a 2017 Sewanee Writer's Conference Stanley Elkin Scholar.

Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. He is the author and editor of numerous works including Wild Hundreds and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Nate is a member of The Dark Noise Collective and co-directs Crescendo Literary. He is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. He is from the South Side of Chicago.  

Sarah Gerard’s essay collection Sunshine State (Harper Perennial, 2017) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio, 2015) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a best-book-of-the-year at NPR, Vanity Fair, and Buzzfeed. Her novel True Love (Harper) was a Best Book of 2020 at Glamour and Bustle, and winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award. Shondaland called it, “appalling and hilarious… surprisingly poignant. It’s an extremely resonant social satire.” Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, and the anthologies We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida (Burrow Press, 2017), One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism (McSweeney’s, 2018), and Tampa Bay Noir (Akashic Books, 2020). Her paper collages have appeared in Hazlitt, BOMB Magazine, The Creative Independent, Epiphany Magazine, No Tokens Journal, and the Blue Earth Review. Recycle, a co-authored book of collages and text, was published by Pacific in 2018. She’s been supported by scholarships and fellowships from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, the Whiting Foundation, and Ucross. She was the 2018 – 2019 New College of Florida Writer-in-Residence.

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, CITY OF LAUGHTER, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, is out now on Grove Atlantic.

 Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Her essay collection, Our Arab, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. Zaina's stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She holds an M.F.A. from Iowa and an M.A. from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently at work on a collection of essays. 

Alia is a Vice President and literary agent at The Gernert Company, which she joined in 2017 after starting her publishing career as a publicist at HMH and working as an agent at McCormick Literary. Her tastes include narrative nonfiction, memoir and literary fiction. Alia graduated from Barnard College and earned an MA in English Literature with a concentration in the nineteenth-century novel from Rutgers. Her book Take It From Me, a guide to nonfiction writing careers for emerging and established writers, will be published by Pantheon in 2025. She lives in Brooklyn.

Anni Liu is an editor at Graywolf Press where she works on the prose list and has edited titles such as If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga and The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris. She is herself the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. She is an Undocupoets Fellow and lives in Philadelphia.

Ezra Kupor works at HarperCollins Publishers, where he acquires and edits a diverse list of titles across the Harper Perennial and Harper Books imprints.

Ezra is compelled by the universal human drive to seek meaning and selfhood in a vastly changing world. He’s always on the lookout for fiction and nonfiction that work to investigate the multiple contradictions of identity and explore places and communities of belonging. This means he’s inherently more attuned to queer and underrepresented voices and/or drawn to stories in which the strangeness of the world adds pressure to what is already pressurized. More than anything, he loves a read that leaves you feeling more tender and full of wonder than when you began.

These interests bring him across genres and formats—including identity-driven cookbooks, trans speculative literary fiction, essay collections on art and identity politics, upmarket commercial books about corporate racism and lesbian love triangles, and more. Ezra does not believe there is such a thing as a book for everyone, and thus is eager to reach out across genres to meet readers where they’re at, and then push them a bit further.

Giovannai Rosa is a writer and artist from Miami. They're the winner of the 2022 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry, a 2022 Periplus Fellow, and a 2023 Tin House Scholar.

Jackson Howard is an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprint MCD, where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Laura van den Berg, Sarah Schulman, Catherine Lacey, Jonathan Escoffery, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Venita Blackburn, Imogen Binnie, Thomas Grattan, Missouri Williams, Kaitlyn Tiffany, and many others. Books he has edited have won or been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Jean Stein Open Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Galbraith Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

As a writer, his reviews, profiles, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, The Cut, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, W., i-D, office, Document, and elsewhere.

Julia Kardon was born and raised in New York City. Her first job in publishing, while in high school, was shelving fiction at the fabled Strand Bookstore. She received degrees in Comparative Literature, as well as in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Julia joined HG Literary in 2018 after building a list at Mary Evans Inc and handling foreign rights. Prior to that she assisted at Sterling Lord Literistic, a job she attained after an unpaid internship both there and at the Wylie Agency.

She is interested primarily in literary and upmarket fiction and memoir, and especially stories grappling with racial, religious, sexual or national identity, narrative nonfiction, journalism, and history. She does not represent thrillers, any children’s literature or books about spirituality or Christianity. Her clients include New York Times Best Sellers Brit Bennett and Etaf Rum, Barnes & Noble Discover picks John Freeman Gill, K-Ming Chang and Leah Franqui, Center For Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow Melissa Rivero, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and others.

Julian Guy is a trans and queer writer whose work as an educator emphasizes community building and mutual aid through poetry. Julian teaches poetry courses through Ellipsis Writing and is a volunteer Nonfiction and Poetry Editor with Variant Literature. His first poetry manuscript, In the House Where I Love You, was long-listed at Yes Yes Books and a finalist for the 2023 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. A 2023 Tin House Scholar, Julian's poems can be found in Best New Poets, Swamp Pink, The Adroit Journal, Queerlings, Catapult, and more. Find Julian online at julianguy.com, on Instagram @julianfruitletters, or at the beach combing for seashells.

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the debut linked story collection, If I Survive You (MCD/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 6, 2022). He is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and AGNI, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 and elsewhere. Jonathan is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and resides in Oakland, CA.

Katy Nishimoto, Senior Editor (she/her), joined The Dial Press in 2019 after ten years as a literary agent at WME. Her forthcoming titles include Memphis, a sweeping debut novel by acclaimed poet Tara M. Stringfellow; Brace for Impact by Gabe Montesanti, a memoir tracing a young queer woman’s redemption story through the world of roller derby; Queerly Beloved by Susie Dumond, a joyful queer debut rom-com set in Tulsa; Maryam is a Dyke by Lamya H, a memoir in essays about one queer hijabi Muslim immigrant’s experience told through the lens of radical, lyrical interpretations of the Quran; Open the Light, a memoir by global trans rights activist Geena Rocero; and Red by Claudia Cravens, a genre-bending queer feminist Western. Katy sits on the board of Baldwin for the Arts, a nonprofit founded by Jacqueline Woodson that provides residency fellowships for BIPOC artists. She is based in Los Angeles.

At Neon Literary, Kent D. Wolf represents boundary-pushing fiction but he would never turn away a more commercially-inclined project as long as the writing shines. He has a particular weakness for literary novels that incorporate genre elements—fantasy, sci-fi, horror. He loves to be unsettled by out-of-the box literary thrillers, and wildly appreciate edgy, voice-driven coming-of-age tales. His dreams for non-fiction remain ambitious: serious, immersive journalism with a strong sense of place and story, compelling memoirs, behind-the-scenes looks at fascinating subcultures, and killer essay collections. His authors include National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties), NYT-bestselling essayist Samantha Irby (We Are Never Meeting in Real Life), New York Times Notable novelist Martin Seay (The Mirror Thief), and Korea's most celebrated fiction writer Kim Young-Ha (Diary of a Murderer)

Mariah Stovall joined Trellis Literary Management after agenting at Howland Literary and Writers House. Prior to that, she worked on the other side of things, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at Gallery Books. She represents adult literary and upmarket fiction, narrative nonfiction and essay collections, all by writers with strong voices and interdisciplinary perspectives. She is not currently seeking memoirs.

Across genres, she gravitates toward outsiders and stylish, inventive storytelling. She's primarily interested in how subcultures, social movements, and complex individuals intersect with pop culture and the arts, history, STEM, linguistics, sports, and philosophy. She has a hands-on, collaborative approach to editing and loves helping writers shape their projects for publication. She's especially passionate about advocating for authors from underrepresented and marginalized and minoritized groups (including writers without MFAs).

Mina Hamedi grew up in Istanbul, Turkey before moving to New York in 2010. She received her BA in Nonfiction and Global Identity from NYU’s Gallatin School and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. Mina began her career in publishing at David Black Literary Agency and Writers House. She joined Janklow & Nesbit in 2018 where she supports co-founder Lynn Nesbit and her various authors including Andre Aciman, Robert Caro, Ronan Farrow, Andrew Sean Greer, Anand Giridharadas, and Maaza Mengiste, as well as the estates of Joan Didion, Shirley Hazzard, Anne Rice, and Tom Wolfe. Mina represents adult literary fiction and nonfiction. She is interested in stories from around the world—particularly her native Turkey and Iran. She loves fiction with Gothic-inspired atmospheres, intergenerational tales, family secrets, and deep excavations into relationships, motivations, and obsessions. She is drawn to nonfiction with a fiercely personal bent and a strong voice, and writers who are working not only to uncover the undercurrents of our world but also to change them. She seeks voices in translation and writers from underrepresented backgrounds. As a writer herself, Mina understands the complex and vulnerable process of writing and publishing one’s work. Her clients are journalists, activists, artists, attorneys, sex workers, booksellers, forest restoration advocates, and HIV pharmacists, and it is her aim to support the entirety of their careers.

Natalie Edwards joined Trellis Literary at its founding after nearly two years at Janklow & Nesbit Associates. Prior to that, she worked at Curtis Brown, Ltd. At Trellis, Natalie supports Allison Hunter while actively building a list of her own.

Natalie represents adult fiction and nonfiction across a broad range of genres. In fiction, she tends to lean more upmarket and literary, and her nonfiction tastes trend toward the narrative (memoir, history, science, cultural criticism) rather than the prescriptive (how-tos, cookbooks, craft/gift, etc.). Across her list, she loves projects that blur genre and defy easy categorization—historical with a hint of the speculative, journalistic nonfiction with a memoir throughline. Above all, she is drawn to accessible voices with a literary sensibility, guiding the reader through a compelling story with just enough plot momentum to keep them effortlessly turning the page.

Reiko Davis joined DeFiore in 2016. Before that, she was at Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency for four years. She grew up in Kansas City, received her BA in Comparative Literature and Art History from Brown University, and is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course.

She represents both adult and children's books.

On the adult side, she's seeking literary and upmarket fiction as well as narrative non-fiction.

Shabnam Banerjee-McFarland is an Associate Agent at Odom Media Management. Throughout her career, she has worked in independent media aimed at providing tools, resources, and frameworks that support movement-building. Embracing the expanse of multimedia across book and digital media, she has worked with award-winning and bestselling authors, scholars, activists, and speakers on topics of decolonization, intersectionality, feminism/s, economic justice and racial capitalism, labor movements, racial and gender justice, identity, and community organizing. She earned her B.A. from University of California, Berkeley and M.A. from the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in American Studies focusing her research on representations of women of color in media.

Sonali Chanchani is a literary agent at Folio Literary Management, focusing primarily on nonfiction that advances current social and cultural conversations and centers historically underrepresented voices and perspectives.

Her clients include Maureen “Mo” Ryan (contributing editor to Vanity Fair and author of the New York Times bestseller and NPR Best Book of the Year Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood); Curtis Chin (co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and author of the Stonewall Honor Book Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant); Dr. Mariel Buqué (psychologist and author of the USA Today bestseller Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma); Rebecca Little and Colleen Long (journalists and authors of I’m Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America); and Joél Leon (poet, performer, and author of Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man’s Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future); among many others.

Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and essayist who grew up in Goa, India before moving to New Delhi where she lived and worked as a writer for many years. She is currently based in the Bay Area. Her work has been recognised by a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, a Tin House scholarship, a Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts residency, an Atlantic Centre for the Arts residency, a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship, a Sangam House fellowship, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize, and a TOTO Award for Creative Writing. She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin India, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Tahoma Literary Review, The Adroit Journal, SWWIM, Southern Humanities Review, The Shore, Orion, Eclectica, Mud Season Review, UCity Review, SOFTBLOW, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and elsewhere.

Stuti Sharma is a writer, comedian, photographer, organizer, & music writer.