Casa Ecco Writers
2022
Aria Aber
CASA ECCO, 2022
Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She is at work on a novel and a second book of poems.
Megan Fernandes
CASA ECCO, 2022
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. Her most recent book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize, the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and was published with Tin House Books in 2020. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She is a Yaddo fellow, recently collaborated on a video poem at the Venice Biennale with media artist, Elisa Giardina Papa, and holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. In 2021, she was a book reviewer for the Poetry Foundation. Her forthcoming poetry collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, will also be published by Tin House Books in summer 2023. She is at work on a novel about Sicily.
Marwa Helal
CASA ECCO, 2022
Marwa Helal was born in Al Mansurah, Egypt. She earned her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University and her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School. She is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). Her work appears in the journals Apogee, Hyperallergic, Boston Review, Poets & Writers, Winter Tangerine, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry volumes two and three, Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Halal If You Hear Me, and BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic. She has edited the Poetry Project Newsletter and serves on the advisory board of The Offing. Helal is the winner of the BOMB Magazine Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem, among others. She has presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. Helal lives in Brooklyn.
photograph by Sean D. Henry-Smith
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
CASA ECCO, 2022
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the co-editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón and the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato's Collateral / Colaterales. His first collection of poems is The Life Assignment, one of Remezcla's 2020's Best Books by Latine or Latin American Authors and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Faber First Book Award. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the T.S. Eliot Foundation, Queer|Arts|Mentorship and CantoMundo, he serves as the 92NY Unterberg Poetry Center's Associate Director. He is at work on el Proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña, an online archive of Puerto Rican poets in the archipelago and the diaspora, supported by the Mellon Foundation and the University of Houston's USLDH.
photograph by Eric McNatt
Angel Nafis
CASA ECCO, 2022
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented NYC at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman and with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
photograph by Justin J Wee
Morgan Parker
CASA ECCO, 2022
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Parker holds a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.
photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Jane Robinson
CASA ECCO, 2022
Jane Robinson was born in Edinburgh, brought up in North Yorkshire and educated at Oxford. Since childhood she has been an insatiable book-collector (needs must: she was banned from the local library at seven for using a jam-tart bookmark) and worked with an London antiquarian bookseller after leaving university. She is now a full-time writer specializing in social history through women’s eyes. Her twelve books to date include Bluestockings: the Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education and biographies of Mary Seacole and Josephine Butler. She is currently writing a biography of Victorian artist and social reformer Barbara Bodichon. She loves everything associated with being an author: speaking at home and abroad, broadcasting, reviewing, teaching and mentoring. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; the Royal Geographical Society; has been a Hawthornden Fellow in the past, and is a Senior Associate of Somerville College. See www.jane-robinson.com.
Stephen Walsh
CASA ECCO, 2022
Stephen Walsh is a leading English writer and broadcaster on classical music, the author of several books on Igor Stravinsky including a major two-volume biography, a large-scale study of the Russian nationalist group of composers known as the kuchka or Mighty Handful, and a highly praised biography of Claude Debussy. He was born at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, in 1942, but was brought up in London and went to school at St Paul’s, then took a music degree at Caius College, Cambridge. He was for many years deputy music critic of the Observer, and a regular reviewer for The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and, more recently, The Independent. He now writes for a leading arts website, theartsdesk.com. From 1976 to 2013 he was a lecturer, then professor on the music faculty at Cardiff University, and is now an Emeritus Professor of that university. His latest book, The Beloved Vision: Music in the Romantic Age, was published by Faber in October 2022.