Casa Ecco Writers

2023

Mahogany L. Browne

CASA ECCO, 2023

Mahogany L. Browne, has received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Hawthornden, Poets House, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, Wesleyan University, and UCross.

Her books include Vinyl Moon; Chlorine Sky (optioned for the stage by Steppenwolf Theatre); Black Girl Magic; and the frequently banned works Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair, a diverse literary initiative.

Browne’s poetry collection Chrome Valley, highlighted in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times, won the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize and she is the winner of the Holmes National Poetry Prize, awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is especially excited to tour her newest young adult novel, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe. Mahogany L. Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from Marymount Manhattan College and serves as the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center.

Sonia Faleiro

CASA ECCO, 2023

Sonia Faleiro is a Royal Literary Fellow and the author of one novel and two books of non-fiction, most recently The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, which was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the ALCS Gold Dagger for Nonfiction as well as being a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Human Rights Watch Book Club pick. The Good Girls has been translated into Italian, French and Polish, and optioned for a screen adaptation. Faleiro is currently working on a memoir of London, as well as editing a radical collection of interviews in which leading writers of color discuss their craft. She is the founder and program director of the literary incubator South Asia Speaks and the co-founder of Deca, a digital first publishing house. She lives in London.

photograph by Jonathan Ring

V. V. Ganeshananthan

CASA ECCO, 2023

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

photograph by Sophia Mayrhofer

Helon Habila

CASA ECCO, 2023

Helon Habila is a Nigerian/US author. He teaches creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia. He is the author of four novels, including Oil on Water (WW Norton, 2010) and Travelers (WW Norton, 2019). His other works include the nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (Penguin, 2016), and the anthology, The Granta Book of African Short Story (Granta, 2011). He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review and a regular reviewer for the UK Guardian.

Aleshea Harris

CASA ECCO, 2023

Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is (world premier directed by Taibi Magar at Soho Repertory Theatre) won the Relentless Award, an OBIE for playwriting and the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award. What to Send Up When It Goes Down (premier directed by Harris, NYC premier directed by Whitney White for the Movement Theater Company) was featured in American Theatre Magazine and received a special commendation from the Blackburn Prize. The play was subsequently re-mounted at Woolly Mammoth, A.R.T., BAM and Playwrights Horizons. On Sugarland (dir. Whitney White) premiered at New York Theatre Workshop in 2022. Awards: Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Award, Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Horton Foote Playwriting Award, Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Alpert Award. Harris is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and has enjoyed residencies at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Hedgebrook and Djerassi.

photograph by Costa Ciminello and Andrew Wofford

Maria Dahvana Headley

CASA ECCO, 2023

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, including Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award administered by the Academy of American Poets, and was named a Book of the Year by The Atlantic Monthly, Kirkus, NPR, The New Statesman, and The Irish Times. Her novel The Mere Wife is a contemporary adaptation of the Beowulf story, set within American suburbia. Headley’s genre-bending work has won the Hugo and the World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and Tiptree Awards, as well as for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her ten-episode musical adaptation of The Aeneid will be released by Audible in 2023. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.

photograph by Beowulf Sheehan

Sandra Lim

CASA ECCO, 2023

Sandra Lim is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her previous collections are The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize chosen by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Levis Reading Prize. Sandra’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Baffler, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and serves on the Poetry faculty in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Born in Seoul, Korea, she lives in Cambridge, MA.

Sarah Moss

CASA ECCO, 2023

Sarah Moss is a novelist, occasional travel writer and academic. Her most recent novels are The Fell, Summerwater and Ghost Wall. She was born in Scotland, grew up in the north of England and studied at Oxford where she wrote her PhD on Romanticism and travel writing. She worked at universities around Britain before settling in Ireland, where she teaches English Lit and Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Sarah enjoys running, hiking, knitting and cooking.

Claire Schwartz

CASA ECCO, 2023

Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service (Graywolf Press, 2022) and the culture editor of Jewish Currents. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Granta, The Nation, The New Yorker online, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. With Kaveh Akbar and Sarah Kay, she wrote a column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.” The recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize, Claire received her PhD in African American Studies, American Studies, and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies from Yale.

Chet’la Sebree

CASA ECCO, 2023

Chet'la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poetrys, and Mistress, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. She is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.

Charif Shanahan

CASA ECCO, 2023

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. Shanahan’s poems appear widely, in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Furious Flower’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020). Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.

Cathy Sweeney

CASA ECCO, 2023

Cathy Sweeney is a writer from Ireland. She studied English and History at Trinity College, Dublin. Her short fiction has been published in literary magazines, including The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and Granta, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2020 her collection of short stories, MODERN TIMES, was published by The Stinging Fly Press in Dublin and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London. It was also translated into Italian by Claudia Durastanti and published by Il Saggiatore in Milan. MODERN TIMES was shortlisted for the Butler Literary Prize and The John McGahern Book Prize and was selected by the Guardian as a Book of the Year. Cathy was awarded a Literature Bursary from The Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 and in 2022 she was appointed Writer-in-Residence in University College Cork. Her debut novel BREAKDOWN is forthcoming with Weidenfeld & Nicolson in August 2023.

Ralf Webb

CASA ECCO, 2023

Ralf Webb (b. 1991) is a poet, writer and editor based in the West Country. His debut collection of poems, Rotten Days in Late Summer, was published by Penguin in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Webb’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in the likes of the London Review of Books, Fantastic Man, The Poetry Review, and the Guardian, and his fiction has appeared in Granta Magazine. In 2022 he was a writer in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. He is currently working on his second collection of poems, and Strange Relations, a nonfiction book about masculinity and sexuality in the works of four mid century writers, which will be published by Sceptre in 2024.

Frances Wilson

CASA ECCO, 2023

Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. Her most recent book, Burning Man: The Trials of D H Lawrence, won the BIO Plutarch Award in America and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK. She reviews for the New York Review of Books, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her current project is the early life of Muriel Spark.

Jacqueline Woodson

CASA ECCO, 2023

Jacqueline Woodson (jacquelinewoodson.com) is the author of more than thirty books for young people and adults including Another Brooklyn, Red At The Bone and The Day You Begin. She received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2023 E. B. White Award, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Her books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and Each Kindness. In 2018, she founded BALDWIN FOR THE ARTS (https://baldwinforthearts.org), a residency serving writers, composers, interdisciplinary, and visual artists of the Global Majority. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

photography by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation