Hawthornden Brooklyn Writers
Since 2024
Hala Nafez Alyan
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Hala Alyan is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at New York University, and writer. She is the author of the novel Salt Houses, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Her latest poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, was recently published by Ecco. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Yahya Ashour
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and an award-winning author. Born on April 22, 1998, he is based in the US. He is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book A Gaza of Siege & Genocide (Mizna, 2024). Ashour's portfolio also includes poetry collections, children's books in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including Michigan Quarterly Review and ArabLit. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships, and has read poetry at over 50 U.S. organizations and universities, including Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, and UCLA. His poetry has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied Sociology & Psychology and worked as a creative writing mentor.
Delali Ayivor
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Delali Ayivor is a Ghanaian-American writer, librarian, and non-profit administrator. Her work is grounded in her lived experience growing up in the Global South, where access to mainstream flows of information were often fractured, tenuous, refracted or distorted. She once wrote of Ghana: “this is as West Africa is, constantly trapped somewhere in the binary of finite and fracture.” Thus, her work—like her country and herself—is fundamentally concerned with the structural: intersections, frictions, overlaps, and sites of disjuncture. She is a 2024 graduate of the Pratt Institute School of Information with a M.S. in Library and Information Sciences; a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Reed College, a 2011 U.S Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a 2020 Tin House Workshop Scholar, and a member of the second class of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal residency. She currently lives and works between Fort Greene, Brooklyn and Accra, Ghana.
Marina Blitshteyn
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Born in Soviet Moldova, Marina Blitshteyn and her family came to the US as refugees in 1991. She studied English at SUNY Buffalo and Creative Writing at Columbia University. She is the author of two poetry collections, Two Hunters (Argos Books, 2019), and i take your voice (Switchback Books, 2022), winner of The Gatewood Prize. Prior chapbooks include Russian for Lovers (Argos Books), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), $kill$ (dancing girl press), and Sheet Music (Sunnyoutside Press). More chapbooks are forthcoming with Ghost Proposal and Bunny Presse, an imprint of Fonograf Editions. She is working on a novel about motherhood and grief.
Carol Dorf
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Carol Dorf has received fellowships from Zoeglossia, and the Napa Writers’ Conference. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, and in journals that include Pleiades, About Place, Cutthroat, Braving the Body, The Mom Egg, American Stories, Five South, YesYesPoetry, and Scientific American. Carol Dorf has published several chapbooks. Theory Headed Dragon, is available through Finishing Line Press. They were founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, where they published issues on mathematical poetry and disability poetics as well as general issues. They taught math and writing in Berkeley USD, as well as at other venues that included museums and conferences.
Shira Erlichman
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Shira Erlichman is a writer, visual artist, and musician. She is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Odes to Lithium and the author-illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold: A Friendship Book. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and PBS, among others. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and is the founder of In Surreal Life, a global online creativity school. She has been awarded the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe, the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency, and a MacDowell Residency, among others. She was a finalist for the Lambda Award. She lives in Brooklyn.
Raghu Karnad
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Raghu Karnad is a journalist, essayist and author from India. He was a 2022–23 fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His first book, Farthest Field, tells the story of the Indian involvement in the Second World War through the lives of his maternal grandparents. He has also written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Caravan India, n+1, and elsewhere. In 2019, he received the Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
Raghu was part of the founding team of The Wire, India’s leading non-profit news platform, where he has served as Chief of Bureau. He has also produced and presented video and podcasts. He is currently co-producing a documentary feature about astronomy and the night sky in Ladakh, with funding from the Sundance Institute.
Adalena Kavanagh
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Adalena Kavanagh is a writer and photographer from New York City, living in Brooklyn. In 2018 Adalena was a NYFA Fiction Fellowship Finalist. She has published fiction, essays and interviews in journals like Epoch, The Believer, Air/Light, The Literary Review and Electric Literature, among others. Her photography has been exhibited in Philadelphia at The Asian Arts Initiative, and in Brooklyn at the Worthless Studios’ Free Film: New York show. In 2023 she was a photography resident with Free Film: New York on the grounds of Green-Wood Cemetery where she worked out of an Airstream trailer equipped with a darkroom. She has been a public school librarian for fourteen years.
Megha Majumdar
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Megha Majumdar is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. She is the former editor-in-chief of Catapult Books. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, and a 2024 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow, she lives in New York.
Leslie McIntosh
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) is black, male presenting, male attracted, autistic, an older millennial, a poet, & a fictionist. Leslie has received grants and fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Furious Flower Poetry Center, Jersey City Arts Council, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, the Roscoe Lee Browne Scholarship Fund, and Zoeglossia. Leslie's work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, some of which include Adi Magazine, Foglifter, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Witness, and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Leslie was a finalist for the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize, the 2023-2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize (Fordham University Press), and a 2022 semi-finalist for the 92Y Discovery Award. Currently a chapbook editor at Newfound: An Inquiry of Place, Leslie lives on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, presently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.
John Murillo
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, two Pushcart Prizes, two Larry Neal Writers Awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The New York Times, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.
Angel Nafis
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Angel Nafis is a writer and 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 Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day, BLACK FUTURES, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, and is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She is the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she is The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Salma (Rajathi Samsudeen)
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Rajathi Samsudeen is an Indian Tamil writer known by her pen name, Salma. Writing on the subjects of overcoming orthodoxy, marital violence, and confinement, she has received global acclaim and she is a sensation in contemporary Tamil literature. She has published three volumes of poetry, three novels, two collections of short stories and a travelogue, and her most recent poetry collection is i, Alma. Her novel The Hour Past Midnight was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize (2009) and the Crossword Book Prize (2010). Salma’s novel Women Dreaming was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award in 2022.
Christopher Shinn
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Christopher Shinn is a playwright who lives in New York. Several of his plays have premiered at the Royal Court: Four, Other People, Where Do We Live (Obie Award), Dying City (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Now or Later (shortlisted for the Evening Standard Theatre Award). Other plays include The Narcissist (Chichester Festival Theatre), Against (Almeida Theatre), Teddy Ferrara (Goodman Theatre and Donmar Warehouse), An Opening in Time (Hartford Stage), Picked (Vineyard Theatre), On the Mountain (South Coast Rep), What Didn't Happen (Playwrights Horizons), and The Coming World (Soho Theatre). His adaptation of Hedda Gabler premiered on Broadway in 2009, and his adaptation of Judgment Day premiered at Park Avenue Armory in 2019 and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard in 2019-2020, a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library in 2020-2021, and a MacDowell Fellow in 2023.
Robert Anthony Siegel
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other places, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Jayson P. Smith
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Jayson P. Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, educator, and curator from the Bronx. Their work has received support from NYFA, The Poetry Project, and Callaloo, among others. Their performance work has been featured at JACK, Center for Performance Research, Miriam Gallery, and The Guggenheim. Jayson founded NOMAD Readings in 2016, which they continue to host and curate. Find them in the club or at www.jaysonpsmith.com.
Yasmin Zaher
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. Her first novel, The Coin, was published in 2024.