Hawthornden Brooklyn Writers
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 currently based in California. He is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book A Gaza of Siege & Genocide, published by Mizna in 2024. Ashour's portfolio also includes three books for children and young adults in Arabic, as well as contributions to anthologies and journals, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Arrowsmith Journal. His poetry manuscript-in-progress received an honorable mention from the Emerging Writer Fellowship. He has headlined over 100 readings at U.S. organizations and universities, including Harvard and Stanford. His poetry has been translated into more than 10 languages, including Spanish and Bengali. He was the 2025 author-in-residence at UCLA and currently teaches at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges.
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
Marina Blitshteyn is the author of 8 books, including the full-length poetry collections Two Hunters (Argos Books, 2019), and i take your voice (Switchback Books, 2022), winner of The Gatewood Prize. Her third collection, form a more perfect, won the Tenth Gate Prize and is forthcoming with Word Works Books in 2026. Prior works include Russian for Lover' (Argos Books), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), $kill$ (dancing girl press), Sheet Music (Sunnyoutside Press), a dual chapbook landguage/mirror me (Bunny Presse, from Fonograf Editions), and a chapbook of visual poetry called Kaddish (Ghost Proposal). She is now serving as an editor at Switchback Books.
Photo by Luke Bumgarner
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.
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.
Leslie McIntosh
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2024
Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) chiefly explores and explodes the morphologies and hermeneutics of AAVE, with an eye toward the pragmatic language of neurodiverse Black folk, among other things. Leslie’s debut volume of poetry, within-group variance, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2025 Changes Book Prize and is forthcoming from Changes Press in Fall 2026. Leslie has received grants and fellowships from Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hawthornden Foundation, Jersey City Arts Council, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, Zoeglossia, and more. Leslie’s poems have appeared in Adi Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. 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.
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.
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.