Hawthornden Brooklyn Writers
Since 2024
Pragya Agarwal
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Pragya Agarwal is a British/Indian writer and academic, and the founder of a research think tank investigating global gender inequalities. She is currently a visiting professor of social inequities at Loughborough University in the UK, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a visiting scholar at University of Oxford. Agarwal is the author of four widely acclaimed non-fiction books including Sway, Hysterical and (M)otherhood. She has also written for The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, Scientific American, Times Literary Supplement, and Literary Hub, amongst others. Her writing and research have been funded by Leverhulme Trust, Royal Society, British Academy, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Society of Authors, and Royal Society of Literature. Her next book will be published with Ecco Books (USA) and Penguin Random House (UK) in early 2026.
Elina Alter
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Elina Alter is a writer and translator based in New York. Her recent translations from Russian include Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound and Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love. She works with students on writing at Columbia.
Sasha Burshteyn
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Sasha Burshteyn is a poet. Her poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, Four Way Review, Copper Nickel, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow and Translations Editor at the Washington Square Review. In 2022, she was a winner of the 92Y Discovery Contest.
Yuma Carpenter-New
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Yuma Carpenter-New is a poet and educator from Beloit, Wisconsin, based in Brooklyn. They earned their MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, where they were named the Truman Capote Scholar, and their BA from Bard College, where they received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Yuma’s debut collection, Gabapentin, examines the lyric self as it processes and is processed by the architectures of academic, psychiatric, and recovery-based institutions. Their work appears on Poets.org and elsewhere. They currently teach creative writing, literature, and poetry workshops at Brooklyn College and throughout New York City. Gabapentin is being prepared for submission.Ghost Proposal and Bunny Presse, an imprint of Fonograf Editions. She is working on a novel about motherhood and grief.
Ching-In Chen
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer, and teacher. They are the author of The Heart’s Traffic: A Novel in Poems and recombinant (a winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as the chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters, a finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award. Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member and Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation, and speculative writing project that explores breath through meditation and environmental justice.
Julián Delgado Lopera
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times-acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical, which won the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; it was also a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julián is also the author of ¡Cuéntamelo! an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. Julián has received fellowships and residencies from The National Endowment for the Arts, Black Mountain Institute, Creative Work Fund, Hedgebrook, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Headlands Center for The Arts. His work has appeared in Granta, American Short Fiction, Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, The White Review, and Latin American Literature Today, to name a few. He is the former executive director of RADAR Productions and one of the founders of Drag Queen Story Hour. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Julián currently resides in Brooklyn. His second novel is forthcoming from Liveright.
Meghan Dunn
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Meghan Dunn is the author of Curriculum, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she teaches high school English. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Ecotone, and Four Way Review, among others, and has been featured on Verse Daily and the Slowdown Show podcast. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Mohammad El-Kurd
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer, poet, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. He is the Nation’s first-ever Palestine Correspondent and editor-at-large at Mondoweiss, the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and the author of the highly-acclaimed poetry collection Rifqa, which has been translated into several languages.
Selali Fiamanya
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Selali Fiamanya is a novelist from Glasgow, Scotland. He co-founded the community-oriented zine collectives People of Content and whut?. He’s an alumnus of writing workshops Black Gay Ink and The Future Is Back, and won a place on Curtis Brown Creative’s inaugural Breakthrough Novel-Writing Course for Black Writers. His debut novel Before We Hit the Ground won the Borough Press Open Submission 2021 and was runner up for the JJ Bola and PONTAS Emerging Writer’s Prize. He can quote the film Sister Act 2 line-for-line, riff-for-riff. He can’t write without a deadline.
Joshua Garcia
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024). His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
Caprice Gray
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Caprice holds a BA from Yale, a Master of Science from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. A recent Emerging Writer Fellow with the Center for Fiction, her work has been supported by Jentel Arts, SAFTA, Millay Arts, and Storyknife. She has been longlisted for the First Pages Prize and Granum Prize, and recognized as the upcoming 2025 recipient of the Barbara G. Peters Fellowship for Historical Fiction. She is from traditional Wecksquaesgeek territory, Harlem, New York.
David Groff
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
David Groff’s third book of poems, Live in Suspense, was published in 2023 by Trio House Press. His previous book, Clay, was chosen by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award and was published by Trio House in 2012. His first collection, Theory of Devolution, was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press in 2002. He is the coeditor two anthologies: Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010) and Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (Wisconsin, 2012), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. He is a cofounder of the Publishing Triangle and a board member at Nightboat Books. An independent book editor, he teaches poetry, nonfiction, and publishing in the MFA creative writing program at the City College of New York. www.davidgroff.com
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario. An O. Henry Award winning author, her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Dark, PRISM international, swamp pink and elsewhere. Her short story collection The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award and was the runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She recently completed her debut novel, Other Evolutions.
Julie Innis
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Julie Innis is the author of the story collection Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture. Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Post Road, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere, and has received recognition from The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology and the Larry Brown Short Story Award, among others.
Jared Jackson
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Jared Jackson is a writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator born in Hartford, CT. He has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Center for Fiction, Baldwin for the Arts, Instituto Sacatar, Tin House, Writer’s Block Residency, Loghaven, Hawthornden Foundation, and Granum Foundation. His writing has been published in The Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, n+1, and VQR, and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2023. He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. His debut story collection, Locals, is forthcoming from Viking Books.
May Jeong
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
May Jeong is a writer for Vanity Fair. She is a 2024 Ferris Professor in Journalism at Princeton University, and the winner of the 2022 Ida B.Wells Award administered by the Newswomen's Club of New York. Her upcoming book on sex work was awarded a 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her reporting from Afghanistan, where she lived from 2013 to 2017, was awarded the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award, the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents, and has been recognized by the Kurt Schork and Livingston Awards. She lives on land ceded by the Lenape people in the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682.
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.
Elisa Levi
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Elisa Levi debuted in the literary world in 2016 with a collection of poems entitled Perdida en un Bol de Cereales (Lost In a Bowl of Cereals) at Espasa, Grupo Planeta. Two years later, in 2019, she published her first novel Por Qué Lloran Las Ciudades (Why Cities Cry) at Temas de hoy, Grupo Planeta. That same year her work was included in an anthology of generational stories called Ya No Recuerdo Qué Quería Ser de Mayor (Don’t Remember What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up) at Temas de hoy, Grupo Planeta. In 2021, her second novel Yo No Sé de Otras Cosas (That’s All I Know) was published to critical acclaim. The translation rights of this novel have been sold to Germany (Trabanten Verlag), Hungary (Metropolis Media Group KFT), Russia (Eksmo), USA (Graywolf Press) and UK (Daunt Books). In October 2023, she was anthologized in a book of short stories from Blackie Books, called El Gran Libro de los Pájaros (The Great Book of Birds).
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.
Moses McKenzie
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Moses McKenzie wrote his first novel An Olive Grove in Ends when he was 21. A resonant coming of age story and an intimate portrait - at times tender and lyrical, at others bleak and despairing - of a black-British community in Bristol, it was listed as a Guardian Novel of the Year in 2022, shortlisted for The Writers’ Guild Best First Novel Award 2023 and, in a starred Kirkus Reviews review, was called “the most exciting UK debut in years”. Moses’ second novel Fast by the Horns, set in 1980 in the days leading up to the Bristol riots, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2025 and hailed as “full of lyrical energy and invention”. Moses has also won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for Literature, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the Soho House Breakthrough Writer Award. He is currently researching his third novel while also working on a play and original film scripts.
Tawanda Mulalu
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die was selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and received the 2023 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry; it was also listed as a best poetry book of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and was a finalist for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Tawanda’s poems have appeared in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review, A Public Space and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Tin House Books. He is presently a fellow at The Michener Center for Writers and served as a judge for the 2023 Poetry Society of America annual awards.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar and filmmaker. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels, The Theory of Flight (2018), The History of Man (2020) and The Quality of Mercy (2022), published in southern Africa by Penguin Random House and in North America by Catalyst Press. Her fourth novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People (2024), was recently published by Picador Africa and will be published by House of Anansi in April 2025.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht in the north west of Ireland. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021) and Ghostgirl (Donegal Archives, 2023). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award for Best Debut Collection (IRE) and for the Ledbury Hellens Best Second Collection (UK). Her awards include the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award, The Markievicz Award and The Kavanagh Fellowship. As a librettist she co-created the text for Elsewhere – the critically acclaimed debut opera of Straymaker (IRE) in co-production with the Abbey National Theatre of Ireland. Ní Churreáin is a former literary fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude (GR) and has served as an Ambassador for Writing in Irish prisons. She is the 2025 Writer in Residence at University College Dublin. Ní Churreáin is the poetry editor at The Stinging Fly magazine.
Natacha Oyarzún Cartagena
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
The Chilean writer, actress and editor Natacha Oyarzún Cartagena was born in Punta Arenas in 1993. She received the Literary Creation Grant from the Ministry of Culture in 2019 and 2021. In 2022 she published her first book, Terremoto blanco, a collection of stories set in Chilean Patagonia. In 2023, together with Valentina Arévalo and Sofía Cifuentes, she published a visual arts project entitled Somos +. In 2024 she was a writer in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. She currently collaborates with Revista Santiago of the Diego Portales University and is writing her first novel.
Connie Pertuz Meza
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Connie Pertuz Meza is a Colombian American writer, a two-decade-long NYC public school educator, mother of a young adult and teenager, and wife. Connie’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli Literary Journal, and elsewhere, as well as several anthologies. Connie is a three-time VONA alum and served as a board member and secretary, a three-time Tin House participant, a 2021 Kweli Fellow, a 2021 Aspen Words Ricardo Salinas Latinx recipient, a 2022 Pen America Emerging Fellow, a 2023 We Need Diverse Books Mentorship Finalist, a 2024 Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow, and a 2025 Periplus Fellow. Connie has an early chapter book with Scholastic titled Magic Outside My Window.
Diana Quiñones
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Diana Quiñones is a 9th-grade English teacher in the Lower East Side by day and a writer by night. Collaborating around language arts as a practice of justice, she has worked with VONA, Las Dos Brujas, One Story, Kweli, and Catapult, and loves exploring social justice with her students as a way of helping them unearth the power of language and the written word. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she now resides in New York City’s Washington Heights where she is completing her first novel. She spends her spare time, communing with the trees and spending time with her family.
Melody Razak
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Melody is a British Iranian writer who lives in Brighton. Melody has had short stories published in the Mechanics Institute Review, the Bath Short Story Anthology and the Brick Lane Short Story Prize. She has also written for the Observer Food Monthly and The Sunday Times. In 2021, Melody was selected as one of the Observer’s ‘Ten Debut Novelists’ for her novel, Moth, which went on to be shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Desmond Elliot prize, and was selected as the readers jury for the Festival du Premier Roman. Melody is currently writer in residence at Birkbeck University.
Ariana Reines
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Ariana Reines is a poet, Obie-winning playwright, and translator from Salem, Massachusetts. Her newest books are Wave of Blood (Divided 2024) and The Rose (Graywolf 2025). A Sand Book (2019) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She teaches at Invisible College and lives in Queens.
A.J. Rodriguez
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
A.J. Rodriguez was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Oregon’s MFA program. His work has been awarded the Granum Foundation Prize and received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Kerouac Project, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Swamp Pink Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades. His fiction also appears in New England Review, Passages North, The Common, and elsewhere.
Dagny Nzinga Rose
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Dagny Nzinga Rose is an avid karaoke-ist and choral singer from Brooklyn. She has a B.A in English from Stanford University, an M. Ed. Education from Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, another M. Ed. in Counseling from Alfred University, and half of an MFA in Creative Writing from CUNY, City College. After a few years jumping around between jobs in journalism, copywriting, and editing, she found her first teaching job at a private school in 2004. By 2009, she had joined the NYCDOE, where she has remained ever since. Nkomo took a decade-long break from writing to concentrate on building her teaching chops, but returned to her craft during the Covid-19 lockdown. When she isn’t teaching or entering fiction contests, Nkomo watches horror movies, attends visual and performance art exhibits, listens to podcasts and audiobooks, naps with her aging and adorable cat, and ineffectively cleans her apartment.
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.
Yasmin Zaher
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Sarah Tarlow is professor of historical archaeology at the University of Leicester. She is also a mother, a widow and an aspiring writer. She lives in Leicestershire, and works part-time at the university, while trying to develop her non-academic writing. The Archaeology of Loss, her well-received memoir, was published in 2023. It placed her 25 years of professional interest in the archaeology of death and burial alongside the long illness and death, in 2016, of her husband, Mark.Ndlovu holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She has an MA in African Studies and an MFA in Film from Ohio University. Her short film, Graffiti, won several awards including the Silver Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. She received her BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College. She is a 2018 Morland Scholar, a 2020 JIAS Writing Fellow and a 2022 recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize.
Santian Vataj
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
S.P. Vataj was born in the former Yugoslavia to Albanian parents and raised in the Bronx, New York. He is a history teacher at a public school in the Bronx. His work has appeared in Sequestrum Magazine, Prelude magazine’s website, Tin House, 100 Word Story, and Silver Needle Press.
Crystal Yeung
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Crystal Yeung is a queer femme Asian American poet with an MFA in Poetry from the College of New Rochelle and an MsEd in Special Education from Brooklyn College. She holds a BA in English literature and is currently working on a masters in Language & Literacy at CCNY. Her writing can be found in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Poets & Writers, Perigee, TAYO, and descant. She is recipient of Poets & Writers Amy Award and descant Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, serves as poetry chairperson for the PEN Prison Writing Awards and Co-Editor at Apogee Journal. She is currently teaching special education in an NYC Outward Bound middle school. She enjoys going to concerts, thrifting, films both old and new, and not dreaming of labor.
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.
Carina del Valle SchorskeChing-In Chen
Hawthornden Brooklyn, 2025
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator. Her work explores intimate histories of empire, migration, and creative survival in the Caribbean and beyond. Her writing appears in many publications including The Believer, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.
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.
