Our Writers since 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.
Dominic Amerena
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Dominic Amerena's work has been published widely and he's won numerous prizes, grants and scholarships, most recently: the inaugural Speculate Prize, the Alan Marshall Short Story Award and an Australia Council New Work Grant. He recently completed his first novel, I Want Everything, and a PhD at the University of RMIT. He lives in Athens, Greece, with his wife, the essayist, Ellena Savage.
photograph by Anna Tagkalou Photography
Mahogany L. Browne
CASA ECCO, 2023
Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center's Next 50 and Wesleyan's 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, the Executive Director of JustMedia, Artistic Director of Urban Word, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, & Black Girl Magic. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne's latest poetry collection Chrome Valley is a promissory note to survival and available from Norton in Spring 2023. And she readies for her stage debut of Chlorine Sky at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Illinois. She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
photograph by Jennie Bergqvist
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
photograph by Fondation Jan Michalski © Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
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