Mark Anthony Cayanan

Mark Anthony Cayanan is from Angeles City, Philippines. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, where they received the 2021 Doctoral Research Medal. Their most recent poetry book is Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Australian Poetry Journal, and Indiana Review. They teach literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University, and are currently a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

Pol Guasch

Pol Gyasch has a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory from King’s College London and is currently researching his doctoral thesis on love and poetics at the Universitat de Barcelona. He’s the author of the poetry collections Tanta gana, which won the 2018 Francesc Garriga Prize, and La part del foc, which won the 2020 López-Picó Prize. His debut novel Napalm al cor, winner of the 2021 Anagrama Llibres Novel Prize, has been translated into different languages and is also being adapted for theatre and film.

Johannes Heldén

Johannes Heldén is a writer, visual artist, and musician. His interdisciplinary works deal with ecology, sentience, and narrative structures.

Nadia Kalman

Nadia Kalman left Ukraine as a child and now lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel, about a family of emigrants from the former Soviet Union, is called The Cosmopolitans. She has published short work in such magazines as New World Writing, Korean Literature Now, and the Jewish Review of Books, and is working on a second novel.

Mattho Mandersloot

Mattho Mandersloot is a literary translator who grew up in Amsterdam. Formerly a full-time taekwondo athlete, he holds degrees in Classics, Translation, and Korean Studies. His translations include award-winning novels by Han Kang, Cho Nam-joo, and Sang Young Park. He has previously taught translation workshops at the Poetry Translation Centre in London as well as an eight-week course at the Dutch Academy for Literary Translation.

Nadia Owusu

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by over a dozen publications, including Time, Vogue, Esquire, and the BBC. It was named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was selected by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai for her Literati book club. Nadia is the winner of a Whiting Award in nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, Bon Appétit, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Nell Painter

Nell Painter (the artist formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter) is the author of several books and the recipient of degrees in painting from Rutgers University and the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. She lives and works in East Orange, New Jersey, and when not writing essays and drawing self-portraits, she makes artist’s books that visualize people and history. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she currently serves as Madame Chairman of MacDowell.

Nadeesha Uyangoda

Nadeesha Uyangoda was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and writes in Italian. She is the author of L’unica persona nera nella stanza (The Only Black Person in the Room) and creator of the podcast Sulla Razza. Her debut non-fiction book earned a spot on many prestigious award shortlists. She has written for national and foreign media, including Open Democracy, Al Jazeera English, and the Telegraph. She lives in Italy.

Kirstin Warnke

Kirstin Warnke studied theatre and English while beginning work as an actress. In addition to various theatre engagements, she has appeared on television with her own comedy show The Dingens Show, and reached a large audience with her roles in the ARD satire programme Extra3. She is a member of the artist group A Rose, a freelance author for the FAZ, and she is a lecturer at DEKRA Media University.

Adam Zdrodowski

Alum-in-Residence

Adam Zdrodowski is a writer and translator (Gertrude Stein, Henry Green, Dave Grohl, and Grzegorz Wróblewski). He authored four collections of poetry, including Moon Machine (2019), and is currently working on a novel, Kandydat (The Candidate), as well as recording music as Moon Machinery. He lives in Warsaw.

Arià Paco

Arià Paco is a Catalan writer. He has published two novels, Mentir a les mosques and Covarda, vella, tan salvatge. He is interested in morality, and is also a Philosophy Ph.D candidate at the University of Arizona. He has collaborated with different digital media.

Catherine Dana

Alum-in-Residence

Catherine Dana was born in France and now lives in Atlanta. She has published two novels. The third one is perhaps done. When she doesn’t manage to write, she paints.

Tyree Daye

Tyree Daye is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth, Cardinal, and River Hymns, which was the winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina.

Kata Győrfi

Kata Győrfi is a Hungarian poet and bilingual playwright from Romanian who has been publishing for more than ten years. In 2019, her first book of poems, Te alszol mélyebben, was nominated for the György Petri Literary Award and was a nominee for the Péter Horváth Literary Scholarship. Her plays in Romanian and Hungarian have been performed and translated since 2017. Her next book of poetry depicts a post-apocalyptic natural world. In her dramas, she is interested in loneliness, circumventing the rules of being among people, and in characters who for some reason do not automatically fit in, who think of themselves as a mistake in the seemingly perfect system.

Dominique Haensell

Dominique Haensell is a writer, translator, and editor from Berlin. She holds a PhD in literary studies and her award-winning monograph Making Black History: Diasporic Fiction in the Moment of Afropolitanism was published in 2021. Dominique is co-editor-in-chief of Germany’s foremost feminist magazine, Missy (on sabbatical), and is currently working on a hybrid memoir about Afro-German identity, British colonialism, and her family’s relationship to German colonial Africa (The White Rasta, forthcoming with Luchterhand).

Shubnum Khan

Shubnum Khan is a South African author and artist. Her first novel, Onion Tears was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Huffpost, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her debut novel in the U.S., The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, is a gothic tragedy set in South Africa and India.

Ilknur Kocer

Ilknur Kocer, born into a Turkish guest worker family in Germany, is a German-Turkish illustrator and graphic designer living and working in Kassel. Through her art, she paints complex narratives of cultural interference and explores profound themes of feminism, racism, and migration. Infused with personal and communal experiences, her stories reflect the delicate threads that weave our diverse society. Her comics and illustrations have been published in various magazines and anthologies and shown in museums and book fairs.

Sung Ryu

Sung Ryu is a Korean-English translator who has called South Korea, the US, Canada, and Singapore home. Her translations include Tower by Bae Myung-hoon, Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eunyoung, I’m Waiting for You: And Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young (co-translated with Sophie Bowman), and the Korean edition of Grandma Moses: My Life’s History by Anna Mary Robertson Moses.

Beñat Sarasola

Beñat Sarasola has published two books of poems, an essay, and the novel Deklaratzekorik ez. He has been the editor of the poetry collection Munduko Poesia Kaierak and has translated into Basque the novel Nemesis by Philip Roth. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of the Basque Country and in literary theory and comparative literature from the University of Barcelona. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Barcelona. Currently, he is a professor and researcher at the University of the Basque Country.

Noemi Schneider

Noemi Schneider is a writer for adults and children and works as a cultural journalist for radio and print. Her short stories and essays have won several awards and appeared in English translations of Asymptote and Words Without Borders. In 2017, her debut novel was published; in the same year, she was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Her philosophical bedtime story for children Ludwig and the Rhinoceros is translated into English. The book has already received several awards, including Most Beautiful German Book 2023. The translation rights are sold to publishers in five languages.

Saraid de Silva

Saraid de Silva is a writer from Aotearoa who works across radio, theatre, and television. She co-hosts and co-produces Radio New Zealand podcast and documentary series Conversations with My Immigrant Parents, and contributed to the anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her debut novel Amma, the inaugural winner of the Crystal Arts Trust Prize, will be out in 2024.