Art Omi: Writers 2023 — Spring
April Cohort
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the Gotham Book Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, selected by The New Yorker and Vogue as a Best Book of 2022 and as a Top 10 Book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly. Her book of poems, Mouth, received an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City.
Emily Hashimoto is the author of the novel A World Between, which was published in 2020. Their personal essays have appeared in Out, The Margins, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, and The Rumpus, centering intersectional narratives. They’ve received fellowships from VONA, Queer | Art, VCCA, and Baldwin for the Arts. Emily lives with their wife and child in Southern California.
May Jeong is a writer for Vanity Fair. Her reporting from Afghanistan has been awarded the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award, and the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents, and has also been recognized by the Kurt Schork and Livingston Awards. She was awarded a 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her upcoming book on sex work. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing 2020 among others. She lives on land ceded by the Lenape people in the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682.
Panagiotis Kehagias (Alum-in-Residence) is a writer, editor, and translator based in Athens, Greece. His first book, a short story collection Final Warning, was shortlisted for the Greek National Book Award 2016 and for the Balkanika Prize 2016. His translations include: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Cara Hoffman’s Running, Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings and The Netanyahus, Greg Jackson’s Prodigals, and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. He has worked as the official Greek-to-English translator of Golden Dawn Watch, an initiative to monitor and document the trial of Golden Dawn, the infamous neo-Nazi organization. In addition to Art Omi, he has been a resident at Sangam House, Bangalore, India (2017), and the Chennai Mathematical Institute, India (2020).
Francesco Leto is a novelist, translator, performer, and podcaster. His work is largely an interdisciplinary exploration into queer identity, relationships, and human condition.
Helen Longstreth is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York, after growing up in Bath, England. She was nominated for the 2019 Pat Kavanagh Award, Spread the Word’s Life Writing Award 2019 and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award 2020. She has had stories published in The New Yorker and Touchstone Literary Magazine, amongst others.
Kelly Luce is the author of the story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, winner of Foreword Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, and the novel Pull Me Under, a Book of the Month Club selection and one of Elle’s Best Books of 2017. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Michener Center for Writers, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Tennessee Arts Commission, VCCA, and UCross. She serves as editor-in-chief of Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and lives in an old grist mill in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Felipe Franco Munhoz is the author of the novel Mentiras, which was awarded the 2010 Bolsa Funarte de Criação Literária, a grant from the Brazilian National Foundation for the Arts. It was followed by the play Identidades and by the poetry-drama mixture Lanternas ao nirvana. From the Russian, he translated O Cavaleiro de Bronze e outros poemas, a selection of Pushkin’s poetry, including the first complete version ever published in Brazil of “The Bronze Horseman.” He was born in São Paulo, Brazil.
Bushra Rehman is the author of the dark comedy, Corona, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a favorite book about New York City. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and author of the collection of poetry, Marianna’s Beauty Salon. Her new novel, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, is a modern classic about what it means to be Muslim and queer in a Pakistani-American community. It was chosen as a Best Book of the Month and Editor’s Choice: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, Good Morning America, Goodreads, The Chicago Review, BuzzFeed, Lit Hub, Lambda Literary, Book Riot, PopSugar, The AV Club, E! News, Ms. Magazine, and more.
Quynh Tran grew up in Jakobstad in Finnish Ostrobothnia. He now resides in Malmö, Sweden, where he works as a psychologist. Quynh is a graduate of the acclaimed Biskops Arnö Writing School. His literary debut Shade and Breeze was awarded Svenska Yle’s Literature Prize, the Runeberg Prize and Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize, and the translation rights are sold to publishers in six languages.
May Cohort
Max Besora is a Master of Arts graduate in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Barcelona. He also is a fiction writer with five published novels and a poetry book in Catalan. His third novel, Adventures and disadventures of the extraordinary admirable joan Orpí, conquistador and founder of New Catalonia, has been translated into English by Art Omi alumna Mara Lethem and published at Open Letter Books in 2021.
Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff received a 2020 American Book Award. Sara has been featured as one of Poets & Writers Debut Poets and previously received fellowships from MacDowell, Ragdale, CantoMundo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Postgraduate Writers Conference, and Community of Writers. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized. She teaches at California State University, East Bay, and stays rooted in Fresno.
Astrid Huisman is a freelance Dutch translator and editor specializing in contemporary English-language literary fiction and non-fiction. She has translated work by several award-winning authors such as Evie Wyld, Deborah Levy, Patti Smith, and Jesmyn Ward. More recently, Astrid started training emerging literary translators through the Dutch Centre of Expertise for Literary Translation, focusing on inclusion and empowerment. She’s currently also exploring creative writing, podcasting, and performing arts.
Adam Kraar writes plays about cross-cultural clashes and connections, including works about American families in Asia, the Civil Rights Movement, and quixotic rebels who challenge societal boundaries. Recent productions include ALTERNATING CURRENTS (The Working Theater); NEW WORLD RHAPSODY (Commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club); WILD TERRAIN (EST Marathon of One-Act Plays); FREEDOM HIGH (Queens Theatre in the Park); THE KARPOVSKY VARIATIONS (Boomerang Theatre Co.); and DON’T LOOK BACK (Voyage Theatre Company at HERE Arts Center, NYC). Adam’s plays are published by Dramatic Publishing, Smith & Kraus, and Applause Books. He grew up in India, Thailand, Singapore and the U.S. He earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University, and teaches playwriting at Primary Stages and Long Island University. More information at www.adamkraar.com.
Angela Pelster was a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow judged by Hanif Abdurraqib. Her first essay collection, Limber, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion, LitHub, Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, and The Gettysburg Review among others. She’s been a Bread Loaf Fellow in nonfiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee, and has an MFA from the University of Iowa. She’s currently at work on her new book The Evolution of Fire: Collected Crises.
Heather Quinn is a writer and photographer living in St. Paul with their husband and two young daughters. They were a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow in prose, a 2022 Tin House Scholar, and a 2020 Loft Mentor Series Fellow. They have been published in Longreads, The Rumpus, Cutbank, Fourth Genre, and others. They are working on a book-length essay about their father’s suicide and the California desert called This is How You Disappear.
Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Her debut novel, Work Like Any Other, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and Booklist named it to their Top 10 First Novels of 2016. It has been translated into multiple languages and adapted into a graphic novel. Her second novel, The Behavior of Love, has been reviewed by The New Yorker, the French edition of Elle, and Le Monde, among others. Virginia currently teaches writing and literature at Helena College. She lives in Montana.
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia. He is the author of Messiahs and Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. He was the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, a Sachs Program grant, a Hurston/Wright fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center residency, and a Rhodes University residency in South Africa. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is researching his third novel, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast.
Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare. Her poems and translations appear in Astra, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review. Her work has been supported by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright grant, and a VSC/Luce Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago where she is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow.
Shuchi Saraswat (Alum-in-Residence) has published essays in Ploughshares, AGNI, Ecotone, Tin House, The Boston Art Review, Coffee House Writers’ Project, Arrowsmith, and elsewhere. Her essay “The Journey Home” is anthologized in Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism. She received the Gulliver Travel Research Grant from The Speculative Literature Foundation and has received fellowships and scholarships to Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Writers’ Room of Boston, Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Boston.
Mary South is the author of You Will Never Be Forgotten, which was a finalist for The PEN/Bingham Prize for a Debut Story Collection and longlisted for The Story Prize. She has received fellowships and support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Black Mountain Institute, Ucross, Kimmel Harding Nelson, VCCA, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, NOON, and elsewhere.