Fellowship Judges

Pulitzer Prize-winning Forrest Gander is a poet, writer, translator, and editor of several anthologies of writing from Spain and Mexico. He is celebrated for the richness of his language and his undaunted lyric passion. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including collaborations with notable artists and photographers. Most recently, Gander collaborated with the photographer Jack Shear to create the collection Knot (Copper Canyon, 2022). Within Knot are twenty-three lush black and white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. The images correspond with Gander’s lyric response. The result is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?” one poem asks. “A divinity wrung from a black cloud.

Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Poets & Writers, among other publications. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and won the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. In July 2022, she was the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark, and she now serves as a 2022-24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Destiny has won the Academy of American Poets Prize and has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, The Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. She serves as a contributing editor for Poets & Writers.

Vanessa Hua is an award-winning, best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, A River of Stars, was named to the Washington Post and NPR’s Best Books of 2018 lists, and has been called a "marvel" by O, The Oprah Magazine, and "delightful" by The Economist. Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities,  a New York Times Editors' Choice, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was a finalist for a California Book Award, and a New American Voices Award. Her latest novel, Forbidden City, was published in 2022.

Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter and teaches at Columbia University.

Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.

Halley Feiffer is a playwright, TV writer and actress. Plays include I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard (World Premiere Atlantic Theater Company, OCC Nom.), Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow (World Premiere Williamstown Theater Festival and MCC Theater, Drama Desk and Drama League Noms), The Pain of My Belligerence (World Premiere Playwrights Horizons), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (World Premiere MCC Theater) and How To Make Friends and Then Kill Them (World Premiere Rattlestick Playwrights Theater). Her plays have been produced around the country and in the UK, and are published by Dramatists Play Service and Overlook Press. TV writing and producing credits include The One Percent (Starz), Mozart in the Jungle (Amazon), Purity, Kidding, SMILF (Showtime), American Crime Story: Impeachment (FX), Rodeo Queens (Amazon), Roar (Apple TV+), Dear Edward (Apple TV+) and original pilots for FX, TNT, Freeform, Hulu and Apple TV+. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner Tim, and tries - a day at a time - not to kill her houseplants.

Amitava Kumar is the author of Lunch With a Bigot, A Matter of Rats, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, Nobody Does the Right Thing, Husband of a Fanatic, Bombay-London-New York, and Passport Photos. Kumar’s latest book is Immigrant, Montana: A Novel, published by Faber in the UK, Knopf in the US, and in translation by other publishers worldwide. The book came out in India under the title The Lovers: A Novel. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. In 2016, Amitava Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (General Nonfiction) as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists.

Sheryl Luna was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. She earned her BA at Texas Tech University, an MFA from the University of Texas at El Paso, an MA in English from Texas Woman’s University, and a PhD in Contemporary Literature from the University of North Texas. Poets & Writers Magazine named Luna as one of the “18 Debut Poets who Made their Mark in 2005.” Luna's first collection of poetry, Pity the Drowned Horses (2004), won the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Institute of Latino Studies and the Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Colorado Book Awards. Luna's second collection of poems, Seven (2013), was runner up for the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize. Luna has been awarded fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Anderson Center, the Ragdale Foundation, and Canto Mundo. She received the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from Sandra Cisneros in 2008. Her poems have appeared in various journals including the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, and the Notre Dame Review. She has taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado and at the Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Daniel Goldfarb’s plays include Legacy (Williamstown Theatre Festival); Modern Orthodox (Dodger Stages); Sarah, Sarah (Manhattan Theater Club); and Adam Baum and The Jew Movie (Blue Light, Oppenheimer Award, Canadian Authors Association Award, Hull-Warriner Award Finalist). His musicals include Piece of My Heart (Signature); Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me (Broadway); Radio Girl (Goodspeed); and Party Come Here (Williamstown). For television, Daniel is a writer/co-producer on season two of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and is developing a pilot for Lifetime. Previous TV includes F/X’s Tyrant, DirecTV’s Rogue, CBC’s Four in the Morning, and PBS’s The Electric Company. Daniel is a graduate of Juilliard and NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing at Tisch (BFA, MFA), where he is an Assistant Arts Professor. 

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (Bloomsbury) and The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times Bestseller, an Editor's Pick, and a finalist for the PEN Center Literary Award in Nonfiction. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry.

Douglas Langworthy is the Literary Director/Director of New Play Development at the Denver Center Theatre Company. He held similar positions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the McCarter Theatre. He has translated fifteen plays from the German, by playwrights Brecht, Wedekind, Hans Henny Jahnn, Heiner Müller and Heinrich von Kleist, among others. His translation of Goethe’s Faust was produced in 2006 in New York by Target Margin Theater and the Classic Stage Company. He co-wrote the libretto for The Sandman, an opera based on an E.T.A. Hoffmann story with music by Thomas Cabaniss, directed by David Herskovits. With Linda Alper and Penny Metropulos he adapted The Three Musketeers and the musical Tracy’s Tiger, both of which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches at Naropa University. She also teaches in Goddard College’s low-residency MFA. She is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry/prose, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015).

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me. Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. She's been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, Anderson Cooper Live, and elsewhere. Her essays have twice received special mention from the Best American Essays anthology and have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The MacDowell Colony.

Corinne Hayoun runs the NY office of MANAGE-MENT, an agile LA-based organization that integrates talent management, development, production, and financing. A former theatre agent at Creative Artists Agency, Corinne has also co-produced the hit Broadway play AN ACT OF GOD starring Jim Parsons, and is a board member for the Lilly Awards Foundation.

Joanna Luloff’s short story collection, The Beach at Galle Road, was published by Algonquin Books in 2012. It was selected by Barnes & Noble as a Discover Great New Writers pick and won the Maria Thomas Fiction Prize from Peace Corps Writers. Her stories have appeared in several journals, including The Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, and New South. Her novel Remind Me Again What Happened is forthcoming from Algonquin. Joanna received her MFA from Emerson College and her PhD from the University of Missouri. She is an assistant professor of English at University of Colorado Denver, where she also edits fiction and nonfiction for Copper Nickel.

Robin Black is the author of the story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this, the novel, Life Drawing, and, most recently, Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide. She teaches in the Rutgers-Camden MFA Program and lives in Philadelphia.