2025 Author in Residence
Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is a poet, mentor, editor, and translator, born and raised in Gaza on April 22, 1998, and has been exiled in the US since Oct 2023. He is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book “A Gaza of Siege & Genocide” (Mizna, 2024). Ashour’s portfolio also includes a poetry collection and two children’s books in Arabic. His work has been featured in several anthologies and journals internationally, including the MQR and ArabLit. His poetry manuscript-in-progress received an honorable mention from the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, and his first children’s book won the Arab Forum for Children’s Books Publishers award and made the iBBY honor list. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships and has read poetry at several organizations and over 35 U.S. universities, including Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and UPenn. His poetry has been translated into 11 languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied Sociology & Psychology and worked as a creative writing mentor in Gaza. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in California.
About A Gaza of Seige & Genocide (Mizna, 2024)
Yahya Ashour is an acclaimed poet known for his evocative and poignant works. His poetry, which often explores themes of identity, exile, and the human condition, has resonated deeply with audiences worldwide.
George Abraham writes: “A Gaza of Seige & Genocide is more than a testament to Palestinian resilience and survival; it is a political action insistent on the radical hope that poetry might play some role in saving his family and people. Through these poems and illustrations, Ashour unravels layers of complex grief, moving beyond a poetics of mere witness, insisting, ‘Rejoice, Gaza / we are no longer murdered / while the world is sleeping, / the world is wide awake.’ In Yahya Ashour’s poetry, we find a microcosm comprising the contemporary history of Gaza and the future of the Palestinian people.”
2024 Author in Residence
A poet and multimedia artist, DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
ABOUT Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024)
*One of LitHub’s Poetry Books to Read in 2024*
*One of The Millions’s Must Read Poetry Books of Winter 2024*
National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second poetry collection, a haunting of a family’s past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations.
In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives.
As Terrance Hayes writes, “‘There is nothing that is not music’ for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history.” This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family’s legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
Photo of Diana Khoi Nguyen: Karen Lue
2023 Author in Residence
SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her most recent book, the story collection Likes, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
ABOUT Likes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
In nine stories that range from the real to the unreal, strange to familiar, funny to frightening, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reminds us why her wildly original debut, Madeleine Is Sleeping, and her masterful Ms. Hempel Chronicles have become contemporary classics–celebrated and beloved.
In a nimble dance of lightness and gravity, Likes explores the full range and contradictions of our contemporary moment. Through unexpected visitors, Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, the struggle to gain a foothold in the capitalist shell-game of work, the Instagram posts of a twelve-year-old—these stories of friendship and parenthood, celebrity and obsession, race and class and the passage of time, form an engrossing collection that is both otherworldly and suffused with the deceitful humdrum of everyday life.
For readers of Joy Williams, George Saunders, Lauren Groff, and Deborah Eisenberg, Likes helps us see into our unacknowledged desires and, in quick, artful, nearly invisible cuts, exposes the roots of our abiding terrors and delights.
“Finely attuned to both sensory and emotional detail . . . The adjectives that readers often attach to Bynum’s work—’enchanting,’ ‘charming,’ ‘precise’—are accurate, but . . . her skills and her sensibility are deeper and darker than that. The sentences are indeed meticulous, but never for their own sake; they bring to life characters who possess rich inner lives even when navigating moments that feel dreamily sinister or otherworldly . . . Bynum offers her reader inventively landscaped, beautifully manicured gardens teeming with rewardingly warty toads.” —Caitlin Horrocks, The New York Times Book Review
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Library Journal, Electric Literature, The New York Public Library, PopMatters
A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Story Prize
National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s highly anticipated return weaves together like and unlike, mythic and modern.
2022 Author in Residence
ELAINE KAHN is the author of Women in Public (City Lights, 2015) and Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020). Writing has appeared in the LA Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Granta, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail and Art Papers. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ workshop and has taught at Pomona College, Saint Mary’s College, and the University of Iowa. She is the founder of the Poetry Field School. Kahn is Writer in Residence at UCLA English for spring 2022.
ABOUT Romance or the End (Soft Skull, 2020)
Romance or The End takes up the tools of romantic narrative in order to perform the rupture between self and story that occurs at the onset of trauma. Using known and pathologized literary arcs, Elaine Kahn unspools the fundamental instability of truth, love, and language to create an experiential portrait of narrative’s power to both disfigure and restore.
“This book takes me right back to the Carnage Years―yours, too―sacrificed to love. If only I, you, had possessed Elaine Kahn’s wisdom and wit. These poems are lacerating, coy, bloody, and so true I wanted to memorize lines from them.” ―Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers
2020 Author in Residence
ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He is also the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2019). He is from Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, Poetry, New Statesman, Playboy, The Believer, The Economist, Financial Times and World Literature Today.
ABOUT The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017)
Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from the ‘disposable cities’ composed of shanty towns and rough encampments which spring up wherever new resources are discovered to present-day London and North America, André Naffis-Sahely’s bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. This is poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. As this arresting new poet has remarked elsewhere: “I don’t like poems that invent memories; I have enough of my own.”
“Naffis-Sahely’s poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk… His narratives hold memory to account.” ― David Harsent
“I much admired André Naffis-Sahely’s sharp meditations on our vast but remarkably homogeneous global landscape.” ― Pankaj Mishra
2019 Author in Residence
ANGELA FLOURNOY is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times notable book of the year. The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree for 2015. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Iowa, The New School, Columbia University and Princeton University.
Flournoy was the 2016-17 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts fellow.
Hailed as an “assured and memorable novel” by the New York Review of Books, Flournoy’s book brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances. It’s a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home. The author will be reading excerpts from her debut novel, followed by a Q& A from the audience.