Leia Penina Wilson is an afakasi Samoan poet hailing from the Midwest. Most recently, she has work in Burning House Press, Heavy Feather Review, Denver Quarterly, Dream Pop Press, and Split Lip Magazine. She is the author of i built a boat with all the trees in your closet (and will let you drown), from Red Hen Press.…
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 19 May 2020). He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into sixteen languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Joukhadar has been an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California; the Fes Medina Project in Morocco; Beit al-Atlas in Beirut; and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.…
AM Ringwalt is a writer and musician who is the Spark fellow this year. Her poetry, nonfiction and hybrid works appear or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Entropy, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Interim and the Kenyon Review. Her manuscript What Floods was a finalist for Essay Press’ 2018 book prize and was long-listed for Tarpaulin Sky’s 2019 book prize. She has taught creative writing at the University of Notre Dame and Interlochen Arts Camp, and has performed her music at the Watermill Center and the New Yorker Festival.…
Come listen to the second MFA reading of the semester on February 26. Readers include Ahmad Aljawad, Maxime Berclaz, Elise Houcek, and Jasmine Ortiz.…
Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas, principally of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019; winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series award and an award from the Illinois Arts Council) and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020; article excerpt honorable mention for the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association); and he co-edited American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2016); and participated in a collaboration with visual artist Eamon Ore-Giron, published as Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2020). He is presently working on two books: one about divination and migration and the other on the Mayan story of creation, the Popol Vuh. He is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in the department of Creative Writing.…