Featured Authors & Artists: "Fables & Futures"

John Little Memorial Endowment Fiction Writer

The recipient of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“Genius” Award), George Saunders is the author of two novels, four collections of short stories, a novella, a book of essays, and an award-winning children’s book. Vigil (Penguin Random House, 2026), his forthcoming novel, takes place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next, and has been praised in advance as “a wise, playful, electric novel.” His Man Booker Prize-winning first novel Lincoln in the Bardo was published in 2017; Colson Whitehead noted it as: “A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.” His most recent book is Liberation Day (Penguin Random House, 2022), a masterful collection of short stories exploring ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans.

Saunders’ collection, Tenth of December (Random House, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the 2014 Story Prize for short fiction and the 2014 Folio Prize. Chair of the Judges for the Folio Prize, Lavinia Greenlaw, said: “George Saunders’s stories are both artful and profound. Darkly playful, they take us to the edge of some of the most difficult questions of our time and force us to consider what lies behind and beyond them. His subject is the human self under ordinary and extraordinary pressure. His worlds are heightened versions of our own, full of inexorable confrontations from which we are not easily released. Unflinching, delightful, adventurous, compassionate, he is a true original whose work is absolutely of the moment. We have no doubt that these stories will prove only more essential in years to come.” Tenth of December was also named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, and the collection, and Saunders’ work, was highlighted in a New York Times Magazine cover story.

Saunders’s other collections include: A Swim In A Pond In The Rain; the bestselling Pastoralia, set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and In Persuasion Nation, one of three finalists for the 2006 Story Prize for best short story collection of the year. Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and Tenth of December were all New York Times Notable Books.

Saunders is also the author of the novella-length illustrated fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which takes us into a profoundly strange country called Inner Horner, and the New York Times bestselling children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands. The Boston Globe lauds Saunders’ ability to “construct a story of absurdist satire, then locate within it a moment of searing humanity.” Congratulations, by the Way (Random House, 2014) is a book containing the funny yet uplifting graduation speech Saunders gave at Syracuse University, which went viral shortly after its delivery. Saunders’ book of essays, The Braindead Megaphone (2007), received critical acclaim and landed him spots on The Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, and Harpers Magazine, and has appeared in the O’Henry, Best American Short Story, Best Non-Required Reading, and Best American Travel Writing anthologies.

In 2006, Saunders was awarded both a MacArthur Fellowship, for “bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all his own,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2013 TIME Magazine listed Saunders on its list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. Saunders received the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

Learn more about George Saunders on his website.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Mere Wife (FSG, 2018), a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf. Her full cast musical adaptation of The Aeneid, titled Vergil: a Mythological Musical, came out from Audible in 2023. She delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford in 2023, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, among many others. 

When asked by Slate about her use of contemporary slang in her Beowulf translation, Headley responded, “My whole career has been grabbing bits of folklore and repurposing them, and testing out different meters and repurposing them. That’s the writer I am. But in terms of using some of the more recent slang, I was really just interested in how much of the English language has been constructed out of slang always. That’s just the nature of the language. It’s a language that grabs culturally, jumps class.”

Headley grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.

Anna Maria Hong is the author of the poetry collections Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize, and the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize. Her writings appear in many publications including The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Common, Poem-a-Day, and The Best American Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, she is an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College.

Visit Anna Maria Hong's website and learn more about her work.

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is the author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury, 2023), a USA Today national bestseller that was named an Indies Introduce title and a September Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Megan received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. Currently a Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.

Visit Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's website and learn more about her work.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was named in Newcity’s 2025 Lit 50 list, recognizing influential people and organizations shaping Chicago’s literary culture. She was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”

Visit Ananda Lima's website and learn more about her work.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of trans experience. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the Premio Nuevas Voces, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. Among his seven poetry books are lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title for no existe un mundo poshuracán at the Whitney Museum.

He has edited the anthologies Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous, 2019) and La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña (La Impresora, 2023). The Rust of History (Circumference, 2022), his translation of poetry by Sotero Rivera Avilés, was longlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award, and his translation of Ada Limón’s poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is currently on its way to Jupiter’s moon. Other translation projects include Hijas de América Latina (Ed. Sandra Guzmán, HarperCollins Español, 2023) and animal fiero y tierno/ fierce and tender animal(Angelamaría Dávila, CENTRO, 2024). In 2024, he received a grant from TEN:TACLES to co-create “We Had Nothing to Lose”: The Speeches and Writings of Sylvia Rivera.

In September 2025, Graywolf Press published his epic poem Algarabía. Roque currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, is the Creative Editor for sx salon: a small axe literary platform and serves the needs of a fierce cat named Pietri.

Learn more about Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and his work by visiting his website.

Amber Sparks is the author of a recent novel, Happy People Don’t Live Here, four collections of short fiction, and a hybrid novella written with Robert Kloss and illustrated by Matt Kish. Her essays, film and book criticism have appeared widely online, in BrightWall/Dark Room, Indiewire, Bustle, The Paris Review, Slate, Tin House, New York Mag, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

Learn more about Amber Sparks and her work by visiting her website.

Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist born in El Salvador and based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, multiple temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries. Her work is currently on view at LACMA and Commonwealth and Council, in Los Angeles; UCR Arts, in Riverside, California; and ICA in San Diego in Encinitas. Her work was included in the 60th Venice Biennale, "Foreigners Everywhere," (2024) and the 14th Shanghai Biennale, "Cosmos Cinema" (2024). Cortez is a recipient of Latinx Arts Fellowship (2023), New School Vera List Center Borderlands Fellowship (2022-24), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016). She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches sculpture and critical theory at UC Davis.

Visit Beatriz Cortez's website and learn more about her work.

Penelope Burns came to Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents as an intern in 2012, after graduating from Colgate University and attending the Denver Publishing Institute. She became a full-time agent in late 2015 after working briefly at a book-to-film scouting agency. She considers herself a “generalist,” representing an eclectic variety of literary and commercial fiction in adult, YA, and middle grade, as well as some narrative nonfiction.