Featured Authors

AVA CHIN, a 5th generation Chinese American New Yorker, is the author of the narrative nonfiction book MOTT STREET: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (Penguin Press, 2023), an intimate portrayal of the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act laws (1882-1943) on four generations of her family as they attempted to lay down roots in America.

Publisher’s Weekly called MOTT STREET “stunning,” and the New York Times described it as “sensitive, ambitious, well-reported.” It has garnered rave reviews from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Kirkus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

A professor and a journalist, Chin is the author of the award-winning Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster, 2014), the editor of SPLIT (McGraw Hill, 2002), and the former Urban Forager columnist for the New York Times (2009-2013). 1st Prize Winner of the 2015 MFK Fisher Book Awards, Eating Wildly was one of Library Journal’s “Best Books of 2014” and a Goodreads Choice Awards 2014 semifinalist. Kirkus Reviews described it as “A delectable feast of the heart.”

 

Ava Chin has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Marie Claire, the Village Voice, SPIN, and VIBE, among others. She has held fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, the U.S. Fulbright Scholar’s program, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. In addition, she is a fellow and a board member of the New York Institute for Humanities. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and a B.A. from Queens College.

She is a professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. The Huffington Post named her one of “9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading.”

1st Prize Winner of the 2015 MFK Fisher Book Awards, Eating Wildly was one of Library Journal’s “Best Books of 2014.” Kirkus Reviews described it as “A delectable feast of the heart.” Eating Wildly reveals how nature and the Sustainability movement helped Chin to navigate deep family loss and taught her important lessons in self-reliance. After the loss of a beloved family member, she immerses herself in urban natures—discovering the city’s best mushrooms, mulberries, and even a swarm of wild honeybees—meeting fellow foragers and mycologists along the way. As the seasons turn, she starts to see the world as a place of abundance and beauty, where everything is interconnected and interdependent, and timing is key.

Ava Chin has appeared on C-SPAN, PBS’ MetroFocus, NPR’s Code Switch, and WNYC’s “All Things Considered.” She has been featured in ELLE, Martha Stewart, the Village Voice, PBS’ “Victory Garden/Perennial Plate,” and Edible Manhattan and Brooklyn.

She is the editor of Split: Stories From a Generation Raised on Divorce (McGraw-Hill, 2002) a collection of nonfiction essays about growing up in a divorced family, which Booklist called a “brave and insightful collection.” Her essay “The Missing” reveals the challenges of being raised by a single mother, and how she was eventually reunited with her estranged father as an adult.

A former slam poet, Chin has performed on stages at the Whitney Museum, the Knitting Factory, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and Woodstock94. She was a Van Lier Fellow in fiction at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a Lilly Lieb writer-in-residence at SUNY-Purchase. The American Book Review described her prose as “piquant,” and the German newspaper Taz wrote “her poetry reflects the noise and heat of the New York metropolis.”

She lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.

Access her work at https://avachin.com/index.php/bio/

Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971, and educated at Coker College where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Hayes taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before becoming a dsitinguished Silver Professor of English at New York University.

Hayes served as the 2017-2018 poetry editor for New York Times Magazine. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner, 2014), the preeminent annual anthology of contemporary American poetry. His poems have appeared in ten editions of the series.

His first book, Muscular Music, won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Lighthead, was winner of the 2010 National Book Award.

His sixth poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Fiction & Poetry, the LA Times Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award.

His essay collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

Learn more on his website https://terrancehayes.com/

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain is a Jones lecturer at Stanford University, where he formerly held a Stegner fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel Somebody’s Daughter. Her novel, The Evening Hero, on the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea, was published in 2022, while her latest YA novel, Hurt You was published in May 2023. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division.

Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, and The Guardian, among others. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship and is a current New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellow.

She has been a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellow and has served as a judge for the National Book Award and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In addition, Ms. Lee is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and was an Our Word Writer in Residence for the Columbia MFA program.

She was born and raised in Hibbing, MN.

Learn more about her work at https://marielee.net/about-us/

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Point, The Paris Review Daily, the TLS, The Yale Review and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, a Daniel Varoujan Prize, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2024.

Her translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague (Knopf). With Alice Kaplan, she is also the co-author of a book of essays about the novel called States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (University of Chicago Press, Gallimard). She has translated Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark (New York Review Books), Paol Keineg's Triste Tristan and Other Poems (with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press), Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget (Scribner), Jean-Yves Frétigné’s To Live is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci (University of Chicago Press), Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House (University of Chicago Press), as well as a Proust comic book and experimental translation projects for Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Lukas Prizes, the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and longlisted for the Baillie-Gifford Prize.

She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University at Buffalo and a Teaching Artist at the Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Access her work at http://lauramarris.com/

Ariann Rousu grew up and was raised on The White Earth Ojibwe Reservation in MN, north of Detroit Lakes MN where she attended High School. Rousu began a photography business after receiving a Digital Imaging and Photography Certificate and has serviced White Earth and the surrounding area for 10 years while continuing her education. Rousu has remained passionate about digital technologies throughout her studies and graduated from the University of North Dakota with a bachelor's degree in fine arts (Drawing and Painting) in 2021. She considers herself a multi-media artist, as she works with traditional as well as digital mediums.

Having begun using 3D technology at UND for sculpting and 3D printing, Rousu now works for UND’s Computational Research Center as a 3D technician and Native Heritage Artist. Her role consists of training others in the use of 3D technologies and developing content for “The Native Dancer Metaverse Project” envisioned to become a video game series based on Native American Powwow dancing. The project also has a goal to open doors to, and train other indigenous students who are interested in careers related to 3D technology.

Learn more about her work at https://ariannrousu.wixsite.com