Jennifer Bartlett (2024)
Jennifer Bartlett was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and educated at the University of New Mexico, Vermont College, and Brooklyn College. She is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press, 2007), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax Press, 2012), Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography (theenk Books, 2014), and Hindrances of a Householder (Chax). She also co-edited, with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Bartlett has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Fund for Poetry, LMCC, and the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. Bartlett has given lectures on poetry and disability at Hamilton College, Brown University, CUNY Hunter, and School for the Visual Arts. Her biography on the poet Larry Eigner, Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, was published in 2023 by the University of Alabama Press.
Photo by Emma Bee Bernstein.
Lisa Hsiao Chen (2023)
Lisa is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the Gotham Book Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was selected by The New Yorker and Vogue as a Best Book of 2022 and as a Top 10 Book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly. Her book of poems, Mouth (Kaya Press), received an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Fiction, Art Omi: Writers, and Vermont Studio Center. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City.
Photo by Hisayo Chen.
Chia-Lun Chang (2022)
Chia-Lun is a poet, writer, artist, translator, performer, educator, and UX content strategist. She is the author of Prescribee, winner of the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, An Alien Well-Tamed (Belladonna*, 2022) and One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear, 2016). She has received support from Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Poets House, Tofte Lake Center, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council among others. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry and fiction at the Brooklyn Public Library. Born and raised in New Taipei City and Puli, she lives in New York City.
Amina Henry (2020)
Amina is a Brooklyn-based playwright and a graduate of Yale University, NYU’s Performance Studies MA program, and Brooklyn College’s MFA Playwriting program. Productions include: Ducklings at JACK (Brooklyn, NY), The Animals at JACK, Happily Ever at Brooklyn College, Bully at Interrobang Theater (Baltimore, MD), An American Family Takes a Lover, produced by The Cell: a 21st Century Salon and presented by Theatre for the New City (New York, NY), Water produced by Drama of Works (Brooklyn, NY), The Minstrel Show, produced as part of the 2013 Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood Festival 13th Street Theater/CSC. Publications include: Hello, My Name Is Joe in the compilation 24 Gun Control Plays, published by NoPassport Press. She was a 2012-2013 Core Apprentice playwright at ThePlaywrights Center and a 2013 Finalist for the Leah Ryan FEWW Playwriting Prize for her play Bully. She was a featured playwright at the 2013 Black and Latino Playwrights Conference at Texas State University. She has been a member of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group, Page73’s writers group, and is a 2017-2018 member of the Ars Nova writers group. She is a 2017-2018 recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Space Residency and is a 2018 recipient of a space residency at Dixon Place.
Liana Finck (2019)
Liana, a cartoonist and author, studied fine art and graphic design at The Cooper Union in New York City. She has been an artist-in-residence at the New York Foundation for the Arts, Tablet, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and is the author of A Bintel Brief (2014), Passing for Human (2018), and Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self (2019).
Photo by Jorge Colombo.
Melissa Febos (2018)
Melissa 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 The Believer, Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Elle, The Guardian, Vogue, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University. She serves on the Board of Directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the PEN America Membership Committee, and co-curated the Manhattan reading and music series, Mixer, for ten years. She curates literary events, teaches workshops, and speaks widely. The daughter of a sea captain and a psychotherapist, she was raised on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.
Lisa Ko (2017)
Lisa is the author of The Leavers, a novel that was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, Apogee Journal, Narrative, O. Magazine, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, LMCC, the MacDowell Colony, Writers OMI at Ledig House, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. She lives in New York City.
Julia Jarcho (2016)
Julia is a playwright and director from New York City with the company Minor Theater. Her play Grimly Handsome (Incubator Arts Project 2013, JACK 2015) won a 2013 Obie Award for Best New American Play. Other plays include The Terrifying (Abrons Arts Center 2017), Every Angel is Brutal (Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2016), Nomads (Incubator 2014), Dreamless Land (New York City Players/Abrons 2011), American Treasure (13P 2009), The Highwayman (NTUSA performance space 2004), and Delmar, which the visual artist Meredith James made into a movie installation (Jack Hanley Gallery 2014). She has received a Doris Duke Impact Award (2014), a Sarah Verdone Writing Award (2016), and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Venturous Fund. She has been a MacDowell fellow, an LCT New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center, an Advisory Board member at Young Playwrights Inc., and a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation and the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. She has a PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and is the Head of Playwriting for the MFA Playwriting Program at Brown University. Her book Minor Theater: Three Plays is available from 53rd State Press and her first critical book, Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama, is published by Cambridge University Press.
Photo by Jennifer Seastone.
Sarah Dohrmann (2015)
Sarah is a Brooklyn-based writer of creative nonfiction, journalism, and fiction. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, The Iowa Review, and New York, among other publications. She has received fellowships and awards from Fulbright (Morocco), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Sarah was born and raised in Iowa, and received her MFA from the Graduate Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College.
Pia Wilson (2014)
Pia is a 2017 NJPAC Stage Exchange commissioned playwright, 2017 resident with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space program, 2015 Sundance fellow, and a recipient of the 2014 Sarah Verdone Writing Award. She is a 2012-2013 resident with LMCC’s Workspace program, a member of the 2008 Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater, and a 2009 playwriting fellow with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her play BACK TO THE REAL was produced by Crossroads Theatre, and Drew University produced her play, DOWN NECK, in 2018. Her drama TURNING THE GLASS AROUND was produced by Workspace Collective, and her play, GENERATION T, was produced at Adelphi University in 2014. Her play, THE FLOWER THIEF, was a 2012 co-production between Horse Trade Theater Group and The Fire This Time play festival.
Photo by Joseph Moran.
Amy Whitaker (2013)
Amy is the author of Art Thinking (Harper Business, 2016) and an assistant professor in visual arts administration at New York University. Art Thinking was shortlisted as an innovation and creativity book of the year by 800-ceo-read, and described by Walter Isaacson as “fascinating” and Adam Grant as “eloquent” and “inspiring.” Amy is also author of Museum Legs (Hol Art Books, 2009), which was selected as the first common first-year read at the Rhode Island School of Design, and co-author of The Social Life of Artistic Property (Publication Studio, 2014), which Artnews named one of “14 New Art History Books to Change Your Mind.” Amy has written the creative business curricula for the New Museum Incubator where she was also an entrepreneur-in-residence and for a partnership between Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Actors Fund. Her research is about reframing art markets from the point of view of artists using property rights and the blockchain. She studied at Williams College, Yale University, and University College London. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama, Amy lives in New York City.
Photo by Sheiva Rezvani.
Alicia Jo Rabins (2012)
Alicia Jo is a writer, composer, performer and Torah teacher. The New York Times calls her voice “gorgeous”; the San Francisco Chronicle calls her writing “a poetry page-turner, both sexy and humble.” Alicia’s poetry book, DIVINITY SCHOOL, won the 2015 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her second book of poetry, FRUIT GEODE, is forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, and has released five albums, as well as composing for stage and television. She lives in Portland with her husband and their two small children.
Photo by Jason Quigley.
Emily Rubin (2011)
Emily's debut novel STALINA was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest and was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books in 2011. She was the first recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writers Award, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Rubin’s fiction and essays have appeared in the Red Rock Review, Confrontations, NY Observer, Poets & Writers Magazine, and HAPPY. In 2005 she founded Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Rubin runs the Write Treatment Writing Workshops for people affected by cancer at Mount Sinai in NYC. She teaches creative writing in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University. Rubin has an MFA from the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College. She is working on a novel about urban homesteading and lives with her husband, Leslie, and their dog Sebastian in NYC and Columbia County.