Core Faculty (in-person)
Dawn Raffel
Dawn Raffel is the author of six books, most recently Boundless as the Sky, a hybrid story collection. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote, “Raffel draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the history of Chicago’s 1933 World's Fair for this sublime collection.... This is one to savor.” Her previous book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, won a Christopher Award for books “that affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”
Previous books include a nationally bestselling memoir, The Secret Life of Objects; a novel, Carrying the Body; and two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Fence, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, NOON, and more. She is currently the fiction editor of the Northwest Review and teaches at the Center for Fiction in New York. She mentors emerging writers through the Center and AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs).
Mildred K. Barya
Mildred K. Barya is a writer from Uganda and the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Animals of My Earth School released by Terrapin Books, 2023. Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She’s now working on a collection of creative nonfiction, and her essay, “Being Here in This Body”, won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and was published in the North Carolina Literary Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at UNC-Asheville, serves on the boards of African Writers Trust and Story Parlor, and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café. She blogs here: www.mildredbarya.com.
Josip Novakovich
Josip Novakovich emigrated from Croatia to the United States at the age of 20. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day (in ten languages), five story collections (Infidelities, Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Heritage of Smoke, and Tumbleweed) and three collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism. His new novel, Rubble of Rubles, was published in 2022. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award and an American Book Award, and he was a Man Booker International Award finalist. He has taught at Penn State, University of Cincinnati, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and now at Concordia University in Montreal.
Polina Barskova
Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and appeared in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press) and AirRaid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). Barskova also authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2016) and multiple edited volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad. She teaches Russian Literature at UC Berkeley.
Guest Speakers
George Saunders
(via Zoom)
George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection).
He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In support of his work, he has appeared on The Colbert Report, Late Night with David Letterman, All Things Considered, and The Diane Rehm Show.
He was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois. He has a degree in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University
Idza Luhumyo
(in person)
Idza Luhumyo was born in Mombasa, Kenya, and holds a law degree from the University of Nairobi. She is the inaugural winner of the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award (2020) and was awarded the Short Story Day Africa Prize (2021). On 18 July 2022, she was announced as the winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing (2022) with "Five Years Next Sunday,” described by the judges as “an incandescent story.”
Deborah Treisman
(via Zoom)
Deborah Treisman has been Fiction Editor at The New Yorker since 2003. She joined the magazine as Deputy Fiction Editor in 1997. Previously, she was the managing editor of Grand Street, and she has served on the editorial staffs of The New York Review of BooksHarper's, and The Threepenny Review. Her translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper's, and Grand Street. She is the host of the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast, the editor of the anthology 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2010), and a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2012, she received the Center for Fiction's Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Contribution to Fiction.
Ms. Treisman was born in Oxford, England, and attended the University of California at Berkeley. She lives with her husband and two daughters in New York City.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
(in person)
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was born in Kenya. She is the author of the novels The Dragonfly Sea and Dust, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and won Kenya's pre-eminent literary prize, the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has also received an Iowa Writers’ Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, Kwani?, and other publications, and she has been a TEDx Nairobi speaker and a Lannan Foundation resident. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
Annie Dewitt
(via Zoom)
Annie Dewitt is a passionate writer, editor and literary agent at the Shipman Agency who is looking to acquire literary fiction and nonfiction of extraordinary authenticity, urgency and voice. She has ten years of experience teaching at some of the country's leading creative writing programs including: Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, Bard, Bennington, Skidmore and The New School, where she was nominated for a Distinguished Teaching Award.
Annie was a Co-Founding Editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her debut novel WHITE NIGHTS IN SPLIT TOWN CITY was named one of 2016’s “Most Anticipated” debuts by The Millions, was shortlisted by The New York Times Book Review as a debut novel of note and received accolades from BookForum, Interview Magazine, Publishers Weekly and Vogue, among others. It now appears in several languages. Her debut story collection in progress – CLOSEST WITHOUT GOING OVER – was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Annie has also penned nonfiction reviews, essays and interviews for The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, BOMB, Tin House, Guernica, Esquire, BOMB, Bookforum, The LA Review of Books, art+culture, Catapult, The Towner, Rhapsody Magazine, and Poets and Writers. She was the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship.
Fiona McCrae
(via Zoom)
Fiona McCrae is the former publisher of Graywolf Press, where she worked for 27 years, following four years at Faber and Faber USA in Boston, where she was a director and executive editor. From 1982 until her move to Boston in 1991, she was at Faber and Faber, Ltd., in London, where she worked with such authors as Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, and Howard Norman. McCrae has taught publishing courses at Harvard University and Emerson College. Authors that McCrae has published include Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Baxter, Per Petterson, Salvatore Scibona, and Percival Everett. She also has served on the board of Books for Africa and is an advisor for Open Letter Press.
Emily Wallis Hughes
(in person)
Born in Napa, California in 1985, Emily Wallis Hughes grew up in El Verano and Agua Caliente in the Sonoma Valley. Sugar Factory, her first book of poems, which includes a series of twelve paintings by Sarah Riggs in conversation with Emily’s poems, was published by the legendary small press Spuyten Duyvil in 2019. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Always Crashing, Berkeley Poetry Review, Conduit, Prelude, Trampoline, and many other literary magazines. She coedited Jure Detela’s Moss & Silver, translated by Raymond Miller with Tatjana Jamnik (2018), which was a finalist for Three Percent’s 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Spanish translations of her poems are forthcoming in Buenos Aires Poetry.
Emily and the poet Jason Zuzga collaboratively co-lead Fence as Editorial Directors. The independent small nonprofit publishes Fence, a biannual literary magazine and recipient of the Whiting Foundation Literary Magazine Prize, as well as Fence Books, The Constant Critic, and other online publications.
At Rutgers–New Brunswick in New Jersey, Emily teaches undergraduate creative writing courses. She resides in Astoria, Queens in New York City, a thirty-minute walk from where her mother Katharina lived as a child of immigrant parents in Jackson Heights. Emily is currently working on her second book of poems, Alkali Bloodred Fragrance.
Writers- and Poets-in-Residence (in-person)
Biko Zulu
Jackson Biko (known by his pen name, Biko Zulu) is a renowned and award-winning writer in Kenya and an established storyteller with close to 20 years experience. He is a weekly columnist for Business Daily where he interviews business leaders. He’s also a contributing writer for MSAFIRI, Kenya Airways inflight magazine on top having had a very popular blog (www.bikozulu.co.ke) for the last thirteen years. He is a winner of the ‘Continental Blog of the Year’ on the 2nd edition of the Africa Digital Awards.
A passion for identifying and fostering talent led to setting up Bikozulu Creative Masterclass, a quarterly workshop, that has run for seven years now. The Masterclass has allowed Biko to share his craft with budding writers and spilled over into crash courses for reputable organizations such as such as the African Medical and Research Foundation, Fairtrade Africa, International Committee of the Red Cross, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Kenya Community Development Foundation, OXFAM, Safaricom Foundation, UNHCR, and Zizi Afrique.
Biko has a passion for telling “people stories,” a gift that has drawn many to read his two books: Drunk and
Thursdays.
Iryna Shuvalova
Iryna Shuvalova is a poet, translator, and scholar from Ukraine. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College in the US (2014) where she was a Fulbright scholar and a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge (2020) where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar. At Cambridge, Shuvalova also taught Ukrainian language. Her research interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics in Eastern Europe. In her doctoral thesis, she explored the complex identities in the communities affected by the war in Donbas through the prism of war songs.
As of early 2022, Shuvalova authored five books of poetry, including the bilingual Pray to the Empty Wells published by Lost Horse Press in the U.S. in fall 2019. Her most recent collection stoneorchardwoods (каміньсадліс) (Lviv: Old Lion’s Publishing House, 2020) has been recognized as the poetry book of the year by Ukraine’s Litakcent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. Meanwhile, her new book of poems in Ukrainian titled the ending songs (кінечні пісні) is scheduled to appear in print in 2022. Shuvalova’s writing has been widely anthologized and featured in the periodicals in Ukraine and abroad, including Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and many others. Her poems have been translated into twenty-five languages.
There will be additional guest lectures by writers, editors, and historians in Nairobi and Lamu, which we will be announcing to participants.
Past Faculty
Past faculty members of ILS’s parent program, SLS, include U.S. Poet Laureates, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. Such luminaries include:
Aimee Bender
Christian Bok
Amy Bloom
George Elliot Clarke
Billy Collins
Robert Coover
Robert Creeley
Toi Derricotte
Stephen Dobyns
Cornelius Eady
Dave Eggers
Stephen Elliot
Tibor Fisher
Mary Gaitskill
Vivian Gornick
Saskia Hamilton
Robert Hass
Steven Heighton
Brenda Hillman
Edward Hirsch
Tony Hoagland
Fanny Howe
Denis Johnson
Wayne Johnston
Laia Jufresa
Joe Kertes
Sam Lipsyte
Phillip Lopate
Glyn Maxwell
William Meredith
Erin Moure
Eileen Myles
Padgett Powell
Francine Prose
Claudia Rankine
Dawn Raffel
George Saunders
Lynne Shareon Schwartz
Rebecca Seiferle
Gary Shteyngart
Johanna Skibsrud
Christopher Sorrentino
Anthony Swofford
Lynne Tillman
William T. Vollman
Binyavanga Wainaina
Mac Wellman
C. K. Williams
Lawrence Wright