Project Title: Awake Overnight

Ebony Flowers was born and raised in Maryland. She holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she wrote her dissertation as a comic (mostly), and a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park.

In 2024, Flowers joined the Department of English at Wake Forest University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Fiction. In the fall 2024 semester, she was also a McCausland Visiting Scholar at the University of South Carolina.

Flowers was named the Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, part of the 2022-23 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program.

Flowers is a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award recipient. Hot Comb, her debut book, appeared on best of 2019 lists from the Washington Post, NPR, the Guardian, and the New York Public Library. Hot Comb won the Eisner, Ignatz, and Believer Book Award, and received nominations for numerous others, including the NAACP Image Award and the YALSA Alex Awards.

Project Title: In the Desert

Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. The novel was shortlisted for the Discover Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, and others. Mathews’s writing has appeared in The Yale Review, New York Magazine, Lux, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and was recently honored with a Lowell Thomas Gold Award for travel writing. The founder of Brooklyn mutual aid network Bed-Stuy Strong, Mathews also writes a newsletter on literature, politics, and culture.

Project Title: All the Bones Have Fallen

Award-winning author, Deborah Jackson Taffa, is the director of the MFA CW Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, as well as a longlisted title for a 2025 Carnegie Medal. Named a top book of 2024 by The Atlantic, Time Magazine, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Oprah Daily, Audible, and Publisher's Weekly, the memoir won both a Southwest Book Prize and an International Latino Book Award. Taffa is a 2024 NEA Fellow, a 2022 winner of the PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, and has received fellowships from Tin House, the University of Iowa, MacDowell, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Ellen Meloy Fund, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is a citizen of the Kwatsaan Nation and Laguna Pueblo and earned her nonfiction MFA in Iowa City. 

Project Title: Bad Miracle 

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.

Project title: Psychogeology

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her latest novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit (Make Me a World/Random House, 2024), was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, and the New Yorker, among others. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).

Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Project Title: Somewhere Else

Tahir Hamut Izgil is a modernist Uyghur poet and filmmaker. He grew up in Kashgar and, after attending college in Beijing, returned to the Uyghur region, where he emerged as a film director. Read LessHis writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and has been translated into Japanese, Turkish, French, and Swedish. In 2017, as the Chinese government began the mass internment of Uyghurs, Izgil fled to the United States with his family. His memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night (2023), has been translated into more than a dozen languages and received the 2023 NBCC John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and the 2024 Moore Prize for human rights writing. He also received the 2024 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent and the 2024 Swedish Cicada Prize. Izgil now lives near Washington, D.C.

Project Title: Of Pearl

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not (2017) and Tantrums in Air (2025), both published by The Song Cave. Tantrums in Air was named one of the best poetry books of 2025 by The New York Times. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In fall 2026, Skillings will join the creative writing faculty at Villanova University as an Assistant Professor of English.

Project Title- The Collected Graces

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021; National Book Award Finalist, Lambda Literary Award Finalist), the experimental essay and poetry collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), and The Collected Graces (forthcoming from Nightboat). She is also the co-author, with the Precarity Lab, of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths Press, 2020). She holds a PhD and MA in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a BA in Liberal Arts from New College of Florida. Prior to joining Brown’s faculty, she was an Assistant Professor at The New School and the University of Southern California.

Project Title: Dead Time

Jenny Xie is the author of two collections of poetry. Eye Level (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. The Rupture Tense (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her chapbook, Nowhere to Arrive (2017), was awarded the Drinking Gourd Prize from Northwestern University. Xie has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. She previously taught at Princeton and New York University.

Project Title: The Manuscript Is an Instrument and We Must Play

Andrew Albin's scholarship in the field of historical sound studies examines embodied listening practices, sound’s meaningful contexts, and the lived aural experiences of historical hearers – in a word, the sonorous past – as an object of critical inquiry. His work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He facilitates the Fordham Medieval Dramatists in their biennial performance of early English drama for public audiences in NYC and abroad. He is the author of Richard Rolle’s Melody of Love: A Study and Translation, with Manuscript and Musical Contexts (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018) and of numerous and award-winning articles examining the sonic modalities of later medieval English literature, particularly the writings of Chaucer and Richard Rolle. With Andrew Kraebel, he co-edited a special issue of Speculum, “Reassessing Richard Rolle,” forthcoming in 2024. His monograph in development seeks to transform the way we read and understand medieval manuscripts by theorizing the codex as an expectant, cooperative instrument that anticipates and solicits futures in interactive sound.


Project Title: The Culinary Unconscious: Representing Asian America in a Global Age

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. He specializes in critical refugee studies, diasporic Vietnamese literature, World Literature, theories of food and eating, and Asian American studies.
His first book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, investigates why a number of Southeast Asian American authors have recently embraced the refugee identity as a transformative position. Arguing that aesthetics should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, he shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending upon how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.

He has co-edited a special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies, titled, "Vietnam, War, and the Global Imagination.” Other recent publications have appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Canadian Literature, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.; The Journal of Commonwealth Literature; and Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. His research has been supported by the Faculty Fellows Program at the Humanities Institute at Stony
Brook University, as well as the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asian Consortium Publishing Grant. Since 2000 he has served as the Co-Chair of the Circle for Asian American Studies (CAALS), a national and international scholarly society devoted to the study of Asian American literature, culture, and arts.

Project Title: American Monument: The Kinship of Harriet and John Jacobs

ACADEMIC BIO
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design; this year. In 2016, after receiving his PhD from Chicago, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs’s lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, in an Australian archive. Republished by Chicago in 2024, profiled in the New York Times, Boston Globe, All Things Considered, and elsewhere, and awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction, Schroeder’s edition returned this incredible narrative to America after 169 years, and is accompanied by the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs’s globe-circling brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs.

Schroeder is also co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (Minnesota), and co-founder of Congress of the Birds, a wildlife rehabilitation center that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases more than 2,000 native and migratory birds. A recipient of long-term fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, he is now writing a full-scale biography of the Jacobs family, editing Lauren Berlant, A Reader (with Duke) and completing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (with Harvard).

CONGRESS OF THE BIRDS BIO
Jonathan Schroeder is co-founder of Congress of the Birds, a wildlife rehabilitation center that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases more than 2,000 of Rhode Island’s native and migratory birds. In his day job, he teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, and this year, he’s been fortunate enough to be a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His most recent book, which returned a remarkable slave narrative called The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, to the world for the first time in 169 years, alongside a biography of its author, John Swanson Jacobs, was profiled in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and All Things Considered, and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, given to works that best advance our understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity.

Project Title: The Wanderer: Toni Morrison and the Art of Creativity

Autumn Womack specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century African-American literary culture, with a specific interest in the intersection of literature, visual technologies, and archival practice. At Princeton, she teaches classes on 19th and 20th-century African-American literature and the history of race and media. In keeping with her investment in archival research, her course “Toni Morrison and the Ethics of Reading” makes extensive use of the Toni Morrison Papers, housed at Princeton University Library.

Professor Womack is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2022 the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. The Matter of Black Living explores the intimate relationship between black life, aesthetics, and emergent data regimes at the turn of the twentieth century. She is also the editor of Norton Library’s edition of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition (Norton, 2023).

In 2023, Professor Womack led the curatorial team for the critically acclaimed archival exhibition, Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which used never-seen archival objects from the Toni Morrison Papers to shed new light on Morrison’s creative process. Her curatorial and archival work has engendered two new projects: Her next book, The Wanderer, which investigates Toni Morrison’s creative process and practice through an exploration of her archive, is forthcoming from Knopf (2025). Additionally, Professor Womack is collaborating with Professor Kinohi Nishikawa on a volume of essays that reflect on the relationship between Toni Morrison and Black archival practice.

Professor Womack’s research and writing has been published in journals such as Black Camera: An International Film Journal, American Literary History, Women and Performance, J19: A Journal of 19^th Century Americanists, The Paris Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement as well as numerous edited volumes. Her recent writing attends to the relationship between financialization, speculation, and aesthetics in the work of Charles Chesnutt and W.E.B. Du Bois.