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The 2018 Authors

Meet the 2018 New Voices!
Sonya Chung

Sonya Chung is the author of the novels The Loved Ones—a Kirkus Best Fiction 2016, Library Journal Best Indie Fiction, Indie Next List, and TNB Book Club selection—and Long for This World. She is a staff writer for The Millions and founding editor of Bloom, a site that highlights the work of authors who debut after age forty, and is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts Writ-ers’ Fellowship & Residency, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Key West Literary Seminars residency. Sonya’s stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in the Threepenny Review, Tin House, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and This is The Place: Women Writing About Home, among others. Sonya has taught fiction writing at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, NYU, and Columbia University. Currently she lives in New York City and teaches at Skidmore College.

Stephanie Powell Watts

Stephanie Powell Watts won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (2012), also named one of 2013’s Best Summer Reads by O: The Oprah Magazine. Ms. Powell Watts’s stories explore the lives of African Americans in fast food and factory jobs, working door to door as Jehovah’s Witness ministers, and pressing against the boundaries of the small town, post-integration South. Her debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us, follows the return of a successful native son to his home in North Carolina and his attempt to join the only family he ever wanted but never had. As Ms. Powell Watts describes it, “Imagine The Great Gatsby set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people.” Born in the foothills of North Carolina, with a PhD from the University of Missouri and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she now lives with her husband and son in Pennsylvania where she is an associate professor at Lehigh University.

James Allen Hall

James Allen Hall's first book of poems, Now You're the Enemy, published as a winner in the 2008 University of Arkansas Poetry Series, won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers.  His collection of personal lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, was published in 2017 by Cleveland State University Poetry Center Press after winning their Essay Collection Award, selected by Chris Krauss. James is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. He directs the Rose O'Neill Literary House and teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College on Maryland's Eastern shore.

Sarah DeLappe

Sarah DeLappe’s play The Wolves premiered at The Playwrights Realm, following an engagement at New York Stage and Film, and development at Clubbed Thumb. It was subsequently remounted at Lincoln Center Theater. The Wolves received the American Playwriting Foundation’s inaugural Relentless Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Yale Drama Series Prize. Her fellowships and developmental support include MacDowell Colony, The Ground Floor, The Playwrights Realm's Page One Residency, Sitka Fellows Program, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group, New Georges Audrey Residency, Ars Nova Play Group, and LCT3 Residency. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College.

Chris Santiago

Chris Santiago is the author of Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, selected by A. Van Jordan. His poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELD, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. He holds degrees in creative writing and music from Oberlin College and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Santiago is also a percussionist and amateur jazz pianist. He teaches literature, sound culture, and creative writing at the University of St. Thomas. He lives in Minnesota.

Hermione Hoby

Hermione Hoby grew up in south London and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2007 with a double first in English Literature. She worked as an editor and writer on the Observer’s New Review section before moving to New York in 2010. She writes about culture, especially books, for the Guardian, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the TLS and others and teaches in the Creative Writing department at Columbia University. She has profiled hundreds of writers and other cultural figures, among them Toni Morrison, Meryl Streep, Naomi Campbell, Debbie Harry and Laurie Anderson. Her debut novel, Neon in Daylight, is published by Catapult.

Emily Fridlund

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota. Her debut novel, History of Wolves (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, a Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award winner, a Midwest Book Awards Finalist, a #1 Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and a New York Times Notable Book. History of Wolves has been (or will be) translated into ten languages. Her collection of stories, Catapult (Sarabande Books, 2017) was chosen by Ben Marcus for Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, New Orleans Review, and Southwest Review. Fridlund holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She currently lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York with her husband and infant son.

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