Join us as we partner with Alice James Books for a Fall Showcase featuring Kazim Ali (THE VOICE OF SHEILA CHANDRA), Sumita Chakraborty (ARROW), Taylor Johnson (INHERITANCE), and Andrés Cerpa as moderator!
Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian and Egyptian descent. He received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an M.F.A. from New York University. His books encompass several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon. His novels include Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth. Ali is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College.
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2019, and elsewhere, and her essays and articles appear or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, Modernism/ modernity, College Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, among others. Formerly poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length, she holds a BA from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from Emory University. She was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and has been shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Originally from Massachusetts, she now lives in Michigan, where she is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Find her online at sumitachakraborty.com and on Twitter at @chakrabsumita.
Andrés Cerpa is the author of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019), and The Vault (2021) from Alice James Books. He grew up in Staten Island, NY and holds degrees from the University of Delaware and Rutgers University-Newark. Find him online at andrescerpa.com and on Twitter @_AndresCerpa.
Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, DC. They've received fellowships and scholarships from CALLALOO, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, VONA, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Conversation Literary Festival, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, among others. In 2017, Taylor received the Larry Neal Writers' Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Their poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and the Paris Review, among other journals and literary magazines. Their first book, Inheritance, will be published November 2020 with Alice James Books. Taylor currently lives in southern Louisiana where they listen. Find them online at taylorjohnsonpoems.com.