Emerging Writers Festival

Jean Chen Ho

Fiction

Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane, one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022, longlisted for the Story Prize, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vulture, Vogue, Oprah Daily, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Electric Literature. Her fiction, essays, and criticism appear in New York Times Magazine, Sewanee Review, Guernica, The Cut, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her work has been received support from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Aspen Words, Willapa Bay AiR, Lighthouse Works, the I-Park Foundation, and the W.M. Keck/Cheng Fellowship at the Huntington Library, among others. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University and the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA, and has previously held visiting appointments at Skidmore College and Scripps College. She has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She was born in Taiwan and currently lives in Los Angeles.

Learn more

Michael Loughran

Poetry & Essays

Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia.

The best memoirs are not just an account of a single life, but a guide to how to live. This isn’t because the writer has found all the answers to our oldest human questions; it’s because the writer honors us by telling the hardest truths. Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love. In this endlessly vivid and true book, we follow the narrator in his ongoing daily life—amid friends and family, work, falling in love again—even as he is pursued by the Furies of guilt, regret, and vicious despair. Windower is a vital book about being human amid loss, about how to go on in this devastating and beautiful world.

Learn more

Erin Marie Lynch

Poetry

Erin Marie Lynch is an artist and educator—her practice spans writing, digital media, performance, and archival material. Her book Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, October 2023) was a finalist for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award. Her poems appear in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Wurlitzer Foundation, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Hugo House. Born and raised in Oregon, she is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Ihánktoŋwan Dakota). Currently, she is a Presidential postdoctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

Learn more

Martha Park

Essays & Illustration

Martha Park is the author of World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, an illustrated collection of essays exploring the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South. A writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee, Martha received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University. She has received fellowships and support from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry, where she was a Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence. Her collaborative illustrated journalism won an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Insight Award for Visual Journalism. Martha’s writing, graphic essays, and illustrations have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere. She writes a newsletter, irregularly.

Learn more

Monica Sok

Poetry

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbook Year Zero, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Marilyn Chin.

She is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her poetry has been recognized with a 2018 Discovery Poetry Prize from 92Y.

She is also the granddaughter of Bun Em, a master silk weaver from Takeo and a 1990 recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship for her efforts in the cultural preservation of traditional textiles. Monica followed in her grandmother’s footsteps and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 2017.

She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She recently taught as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, CA. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, and New Republic, among others. 

Learn more