Winter Workshop

Cleyvis Natera is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Neruda on the Park. She studied psychology, literature and creative writing at Skidmore College and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University. Her fiction, essays and criticisms have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, URSA Story, TIME, Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration, Gagosian Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Memorious, The Kenyon Review, Aster(ix) and Kweli Journal, among other publications. Cleyvis teaches creative writing at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City and at the Low-Residency M.F.A. Program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, CA. Her writing has been supported through awards, fellowships and artist residencies by PEN America, Rowland Writers Retreat, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Disquiet International Literary Program, Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation and Juniper Summer Writing Institute. She lives with her husband and two young children in Montclair, NJ. 

Danielle Geller’s first book, Dog Flowers, was published by One World/Random House in 2021. She received her MFA in creative writing for nonfiction at the University of Arizona and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker, and Brevity. She teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria and is also a faculty mentor for the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation: born to the Tsi’naajinii, born for the bilagaana.

Edgar Gomez (all pronouns) is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, their words have appeared in Poets & Writers, Narratively, Catapult, Lithub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere online and in print. Their memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by The New York Times and named a Best Book of the 2022 by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Publisher's Weekly. They live in New York and Puerto Rico.

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. Her debut novel DISORIENTATION (Penguin Press) was a New York Times Editors' Choice Book, an NPR Best Book of 2022 and an NYPL Young Lions Finalist. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and NYFA Artist Fellow, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Tin House Online, Ploughshares and The Atlantic, while her essays appear in The Cut and Vanity Fair. She is the recipient of the 2023 Fred R. Brown Literary Award. As a workshop instructor, Elaine has taught fiction for NYU, Catapult, Accent Society, Kundiman and Tin House. Her multi-genre short story collection WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM is forthcoming from Penguin Press. As a screenwriter, Elaine is adapting DISORIENTATION into a feature film for AppleTV, co-produced by Malala Yousafzai’s Extracurricular Productions and Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries. She is also in development on an animated TV series. Find more about her at www.elainehsiehchou.com

Jane Wong is the author of the debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, out now from Tin House (2023). She is also the author of two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James (2021) and Overpour from Action Books (2016). Her books have been longlisted for the New American Voices Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. Her poems can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and others. Her essays have appeared in places such as McSweeney's, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Common, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Want: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult).

A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, UCross, Mineral School, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Loghaven, and others.

The recipient of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Washington artists, her first solo art show “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” was exhibited at the Frye Art Museum in 2019. Her performance and installation work has also been exhibited at the Richmond Art Gallery and the Asian Art Museum. A scholar of Asian American poetry and poetics as well, you can explore "The Poetics of Haunting" project here. She grew up in a Chinese American restaurant on the Jersey shore and lives in Seattle.

 Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (Tin House, 2019)—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of the year by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye (Tin House, 2017), which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of the year. Her third book, A Silent Treatment (Tin House), is forthcoming. Her essays have appeared in The Believer, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

Jenny Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart, conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City and is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Robert. W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, as well as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. The New Yorker writes, “Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain.” Jenny co-wrote a feature film adaptation of the collection for A24. In 2012, she published a book of poetry titled, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. Jenny’s second collection of poetry, My Baby First Birthday was published in 2020 from Tin House Books. In addition to her fiction and poetry, Zhang’s essays have been published by the New York Times, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, and Rookie. Her essay “How It Feels,” which is a meditation on depression, suicide, and excess, was published in Poetry Magazine and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. A wearer of many hats, Jenny has also written for television and worked in TV writers’ rooms for HBO, Netflix, Amazon, USA Network, and Apple TV. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University.  

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she teaches in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review.

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He received his BA in Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and his MFA in fiction from Stonecoast’s low-residency program. His story collection Night of the Living Rez is out now from Tin House Books (2022), and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty teaches courses in both English and Native American Studies, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.

Roy G. Guzmán is author of the celebrated debut poetry collection Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020), described as “blistering” by Publisher’s Weekly. They are the recipient of a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative grant and the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Their work has been included in the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, guest-edited by Natalie Diaz, and Best of the Net 2017, guest-edited by Eduardo C. Corral. Born in Honduras and raised in Miami, Florida, Guzmán holds degrees from the University of Minnesota, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the Honors College at Miami Dade College. They currently live in Minneapolis, where they are pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies (Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society) at the University of Minnesota.

Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named a fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem, was published by Scribner in August 2022.

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja. Bustle once named her one of “9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Wendy's writing has appeared in numerous journals and other places including BOMB Magazine online, The New York Times, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, and FENCE. She was awarded a Tin House residency in Fall 2022 to continue working on her next book. Her current project is Mommy’s El Camino, a weekly online newsletter. Wendy is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.

Xan Forest Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award, and The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xan is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. He has received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.  

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night, which won both the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He guest edited Mizna's 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue and is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) as well as a mentor with the Periplus Collective.

Allison Malecha joined Trellis Literary Management as Director of Foreign Rights after several years at Bettina Schrewe Literary Scouting, where she worked with major publishing clients in over twenty markets across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, as well as with an independent film client. Prior to working as a literary scout, she spent five years in editorial at independent publishing house Grove Atlantic, where she began building her own list under the publisher and was the in-house manager for Freeman's and The Mysterious Press.

As Director of Foreign Rights, Allison is honored to represent Trellis in the British Commonwealth and foreign language markets. With nearly a decade of experience and contacts in both the international and editorial realms of publishing, Allison has brokered deals for Trellis authors in over twenty territories and counting, and loves being the champion for our titles around the world.

Allison will also represent a small, selective list of domestic clients split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. Within the realms of literary and upmarket fiction, she is drawn to outsider perspectives and narratives that take you somewhere unexpected, whether psychologically, geographically, or historically. She likes writing that is sharp yet imaginative on the line level but wants to be moved, emotionally, by the larger story. She would love to find a novel about a complicated grandmother. Authors she deeply admires include: Jesmyn Ward, Louise Erdrich, Katie Kitamura, James McBride, Miriam Toews, Charlotte McConaghy, Kawai Strong Washburn, Daisy Johnson, and Dantiel W. Moniz.

In nonfiction, Allison is looking for writing that is generous yet galvanizing in the categories of: narrative nonfiction, particularly with a historical or international dimension; social science; pop science; pop psychology; and memoir that touches on larger current issues or on the author's field of expertise. She is especially keen to find nature writing from underrepresented voices. Among the nonfiction authors she most looks to are: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, Natasha Trethewey, Rachel Louise Snyder, Masha Gessen, Ibram X. Kendi, Janna Levin, James Nestor.

Allison grew up between the middle of Canada and the middle of the U.S, but has always found home between the covers of a book. She has a BA in Comparative Literature & Society from Columbia University, where she studied French and Czech.

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for twenty years. She is Publisher and Executive Director of Graywolf Press.

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and she resides in Harlem, where she is hard at work on her debut novel.

Jackson Howard is an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprint MCD, where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Laura van den Berg, Sarah Schulman, Catherine Lacey, Jonathan Escoffery, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Venita Blackburn, Imogen Binnie, Thomas Grattan, Missouri Williams, Kaitlyn Tiffany, and many others. Books he has edited have won or been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Jean Stein Open Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Galbraith Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

As a writer, his reviews, profiles, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, The Cut, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, W., i-D, office, Document, and elsewhere.

Prior to joining Ayesha Pande Literary in 2020, Kayla Lightner started her career at Liza Dawson Associates. She also managed APL’s subsidiary rights department for two years before transitioning to full-time agent. Her client list includes multi-award-winning actor, Delroy Lindo; multi-award-winning journalist and food writer, Annabelle Tometich; and Vice, Teen Vogue, and Longreads contributor, Minda Honey. Kayla is an adventurous reader who loves stories (typically adult; though there are a select few middle-grade titles on her list) within upmarket fiction, literary fiction, and nonfiction. She’s looking for writers that can masterfully straddle the line between story-telling and teaching readers something new (about themselves, their communities, or the world we live in). You can find her full manuscript wishlist is here. Kayla is a Georgia native and earned her B.A. in English from Vassar College. When Kayla’s not reading, she can be found writing, reminiscing on her rugby days, and trying to retain her (waning) fluency in French by watching French shows on Netflix.

Katy Nishimoto, Senior Editor (she/her), joined The Dial Press in 2019 after ten years as a literary agent at WME. Her forthcoming titles include Memphis, a sweeping debut novel by acclaimed poet Tara M. Stringfellow; Brace for Impact by Gabe Montesanti, a memoir tracing a young queer woman’s redemption story through the world of roller derby; Queerly Beloved by Susie Dumond, a joyful queer debut rom-com set in Tulsa; Maryam is a Dyke by Lamya H, a memoir in essays about one queer hijabi Muslim immigrant’s experience told through the lens of radical, lyrical interpretations of the Quran; Open the Light, a memoir by global trans rights activist Geena Rocero; and Red by Claudia Cravens, a genre-bending queer feminist Western. Katy sits on the board of Baldwin for the Arts, a nonprofit founded by Jacqueline Woodson that provides residency fellowships for BIPOC artists. She is based in Los Angeles.

Lisa Lucas was the youngest, first woman, and first person of color to be the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. In 2020, she accepted a position to head Pantheon and Schocken Books as the Senior Vice President. In the past, Lisa has served as the Publisher of Guernica, a non-profit online magazine focusing on writing that explores the intersection of art and politics with an international and diverse focus. Before that, she was the Director of Education at the Tribeca Film Institute, on the development team at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and a consultant for the Sundance Institute, San Francisco Film Society, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and Reel Works Teen Filmmaking. In each role, Lisa has been driven by not just a love of the arts, but a love of sharing the arts and promoting diversity; she is vocal about inclusivity in publishing, insisting that the word transcends boundaries to include everyone regardless of their racial, economic, or geographic background.

Mariah Stovall joined Trellis Literary Management after agenting at Howland Literary and Writers House. Prior to that, she worked on the other side of things, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at Gallery Books. She represents adult literary and upmarket fiction, narrative nonfiction and essay collections, all by writers with strong voices and interdisciplinary perspectives. She is a graduate of Pitzer College, of the Claremont Colleges, where she studied English and World Literature with a minor in Linguistics. She has written fiction and nonfiction for Ninth Letter, Hobart, Joyland, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Catapult, The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub and more, and volunteered with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, after six years with the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and ten years with DeFiore and Company, joined The Gernert Company in January, 2022. She represents primarily literary and upmarket fiction and select creative nonfiction. Some of the prizes and honors Meredith’s clients have been nominated for or have received include The Booker Prize, The Story Prize, the PEN Jean Stein Award, the “5 Under 35” honor by the National Book Foundation, the Whiting Award, the National Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Best First Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Among Meredith’s clients are Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Ryka Aoki, Melissa Broder, Jessamine Chan, CJ Hauser, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Dantiel W. Moniz, Nadia Owusu, Kimberly King Parsons, Morgan Thomas, Brandon Taylor, Cecily Wong, and Leni Zumas. Born in New York City and raised in suburban New Jersey, Meredith is based in Manhattan. She is stepmother to two now-grown daughters. Across her list, she seeks a ferocity of language, intellect, purpose, and heart.

Natalie Edwards joined Trellis Literary after nearly two years at Janklow & Nesbit Associates. Prior to that, she worked at Curtis Brown, Ltd. At Trellis, Natalie supports Allison Hunter and Michelle Brower, while actively building a list of her own.  She grew up in Pasadena, California and attended Bowdoin College, where she earned her BA in English with a minor in History and played four years of varsity softball. She lives in Brooklyn and still plays softball here in the city.

Before joining DeFiore in early 2016, Reiko Davis was an associate agent at Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency. She grew up in Kansas City, received her BA in Comparative Literature and Art History from Brown University, and is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course. Reiko’s interests are varied, but she is particularly drawn to narrative journalism on the topics of pop culture, science/psychology, and current events as well as memoir that focuses on social justice, issues of race and gender, and the history and experiences of women and people of color. For fiction, she’s primarily looking for upmarket and literary novels, specifically set in contemporary times. She loves young, underrepresented voices, magical realism, and voice driven coming-of-age stories. On the children’s side, she’s actively looking for YA and middle grade projects that aren’t afraid to tackle big questions or important emotional truths, and do so through remarkable storytelling and a healthy dose of humor and heart. Her award-winning clients include Devi S. Laskar, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Genevieve Plunkett, Lindsey Klingele, Brittany Geragotelis, Alan Gelb, Micah Perks, and Shannon Sander

Akhim Alexis is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago who holds an MA in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He is the winner of the Brooklyn Caribbean Lit Fest Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean. He was also a finalist for the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Grist Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors Contest and the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize for poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Chestnut Review,  and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @akhimalexis1

Amanda Churchill is a writer living in Texas. Her work has been featured in Hobart Pulp, Witness, River Styx, among others. She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas and was a Writers’ League of Texas 2021 Fellow. Her first novel, THE TURTLE HOUSE, is forthcoming from Harper Books.

Anthony Garrett is a novelist and full-time parent. He received his MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Despite daily effort, he struggled to write for several years post graduation before he learned of his lifelong undiagnosed ADHD and sought treatment for it. His writing embraces a neurodivergent poetics that eschews traditional forms. He is working on a novel titled Neither Themselves nor Each Other. Anthony lives in Salt Lake City with his spouse and children. Twitter: @anthgarrett, Instagram: @anthgarrett

Beina Xu is a writer and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. She usually makes things about archives, colonialism, and desire. Her nonfiction can be found at The Common, Jezebel, Deutsche Welle and Westend, among other outlets, and she's currently working on a book. Her essay film Forget Alberto For Now (2020) debuted at International Film Festival Rotterdam, and has gone on to win several awards. She can be found at www.beinaxu.com or on instagram at @auslaender.salad. 

Giovannai Rosa is a writer and artist from Miami. They're the winner of the 2022 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry, a 2022 Periplus Fellow, and a 2023 Tin House Scholar.

Prad Aphachan is the pen name of a writer, poet, and artist from Thailand. He is currently based in Bangkok where he teaches and writes. He has received scholarship support from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Community of Writers Workshop. He is the author of the poetry-calligraphy chapbook “10,000 Ways to See the Monsoon” published by Ruammitr Collective Press. His writings have appeared in The Chicago Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Modern Haiku, among others. You can find him on Instagram at @pradaphachan.

Thalia is a British author based in Los Angeles. She is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UC Riverside and will soon begin a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at USC. She is the author of a memoir, Things Bad Begun, and is at work on another, The Silent Part. Her work has been published in The Audacity and Longreads. An excerpt of The Silent Part is forthcoming in Joyland. She is trans. Twitter - @authordrw -Instagram - @thaliawme

Tola Sylvan is a poet and writer from Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vallum, POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She currently reads poetry for The Adroit Journal.