Faculty and Guests

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, 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 texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary’s College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.

Helen Macdonald is the author of bestselling memoir H Is for Hawk, essay collection Vesper Flights, a cultural history of falcons, Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler’s Fish. Their most recent book is the sci-fi novel Prophet, co-written with Sin Blaché. Macdonald’s non-fiction revolves around the question of how cultural and social histories shape attitudes to the natural world. An affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, they have worked on raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia, have written and presented television documentaries for PBS and the BBC, and are a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. They live in Suffolk, England, with two small parrots called The Bugs.

Emily Raboteau is the author of Searching for Zion, winner of the American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award, and Lessons for Survival, out in spring, 2024. She writes at the intersection of race, environmental justice, and parenthood. Her essays on these themes have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Orion, New York Magazine, Best American Science Writing, and elsewhere.  A contributing editor at Orion Magazine, she teaches climate writing at the City College of New York. She lives in the Bronx.

Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas. She is the author of the two poetry collections Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018), which won the 2018 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry; and Seam (2014), winner of the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award and the Drake University Emerging Writers Award in 2015. Faizullah’s writing is translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and is part of the theater production Birangona: Women of War. In 2016, Faizullah was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change and was a 2019 USA Artists Fellow. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, she has presented at institutions and organizations worldwide. Faizullah’s work has been featured at the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, the Clinton School of Public Service, and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared widely in the US and abroad in the Daily Star, BuzzFeed, Hindu Business Line, Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, New Republic, The Nation, Oxford American, Poetry Magazine, and the Academy of American Poets, as well as in the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (2019), and the television show PBS News Hour.

Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020. Finney is Carolina Distinguished Professor at USC in Columbia where she is also Director of the Ernest A. Finney Jr. Cultural Arts Center.

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods (2104), awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (2008). He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Terrain.org, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in almost two dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. His poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and on The Slowdown podcast hosted by Tracy K. Smith. A selection of poems from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of the novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain, selected as a notable book of the year by the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has received fellowships in fiction writing from Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of three works of fiction: I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, Gold Fame Citrus, and Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Claire is a professor in the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She lives in the Mojave Desert.