Featured Writers

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2026: Alice Bolin

Lions In Winter

Alice Bolin is the author of the essay collections Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession and Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse. She has been nominated for Anthony and Edgar awards. Her nonfiction appears in the New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, the LA Review of Books, and The Cut. She lives in Minneapolis.
2026: Aram Mrjoian

Lions In Winter

Aram Mrjoian teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he is the managing editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. He is the author of the novel Waterline and editor of the anthology We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. He lives in Michigan.
2026: Ruth Awad

Lions In Winter

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Her work can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She has an MGA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.
2025: Jacqui Germain

Lions In Winter

Jacqui Germain is a poet, journalist, and former student and labor organizer living and working in St. Louis. She served as the 2021-2022 Economic Security Project Fellow with Teen Vogue, reporting on issues of economic inequality of the intersections of race and gender. Winner of the 2021 Center for African American Poetry & Poetics Book Prize and the 2024 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, her debut collection of poetry is BITTERING THE WOUND.
2025: Julia Fine

Lions In Winter

Julia Fine is the author of THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, and WHAT SHOULD BE WILD, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior First Novel. Her third novel, MADDALENA AND THE DARK, came out from Flatiron in June 2023. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her family.
2025: Minda Honey

Lions in Winter

Minda Honey's (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. She is the editor of Black Joy at Reckon - the newsletter has more than 30,000 subscribers. Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS, is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.
2024: Cynthia Pelayo

Lions In Winter

Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker's Magician, and dozens of standalone short stories and poems.
2024: Emily Maloney

Lions In Winter

Emily Maloney is a ceramist and the author of Cost of Living: Essays, a USA Today Best Book of 2022. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, and other publications. Her next book, Burn This House Down, is forthcoming in 2025.
2024: Taymour Soomro

Lions In Winter

Taymour Soomro is a British Pakistani writer. He read law at Cambridge University and Stanford Law School and has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times. He is the author of Other Names for Love, short listed for the McKitterick Prize and a Malala Book Club pick.
2023: Brian Broome

Lions In Winter

Brian Broome is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. His debut memoir, "Punch Me Up to the Gods," is an NYT Editor’s Pick and the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. In addition to The Post, his work has appeared in Poets and Writers, Medium and more. Broome has been a finalist in the Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. His film, "Garbage," won the Audience Choice Award at the Cortada Short Film Festival and was a semi-finalist in the Portland Short Fest.
2023: Kathe Koja

Lions In Winter

Kathe Koja is a writer, director and independent producer. Her immersive work combines and plays with genres, from YA to contemporary to historical to horror. Her novels - including THE CIPHER, VELOCITIES, BUDDHA BOY, TALK, and the UNDER THE POPPY trilogy–have won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film and performance.
2023: Taylor Byas

Lions In Winter

Taylor Byas (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in August of 2023. She is also a co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, forthcoming from Texas Review Press, and of Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology on Black folklore from HarperCollins. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
2022: W. Todd Kaneko

Lions In Winter

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of two books of poetry: This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies. He is co-author with Amorak Huey of the poetry chapbook Slash / Slash and Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Massachussetts Review, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, he lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.
2022: Rachel Monroe

Lions In Winter

Rachel Monroe is the author of Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, which was named a New York Times Editor's Choice and a best book of the year by Esquire and the Chicago Tribune. She's a contributing writer at the New Yorker and has also contributed to the Atlantic, the New York Times, Esquire, and Wired. She lives in Marfa, Texas.
2022: Brenda Peynado

Lions In Winter

Brenda Peynado's genre-bending short story collection, THE ROCK EATERS—featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—has garnered starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and appear in places like The Georgia Review,The Sun, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review Online, The Threepenny Review, and Tor.com. She's currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures, and she teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.
2020-2021: Joy Harjo

NEA Big Read/Lions In Winter Festival

National Endowment for the Arts: Big Read - A Conversation with Joy Harjo

Join Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and current U.S. poet laureate, in a virtual conversation, as she reads works from her latest book An American Sunrise: Poems and has a moderated Q+A discussion.

Part of the Lions in Winter festival sponsored by the EIU Department of English Co-sponsored by Broward County Library, Florida; Broward Public Library Foundation Inc.; and Florida Center for the Book Free and open to the public.

In 2019, Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo is an internationally known award-winning poet, writer, performer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation.
2020-2021: Brandon Hobson

Lions In Winter Festival

Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and his work has appeared in magazines such as The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, NOON, Post Road, Narrative Magazine, Puerto del Sol, and in many other places. Brandon earned a PhD in Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University, is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at New Mexico State University and a Writing Mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story. His next novel, The Removed, will be out in February 2021.
2019-2020: Joanna Diaz

Lions In Winter Festival

Poet Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the author of My Favorite Tyrants (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press, 2011), and with Ian Morris, she is the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.
2019-2020: Nick White

Lions In Winter Festival

Nick White is the author of two books of fiction: How to Survive a Summer and Sweet and Low. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Guernica, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere.
2019-2020: Kelsey Parker Ervick

Lions In Winter Festival

Kelcey Parker Ervick is the author of three award-winning books of fiction and nonfiction: The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová, a hybrid work of biography, memoir, and visual art about a Czech fairy tale writer; Liliane’s Balcony, set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; and the story collection For Sale by Owner. Her comics and graphic essays have appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Quarterly West, Passages North, Ilanot Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, with Tom Hart, of the forthcoming Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature. Follow her daily-ish art habit on Instagram, or check out her web site: http://www.kelceyervick.com/
2019: Barrie Jean Borich

Lions In Winter Festival

Barrie Jean Borich was one of the featured writers at the 2019 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2019: Lynnell Edwards

Lions In Winter Festival

Lynnell Edwards was a featured writer at the 2019 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2019: Rion Almicar Scott

Lions In Winter Festival

Rion Almicar Scott was a featured writer at the 2019 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2018: CM Burroughs

Lions In Winter Festival

CM Burroughs was a featured writer at the 2018 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2018: Rachael Hanel

Lions In Winter Festival

Rachael Hanel was a featured writer at the 2018 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2018: Vu Tran

Lions In Winter Festival

Vu Tran was a featured writer at the 2018 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2017: Dion Irving

Lions In Winter Festival

Dion Irving was a featured writer at the 2017 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2017: Erica Wright

Lions In Winter Festival

Erica Wright was a featured writer at the 2017 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2017: Gangstagrass

Lions In Winter Festival

Bluegrass/rap artists Gangstagrass gave a performance and craft talk on writing rap lyrics at the 2017 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2017: James Davis May

Lions In Winter Festival

James Davis May was a featured writer at the 2017 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2017: Janice Harrington

Lions In Winter Festival

Janice Harrington was a featured writer at the 2017 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2017: Laura van den Berg

Lions In Winter Festival

Laura van den Berg was a featured writer at the 2017 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2016: Andrew Malan Milward

Lions In Winter Festival

Andrew Malan Milward was a featured writer at the 2016 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2016: Bradford Tice

Lions In Winter Festival

Bradford Tice was a featured writer at the 2016 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2016: Editors Panel - BLUESTEM, QUIDDITY, and NINTH LETTER

Lions In Winter Festival

Editors of Bluestem, Quiddity, and Ninth Letter presented at the 2016 Editors Panel at the Lions In Winter literary festival.
2016: Jane Spivey Gilchrist

Lions In Winter Festival

Jane Spivey Gilchrist was a featured writer at the 2016 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2016: Moira Crone

Lions In Winter Festival

Moira Crone was a featured writer at the 2016 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2016: Wendy C. Ortiz

Lions In Winter Festival

Wendy C. Ortiz was a featured writer at the 2016 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2015: David Tomas Martinez

Lions In Winter Festival

David Tomas Martinez was a featured writer at the 2015 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2015: Editors Panel - BLUESTEM, HOBART, QUIDDITY, LUNA LUNA, and COSSACK REVIEW

Lions In Winter Festival

Editors of Bluestem, Hobart, Quiddity, Luna Luna, and Cossack Review at the 2015 Lions In Winter literary festival Editors Panel.
2015: Edward Kelsey Moore

Lions In Winter Festival

Edward Kelsey Moore was a featured writer at the 2015 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2015: Jessica Young

Lions In Winter Festival

Jessica Young was a featured writer at the 2015 Lions In Winter literary festival. She gave a craft talk and a children's book reading.
2015: Julija Sukys

Lions In Winter Festival

Julija Sukys was a featured writer at the 2015 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2015: Stephen Graham Jones

Lions In Winter Festival

Stephen Graham Jones gave the keynote and presented a Craft Talk at the 2015 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2014: Alissa Nutting

Lions In Winter Festival

Alissa Nutting was a featured writer at the 2014 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2014: Editors Panel - BLUESTEM, THE COSSACK REVIEW, CRAZYHORSE, CREAM CITY REVIEW, THE MISSOURI REVIEW, PANK, and QUIDDITY

Lions In Winter Festival

Editors from Bluestem, The Cossack Review, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, The Missouri Review, PANK, and Quiddity took part in the Editors Panel at the 2014 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2014: Jami Attenberg

Lions In Winter Festival

Jamie Attenberg was a featured writer at the 2014 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2014: Jason Koo

Lions In Winter Festival

Jason Koo was a featured writer at the 2014 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2014: Ryan Van Meter

Lions In Winter Festival

Ryan Van Meter was a featured writer at the 2014 Lions In Winter literary festival.
2013: Eduardo C. Corral

Lions In Winter Festival

Eduardo C. Corral was a featured writer at the 2013 Lions In Winter literary festival.

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