Ithaca College
New Voices Literary Festival
Spring 2020
Official Dates to Be Announced
The 2019 Authors
Meet the 2019 New Voices!
Aja Gabel
Aja Gabel's debut novel, The Ensemble, is out now from Riverhead Books. Her short fiction can be found in the Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, BOMB, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of awards from Inprint, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Sarah Viren
Sarah Viren is a creative nonfiction writer and translator. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Iowa and also did a Fullbright in Colombia. She is the author of the essay collection MINE, which was winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, named one of LitHub’s favorite books of 2018, and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She also translated the novella Cordoba Skies by the Argentine writer Federico Falco. With Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Sarah is editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay.
In her day-to-day life, she teaches and lives and (tries to) raise two kids in Arizona.
Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. Before a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. Zamora is a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O'Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University, and Yaddo. He has also received a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign.
Clare Barron
Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. Her plays include You Got Older, which received its world premiere with Page 73 and appeared at Steppenwolf in 2018 (Obie Award for Playwriting, Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Play, Kilroys List, and Susan Smith Blackburn finalist); I’ll Never Love Again (The Bushwick Starr, NYTimes & Time Out Critics’ Picks); Baby Screams Miracle (Woolly Mammoth, Clubbed Thumb); and Dance Nation, which appeared at Playwrights Horizons in 2018 and won the Relentless Award established in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is also the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship and the Paula Vogel Award at the Vineyard.
Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of two novels: Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother. His short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Meridian, and at Wigleaf. Other writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. Alam studied writing at Oberlin College. Now he lives in New York with his husband and two kids. He is also very good at building things out of Legos.
Emma Kemp
Emma Kemp is a British-born writer based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts, her essays and articles have appeared in Atlas Obscura, Ohio Edit, and more. Emma is the recipient of the Utah Humanities’ 2016-17 Delmont R. Oswald Fellowship for her long-term investigation of a spiritualist community in rural Utah. She is a co-founder of publishing platform Which Witch L.A. and one half of artist collaborative Earl Gravy. Recent work includes Blue Pool / Cecelia (iTi Press, 2017). She is currently an instructor at Otis College of Art and Design.
Tommy Pico
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Library Literary Prize and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), winner of a 2018 American Book Award and finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, Junk (Tin House Books, 2018), Feed (forthcoming 2019 from Tin House Books), and the zine series Hey, Teebs. He was the founder and editor in chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine that published art and writing from 2008-2013. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, was awarded the 2017 Friends of Literature prize from the Poetry Foundation, won a 2018 Whiting Award, and he’s been profiled in Time Out New York, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker at the Ace Hotel, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. @heyteebs