SMART, POLITICAL & SUBVERSIVE – FICTION

JOSEPH EARL THOMAS is the author of Sink: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer: A Novel (Grand Central Publishing), and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central Publishing). His prose, poetry, and criticism has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. Sink was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, Thomas is earning a Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and courses in Black studies, poetics, queer theory, video games, and more at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

KAVEH AKBAR’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

VINSON CUNNINGHAM is a staff writer and theater critic at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He co-hosts the podcast Critics at Large and his writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Fader, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s. A former staffer on President Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University's School of the Arts. He lives in New York City. Great Expectations: A Novel (Hogarth) is his first novel.