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Brandon Hobson, Ph.D.
2025 Fiction Mentor
BRANDON HOBSON, PH.D., is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow. He received his doctorate from Oklahoma State University. His novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Reading the West Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, among other distinctions. His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.
Vievee Francis
2025 Poetry Mentor
VIEVEE FRANCIS is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies including Poetry, Best American Poetry, Spin, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Born in West Texas and raised in metropolitan Detroit, Francis, along with composer Jonathan Berger and artist Enrico Riley, wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath. She received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a Kresge Fellowship. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.
Esmeralda Santiago
2025 Nonfiction Mentor
ESMERALDA SANTIAGO is the author of three groundbreaking memoirs: When I was Puerto Rican and Almost A Woman, which she adapted into a Peabody Award-winning movie for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, and The Turkish Lover. Her novels include America’s Dream, the national bestseller Conquistadora, and Las Madres. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Esmeralda lives with her husband, documentary filmmaker Frank Cantor, in Westchester County, New York.
The Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships program is supported by The Jorge M. Peréz Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation, the Green Family Foundation, Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Tristarr LLC, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida Department of State Division of Arts and Culture.
