Kazim Ali is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction, essay, and cross-genre work, most recently Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2023) and The Man in 119 (Copper Canyon, 2026). His book Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions) won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation. He taught two short courses on the life and poetics of Lucille Clifton for the Writers’ Annex at the Community of Writers. He is a professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego.
50th Annenberg Beach House
Photo Credit: Mark Miller/Doubleday
Aimee Bender (’95, ’97, ’99) is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s “This American Life”and “Selected Shorts”. She lives in Los Angeles with her family, and teaches creative writing at USC.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (’11) is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir (Harper Collins, 2020); Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), which Brenda Shaughnessy selected as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Prize; and Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. His work has been adapted to opera through a collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya. Additionally, Castillo is the translator of work from the Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman, and is currently at work translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy.
Castillo is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S., and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writer Award. He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and lives in Northern California where he serves as the poet laureate of Yuba and Sutter Counties.
Castillo currently teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and in the Ashland University low-residency MFA program. He is the Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day for October 2022. He attended the Community of Writers as a participant in 2011 with the Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholarship. marcelohernandezcastillo.com
Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle set in 1970s Greenwich Village: List of All Possible Desires, a novel in stories; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Her work has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. She lives in Los Angeles. dylanlandis.com [F]