Meet the 2026 Conference Faculty

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Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and faculty member, an Affrilachian Poet, and a member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. She is the author of Conversion, What We Ask of Flesh, and Starlight & Error. Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up (Beacon Press), was followed by Room Swept Home, which was named an Honor Poetry Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and won the L.A. Times Book Prize. She is the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Excellence and Engagement at Old Dominion University.

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Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is the author of Another Name for Red and the forthcoming short story collection Deer Women. A first-degree descendant of White Earth Nation in Minnesota, she is an Anishinaabe writer, beadwork artist, and jingle dress dancer. She received her MFA from Arizona State University and was the 2024–25 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her work has appeared in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at The Ohio State University, where she lives with her overactive dog, Fern.

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David Bowles is a Mexican American author and translator from South Texas, where he teaches literature and Nahuatl at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written over three dozen award-winning titles for children and teens, including My Two Border Towns and They Call Me Güero. In 2017, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters and has served as its president. In 2019, he co-founded the #DignidadLiteraria movement, advocating for greater Latine representation in publishing.

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Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency in New York. Serendipity is one of the largest African American–owned agencies in the country and represents a diverse list of award-winning clients across genres. Her authors’ work has appeared in USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, as well as across major media platforms. In 2015, she was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Finalist and received a Stevie Award in Business, and Writer’s Digest named Serendipity one of the top 25 literary agencies.

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Lauren Camp is the author of nine books, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her honors include an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the Dorset Prize, as well as finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Kenyon Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and have been translated into multiple languages. She served as New Mexico Poet Laureate.

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Amie Charney is a novelist and screenwriter who lives in San Antonio, Texas. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside–Palm Desert, where she presented her graduate thesis, Not Your Grandmother’s Bodice Ripper. She is currently the Director of Creative Writing for the Northeast School of the Arts (NESA), where she enjoys shaping the next generation of writers. She’s also the wife of a fighter pilot, mother of two young adults, and an Aggie Mom—Gig ’em! Connect with her at @amiecharney or www.amiecharney.com.

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Jonathan Danielson is the author of The Lowest Basin: Arizona Stories (Cowboy Jamboree Press 2025), which was longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and named a Southwest Book of the Year. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of San Francisco. His scholarly work focuses on the intersections of creative writing, the Western, and Arizona literary regionalism.

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Kathy Fagan is the author of The Unbecoming (W.W. Norton, 2026). Her sixth book, Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), won the PSA’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, and Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she is Professor Emerita of The Ohio State University, where she co-founded and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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Anel I. Flores is a Xicanx/e author, artist, and cultural worker whose books include Curtains of Rain and Empanada: A Lesbiana Story en Probaditas. A co-editor of JOTA and I Love Us, their work has been published, exhibited, and performed internationally since 2002. A DRJ Fellow and NALAC Catalyst for Change Fellow, Flores co-founded Queer Voices Collective and La Otra: Taller Nepantla. They are currently completing their graphic memoir, Painted Red.

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Wendy J. Fox is the author of five books of fiction, including What If We Were Somewhere Else, which won the Colorado Book Award, and the forthcoming The Last Supper. She has written for national publications including Self, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and Ms., and authors a quarterly column in Electric Literature focusing on independent books. A lifelong resident of the American West, she lives outside Phoenix.
 

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Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods and The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, as well as the memoir Body, Remember. His poetry collections include Returns: Poems Selected and New, among others. He has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His current project is Stumbling Over History: Disability and the Holocaust.

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Reyna Grande is an award-winning author whose work explores immigration, family separation, and belonging. Her memoirs The Distance Between Us, A Dream Called Home, and Migrant Heart have received widespread acclaim, with the latter published in 2026. Her novels include Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and A Ballad of Love and Glory. She is an American Book Award winner and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

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Laurie Ann Guerrero is a poet, essayist, and visual artist born and raised on the Southside of San Antonio. She is the author of Redwork, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Poetry Award, forthcoming in 2026. Her previous collections include Babies Under the Skin, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, A Crown for Gumecindo, and I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake. She served as Poet Laureate of San Antonio and of Texas and teaches at Texas A&M University–San Antonio.

Saúl Hernández is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His debut poetry collection, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters, is a Lambda Literary Award winner, a Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Award winner, and was longlisted for a PEN Open Book Award.

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Jenny Irish is a fiction writer and poet whose hybrid writing appears widely in journals including Blackbird, Conduit, Hobart, The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. She facilitates a free community workshop every summer. She is the author of the collections Common Ancestor, I Am Faithful, Tooth Box, and Lupine. Her latest work Hatch is a groundbreaking hybrid feminist collection of speculative prose poems that trace the consciousness of a mechanical womb. She is an assistant professor in the MFA program at ASU.

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Jen Knox is the founder and director of Unleash Creatives and an award-winning writer of short fiction and essays. Her work appears in McSweeney’s Internet Quarterly, The Saturday Evening Post, The Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Montana Prize for the Essay and the San Miguel Essay Prize. She teaches at The Ohio State University and is at work on a collection of essays; her first novel, Radicals, will be published in 2026.

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Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, he has published widely in public scholarship and poetry, including the chapbooks The Bone Setter, Paring, and Vagaries, and the full-length collection What’s Left Is Tender (Harbor Editions, 2025). He is also co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, 2026).

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Diana López is the author of numerous middle grade novels, including Confetti Girl, Nothing Up My Sleeve, and Lucky Luna. She also wrote the picture book biography Sing With Me: The Story of Selena Quintanilla. Her Los Monstruos series includes Felice and the Wailing Woman, Rooster and the Dancing Diablo, and Ava and the Owl-Witch. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, she retired after a 28-year career in education and continues to mentor writers through programs such as AWP and Las Musas.

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Oscar Mancinas is a Rarámuri-Chicano poet, scholar, and teacher from Mesa, Arizona’s Washington-Escobedo Neighborhood. His books include the short story collection To Live and Die in El Valle and the poetry collection des__: papeles, palabras, & poems from the desert. Find more of his work at oscarmancinas.wordpress.com.

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Sally Wen Mao is the author of the story collection Ninetails: Nine Tales (Penguin Books, 2024) and three poetry collections: The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf, 2023), Oculus (Graywolf, 2019), and Mad Honey Symposium. Her work has been recognized with an NEA grant, a Cullman Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College.

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Sean Avery Medlin writes poems, raps, and essays. They are a graduate student in Randolph College’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Their work has been featured in Phoenix New Times, Chicago Tribune, and Teen Vogue, and includes the album skinnyblk (2016), the EP I Never Left, and the poetry and music collaboration ECHOES (2025). They are the author of 808s & Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, & Mythologies (Two Dollar Radio, 2021).

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Susan Nguyen is the author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and received multiple honors, including an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets. She is the editor-in-chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

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Karen Odden received her PhD in English from New York University, where she wrote her dissertation on Victorian literature. She is the author of six crime novels set in 1870s England, including A Lady in the Smoke and An Artful Dodge. Her work has been nominated for the Lefty, Anthony, Agatha, and Derringer awards and selected for Best Mystery Stories of the Year. She lives in Arizona with her family.

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Naomi Ortiz (they/them) is a Disabled Mestize poet, visual artist, and writer. They are the author of Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice and Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, and co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled. A Disability Futures Fellow and Reclaiming the U.S.–Mexico Border Narrative Awardee, Ortiz creates interdisciplinary work exploring disability justice, climate action, and collective care. More at www.NaomiOrtiz.com.

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Barry Pearce is the author of The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories, finalist for the 2025 INDIES Book of the Year Award. He is the recipient of the Nelson Algren Award, a Chicago Independent Artists Program grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Award. His work has appeared in Chicago Tribune, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and Puerto del Sol. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches and ghostwrites nonfiction.

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Justin Petropoulos is the author of Eminent Domain and <Legend> </Legend> (2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist Carla Gannis. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Gulf Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the Program Manager for the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

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Gionni Ponce is a Macondista prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Indiana University’s Writer in South Asia Fellowship, and was a Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference Fellow. Her work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Ocotillo Review. She is currently working on a short story collection exploring bilingualism and multigenerational conflict.

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Alberto Ríos is widely acclaimed as a writer who uses language in lyrical and unexpected ways that reflect his Chicano heritage and contain elements of magical realism. His most recent poetry collection is A Sound is Not a Wolf (Copper Canyon, 2025). His honors include six Pushcart Prizes, the Arizona Governor's Arts Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as Arizona’s first Poet Laureate. He is University Professor of Letters, Regents’ Professor and the Katharine C. Turner Chair in English at ASU. He directs the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
 

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Cecilia Savala (she/her) is a Shrek-obsessed Latinx poet, teacher, and mom who writes 1,200 miles from home. She is a creative writing teacher at Arizona State University and the Virginia G. Piper Fellow-in-Residence. Her work appears in Acentos Review, The Boiler, and Poetry South, among others.

Laura Tohe is Diné and a member of the Sleepy Rock People clan, born for the Bitter Water People clan. A poet and librettist, she is the author of Tseyí / Deep in the Rock, No Parole Today, and Code Talker Stories. Her work has received numerous honors, including awards from the Arizona Book Association and the Wordcraft Circle. In 2026, she was named the second Poet Laureate of Arizona.

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Sarah Viren is a writer, journalist, and translator. She is the author of Mine and To Name the Bigger Lie, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and NPR Best Book of the Year. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, she teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University. Her honors include fellowships from the NEA and the Dora Maar House.

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Nicole Walker is the author of several books, including How to Plant a Billion Trees and Writing the Hard Stuff. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and multiple editions of The Best American Essays. She edits the Crux series at University of Georgia Press and teaches at Northern Arizona University, where she serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society. Find her at nikwalk.com and nikwalk.substack.com.