NEW WRITERS ANNOUNCED

ROZINA ALI (September 2024) is a journalist based in New York City who writes about the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature. A contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, she won a 2023 National Magazine Award in Reporting. She’s held fellowships at Type Media Center and New America, and was a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library for 2022-23. 

TIMOTHY DONNELLY (October 2024) has published four collections of poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, including the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A professor in the writing program at Columbia University, he’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, and New York State’s Writers Institute.

ERSI SOTIROPOULOS (November 2024) is based in Chalandra, Greece, where she’s won two National Literature Awards, the Book Critics’ Award and the Athens Academy Prize. She’s received the Dante Alighieri Prize for poetry and been shortlisted for the European Book Prize. Her novel, What’s Left of the Night (2015), won the Prix Méditerranée Étranger in France and the ALTA Award in the U.S.

MANAN KAPOOR (April-May 2025) is Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review. His interests range from multiethnic literature of the U.S. to poetry in the 21st century. His debut novel, The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky, was published in 2016. His writing has appeared in The Stockholm Review of Literature, Scroll, The Ghazal Page, Travel-Writing Quarterly, Arré, and Indian Review of Literature.

JOÃO TORDO (June 2025) is based in Lisbon, Portugal. He’s the author of twenty books, divided between novels, detective stories and essays. He won the José Saramago Literary Prize in 2009, with the novel The Three Lives, and the Fernando Namora Literary Prize in 2021, with Felicidade. As a screenplay writer, he participated in the Netflix series Until Life Do Us Part and Turn of the Tide.

SUJI KWOCK KIM (July 2025) is a playwright and poet who received the 2003 Walt Whitman award for her debut collection, Notes from the Divided Country. A Yale graduate, she attended Seoul National University as a Fulbright Scholar, and Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow. Her plays have been performed at Pablo Casals Hall in Tokyo and the Art Institute of Chicago.

DAVID YEZZI (August 2025) is author of Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life and More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems, and editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. As an actor, he’s performed in King Lear (Baltimore Shakespeare Factory) and Hamlet’s Ghost (Chesapeake Shakespeare). He teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.

KATIE PETERSON (September 2025) is author of six poetry collections, including the forthcoming Fog and Smoke (2024). Her collection, The Accounts, won the 2014 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. A Piece of Good News was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and Life in a Field won the Omnidawn Open Book Prize. She teaches poetry and creative writing at UC Davis. 

WILL DOWD (September 2024-2025), poet, essayist, and cartoonist, will hold the first Virtual Merrill House Fellowship. Recipient of a Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” prize for his essay collection, Areas of Fog, Dowd is a contributor to the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and NPR. He has a special interest in assistive technology, which he uses to compensate for a visual disorder.