Fall 2020

Jack Hitt is the cohost of the podcast Uncivil, which won the Peabody Award in 2018. His most recent book is Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character (Crown, 2012). He’s a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, and his nonfiction, for which he’s won the Livingston and Pope awards, also appears in the New Yorker, WIRED, and Vanity Fair. His book Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain (Simon & Schuster, 1994) was made into the 2010 motion picture The Way.

Ashley M. Jones is the author of dark / / thing (Pleiades, 2019) and Magic City Gospel (Hub City, 2017). She has been awarded fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and she was the winner of the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2019 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in CNN, Shenandoah, and Oxford American, among others. She is the codirector of PEN Birmingham, the director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Nicole Tung is a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Stern, Le Monde, Harper’s, and other publications. She received the 2020 Award for Production by the French Ministry of Arts and Culture at the Visa Pour l’Image Festival, among other accolades.  

Khaddafina Mbabazi is a writer and musician from Kampala, Uganda. Currently, she resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is at work on a novel and completing a short-story collection titled History and Memory. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Virginia.

Wayétu Moore is the author of The Dragons, The Giant, The Women (Graywolf, 2020) and She Would Be King (Graywolf, 2018), named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly, and BuzzFeed. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. Her writing can be found in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Frieze, Guernica, the Atlantic, and other publications. She’s a graduate of Howard University, the University of Southern California, and Columbia University. 

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of The Ground, Heaven, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (FSG, 2018), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020), and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive, 2010). He has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Phillips is the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of English at Williams College and teaches creative writing at Princeton.