We are thrilled to announce our poetry and fiction faculty Rajiv Mohabir, Solmaz Sharif, Lehua M. Taitano, Ryka Aoki, Megha Majumdar, and Lysley Tenorio for the 2023 Kundiman Retreat this June! Applications open December 1st, so mark your calendars. Learn more about the retreat here.
2023 POETRY FACULTY
Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, and Cutlish; a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. Mohabir has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at Emerson College.
Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Arizona State University where she is inaugurating a Poetry for the People program.
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (familian Kuetu yan Kabesa) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century, a dynamic collective which investigates how Indigenous and Black art lives in the 21st century and envisions how it will flourish in the 25th century and beyond. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
2023 Fiction Faculty
Ryka Aoki (she/her) is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist whose books include He Mele a Hilo and two Lambda Award finalists, Seasonal Velocities and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. Ryka’s work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed. Her poetry was featured at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.”
Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning (Knopf, 2020), which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former editor in chief of Catapult Books, and lives in New York. A Burning is her first book.
Lysley Tenorio is the author of Monstress, named a book of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle,and The Son of Good Fortune, winner of the New American Voices Award from the Institute for Immigration Research. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Manoa, and Zoetrope: All-Story, and have been adapted the for the stage in San Francisco and New York City. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Macdowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in the Philippines and raised in California, he is an Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.