We are honored to welcome Fady Joudah, No‘u Revilla, Divya Victor, Zeyn Joukhadar, Akil Kumarasamy, and C Pam Zhang to the 2024 Kundiman Retreat faculty this June! Applications are open from December 1st until January 15th. Learn more about the retreat here.
2024 POETRY FACULTY
Fady Joudah has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Arab American Book Award, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
No‘u Revilla is an ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) poet and educator. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she prioritizes aloha, gratitude, and collaboration in her practice. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed 2022) won the 2021 National Poetry Series and the 2023 Balcones Prize. Her writing has been featured in Poetry, Lit Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, Poetry Northwest, and the Library of Congress. She has performed throughout Hawaiʻi, New York, Toronto, and Papua New Guinea. Her work has also been adapted for theatrical productions in Aotearoa as well as art exhibitions for the Honolulu Museum of Art and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe. She teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa and is a lifetime “slyly / reproductive” student of Haunani-Kay Trask.
Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.
2024 Fiction Faculty
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], the anthologies Letters to a Writer of Color and This Arab Is Queer, and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (FSG, 2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods (FSG, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.
C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a Booker Prize nominee, and the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. She has been a finalist for awards from PEN America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Center for Fiction. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.