Emerging Writers Festival

Michael Loughran

Poetry & Essays

Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia.

The best memoirs are not just an account of a single life, but a guide to how to live. This isn’t because the writer has found all the answers to our oldest human questions; it’s because the writer honors us by telling the hardest truths. Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love. In this endlessly vivid and true book, we follow the narrator in his ongoing daily life—amid friends and family, work, falling in love again—even as he is pursued by the Furies of guilt, regret, and vicious despair. Windower is a vital book about being human amid loss, about how to go on in this devastating and beautiful world.

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Erin Marie Lynch

Poetry

Erin Marie Lynch is an artist and educator—her practice spans writing, digital media, performance, and archival material. Her book Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, October 2023) was a finalist for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award. Her poems appear in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Wurlitzer Foundation, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Hugo House. Born and raised in Oregon, she is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Ihánktoŋwan Dakota). Currently, she is a Presidential postdoctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Adrienne Perry

FICTION AND NONFICTION

Adrienne Perry grew up in Wyoming, earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. From 2014-2016 she served as the Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. A Hedgebrook alumna, Adrienne is also a Kimbilio Fellow and a member of the Rabble Collective. Adrienne's writing has received support from Friends of Writers, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Inprint, and the University of Houston. In 2020, Adrienne received the inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Prize in Creative Writing from Meridians journal. Adrienne’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of literature and creative writing at at Villanova University.

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Sejal Shah

FICTION AND NONFICTION

Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. She is a longtime teacher of creative writing whose teaching is informed by her belief that we all have important stories to tell and creating space for these stories through writing and mindfulness exercises is a life-changing practice and journey. 

Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions (West Virginia University Press), was long-listed for the 2024-2025 Story Prize. Her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance: Essays (University of Georgia Press) was an NPR Best Book of the year, recommended in the New York Times, and named in over thirty “most-anticipated” or “best-of” lists including the Los Angeles Times. Her writing has also appeared in Conjunctions, The Guardian, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Longreads, the Massachusetts Review, Poets & Writers, and The Rumpus, among others, as well as in several anthologies. 

She is the recipient of a 2025 New York Council on the Arts Support for Artists grant, sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution. Other awards include fellowships or residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Millay Arts, New York University, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. 

Sejal serves as a mentor for the Periplus Collective, a community of writers who provide guidance to early-career BIPOC writers in the United States. The daughter of Gujarati parents who immigrated to the United States from India and Kenya, Sejal lives in Rochester, New York on Seneca land.

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Monica Sok

Poetry

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbook Year Zero, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Marilyn Chin.

She is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her poetry has been recognized with a 2018 Discovery Poetry Prize from 92Y.

She is also the granddaughter of Bun Em, a master silk weaver from Takeo and a 1990 recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship for her efforts in the cultural preservation of traditional textiles. Monica followed in her grandmother’s footsteps and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 2017.

She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She recently taught as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, CA. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, and New Republic, among others. 

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