Previous & Future Artists

Nam Le (he/him) was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, where he now lives with his family. His writing encompasses fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and screen. Nam has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, editor, and board director. He is the author of the poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Knopf, 2024), the book-length essay On David Malouf (Black Inc, 2019), and the short story collection The Boat (Knopf, 2008). His writing also encompasses criticism and screenwriting.

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Le’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Granta, BOMB, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Asymptote, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. His work has won numerous honors internationally, including a PEN/Malamud Award, a Dylan Thomas Prize, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and an Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the University of East Anglia, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Sidney Myer Foundation, among others.

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Le was the fiction editor of the Harvard Review from 2007 to 2013. He earned a BA and LLB with honors from the University of Melbourne and an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. 

Jessica Granger is a TV and film writer and producer raised between London and Connecticut. She attended the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts and Oxford University.

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Jessica recently sold an original psycho-sexual thriller to HBO Max in a competitive situation with A+E Studios producing.  She is currently staffed on a first season thriller for Netflix and in pre-production on CANDLEWOOD, an early 90’s queer coming-of-age film that was featured on the 2021 Black List and will be produced by Washington Square Films.

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Previously, she was a Producer on season two of NBC’s LA BREA and on-set produced season one in Melbourne, Australia. Prior to that, Jessica wrote on two seasons of CBS's GOD FRIENDED ME. There, she on-set produced nearly half of the 42 episodes.

For print, Jessica wrote an essay about grief and nude modeling that was featured in the November 2020 issue of Vogue Magazine and is now in development with Condé Nast Entertainment as a feature.

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When Jessica isn’t writing, she enjoys fly fishing on any river or creek she can gain access to without being arrested for trespassing (again). Unfortunately, she missed the fishing season in Australia by one day on three separate trips to cover set.

V.V. Ganeshananthan, known by her nickname Sugi, is an American writer primarily known for women's historical fiction.

Born in Connecticut in 1980, she received her Bachelor of Arts in 2002 and in 2005 gained a Master of Fine Arts from University of Iowa and finally earned a Master of Arts from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2007. Her stories are often inspired by her Sri Lanken background and are reflective of her heritage. Her protagonist are ambitious young women caught in the middle of the turmoil of their politically torn nation. 

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Her first book, Love Marriage, was published in 2008. In 2023, she published her second book, Brotherless Night. She has previously taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota.

Author of The New York Times bestselling books Grief Is for People, How Did You Get This Number, and I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor). She is also the author of Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the novels, Cult Classic and The Clasp, both of which she has adapted for film.

She has been featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best American Travel Writing and Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay. She has been a columnist for The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Independent, Departures, Black Book and The New York Observer. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and Vogue.

A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and Yaddo Fellow, she has also been an adjunct professor in Columbia University’s MFA program and The New School’s MFA program, as well as a visiting teacher at Dartmouth College, The Yale Writers’ Workshop, The School of Visual Arts, New York University and Sarah Lawrence College.

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She lives in New York City.

Dr Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York City.  Dr Guralnik is on faculty at NYU PostDoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at NIP (National Institute for the Psychotherapies) in NYC, where she teaches courses on the trans-generational transmission of trauma, socio-politics/ideology and psychoanalysis, and on dissociation.  Currently Dr Guralnik lectures and publishes on the topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, as well as culture & psychoanalysis.  She is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and of Studies in Gender & Sexuality. She is co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School, where she was funded by NIH and NARSAD grants.  Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst she was one of the principals of Lucid Consulting and Worklab Consulting research and organizational consulting firms. Dr Guralnik is a graduate of the NYU PostDoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy.

Dao Strom is a poet, musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid-literary works, including the poetry-art collection, INSTRUMENT, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE, and the forthcoming TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025). She co-edited/co-curated the hybrid-literary anthology + exhibit A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS (2024). Strom’s work encompasses both solo and collaborative art and writing projects, and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others.

Born in Vietnam, Strom now lives in Portland, Oregon.

Tommy Orange is a novelist and writer from Oakland. In 2019, his debut novel, There There, received the American Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book also won the 2018 John Leonard Prize and the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award, both awards given for first-time books, and was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Following the 2024 publication of his second novel, Wandering Star, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, he was awarded a 2025 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as the "Genius Award."

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Orange writes vividly about the struggle for identity and meaning of urban Native Americans in his hometown and beyond. He received a BS (2004) from Expression College and an MFA (2016) from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and he is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He currently serves as a faculty mentor at IAIA’s MFA program. In addition to his novels, he has published essays and short stories in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, and Zyzzyva, among other journals and publications.

Hoa Ngyuen was born in the Mekong Delta, raised and educated in the United States, and has lived in Canada since 2011. Her books include As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Her sixth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure won a Canada Book Award and was a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, a National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. A recipient of the 2019 Pushcart Prize and a finalist for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Ngyuen's writing has been promoted by such outlets as PBS NewsHour, Granta, the Walrus, the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Boston Review, PEN American Center, The Best Canadian Poetry series, and Poetry magazine.

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Ngyuen has more than twenty years’ experience teaching across genres in community, undergraduate, and graduate settings. From 2015 - 2023, she served as faculty at Bard College’s MFA Program in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, serving as Co-Chair of the discipline of Writing from 2020 to 2023. She currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University as an Assistant Professor and serves as a mentor for writers in the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto.

Leah Hennel has been following her lens for nearly three decades. It’s a pursuit that has taken the photographer everywhere, from small-town Alberta to countries all over the globe. The SAIT graduate got her start in daily newspapers at the Calgary Sun at the age of 16 and went on to an 18-year career as a staff photographer at the Calgary Herald.

She is passionate about telling stories that showcase her home province, especially the lesser-known communities and landscapes that make Alberta unique. 

Leah has covered numerous Olympic Games on behalf of newspapers and the Canadian Olympic Committee and has also published two photography books — Along The Western Front as well as Alone Together: A Pandemic Photo Essay, which received the International Communications Arts Award. Her work has been recognized by Pictures of the Year International, the National Newspaper Awards, and the News Photographers Association of Canada. She also claimed the Sports Media Canada’s Outstanding Photography Award. And, in 2022, Leah received an honorary degree from SAIT.  Her clients include The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Washington Post, The Narwhal, Canadian Olympic Committee, Getty Images and more.