2024 Faculty

Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, a book of essays on art, politics and culture, The Hard Crowd, and a story collection, The Strange Case of Rachel K. Her new novel, Creation Lake, will be published in September 2024. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and she was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Kushner has been a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice Award and twice won California Book Awards. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, where she is also a columnist. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Francesca Lia Block, M.F.A., is the best-selling and widely-translated author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, and has written screenplay adaptations of her work. She received the Spectrum Award, the Phoenix Award, the ALA Rainbow Award and the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as other citations from the American Library Association and from the New York Times Book Review, School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly.

Gene Kwak has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Wigleaf, and Electric Literature among others.

Go Home, Ricky! is his debut novel and was a Rumpus October Book Club Selection, was featured in Vanity Fair magazine and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and has garnered rave review from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist among others. It was also recently translated into French with the publisher, Le Gospel Press.

He is also the winner of the 2022 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen WEX Prize, has attended workshops at Tin House and Yale, and soon plans to attend a residency through the Jentel Artist Residency.

He is also a Periplus mentor and co-founder of Tiger Balm, a Korean American writer’s collective, with Joseph Han. He currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University.

Lio Min writes at the nexus of queer youth culture and metamorphic Asia America. Their debut YA novel Beating Heart Baby follows two boys as they reckon with internet friendships, first love, family, fandom, and "the violence and ecstasy of what it means to become an artist" (Chicago Review of Books). BHB was named a best YA book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BuzzFeed, and the Chicago Public Library.

Min's culture reporting and fiction have appeared in The FADER, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Nylon, and many other outlets. They live in California.

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Whittier, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa's International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.

Kate Folk is the author of Out There (Random House '22), a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, One Story, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva, among others. She's received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University, as well as support from MacDowell, Willapa Bay AiR, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her first novel, Sky Daddy, is forthcoming from Random House in 2025. Originally from Iowa, she lives in San Francisco.

Henry Hoke is the author of five books, most recently the memoir Sticker (Bloomsbury) and the novel Open Throat (FSG/Picador), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and edits humor at The Offing.

Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the University of Oregon’s MFA program and has attended workshops through the Clarion Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Tin House, where she was a 2021 scholar. Her fiction can be found in publications such as One Story, Witness Magazine, Passages North, and Lightspeed Magazine and has been nominated for anthologies like the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Nic has also written essays and articles for Autostraddle and Tor.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University.

Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Northern California. She is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and the author of Silent Cities New York and Silent Cities San Francisco. She is the owner of the feminist bookshop, Womb House Books. 

Angela Garbes is the author of Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, called “a landmark and a lightning storm” by the New Yorker. Essential Labor was named a Best Book of 2022 by both the New Yorker and NPR. Her first book, Like a Mother, was an NPR Best Book of the Year and finalist for the Washington State Book Award in nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and NPR's Fresh Air. A first-generation Filipina American, she lives with her family in Seattle. 

Sarah Bowlin joined Aevitas in early 2017 after a decade as an editor of literary fiction and nonfiction. She has worked on the international breakout novel How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti; the New York Times Notable Book, The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips; the National Book Award-nominated The End by Salvatore Scibona; the acclaimed novels Marlena by Julie Buntin and Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong; and works by the award-winning novelist, Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

Bowlin has a BA in American Literature from New York University. Originally from the South, she got her start in publishing at Riverhead Books and was most recently a senior editor at Henry Holt & Company.

As an Aevitas agent based in Los Angeles, she is focused on bold, diverse voices in fiction and nonfiction. She’s especially interested in stories of strong or difficult women and unexpected narratives of place, of identity, and of the shifting ways we see ourselves and each other. She’s also interested in food history, wine, and dance.

Alyssa Ogi is an editor at Tin House, where she acquires poetry and fiction. Originally from southern California, she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon, and taught undergraduate creative writing and AAPI literature before shifting into publishing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.