Spring Literary Festival

Lily Hoàng is the author of six books, including Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Non-Fiction Award finalist), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). She has two books forthcoming in 2024—The Mute Kids (micro-tales) and A Knock at the Door (fairy tales)—and her collaborative collection Timber & Lụa with Vi Khi Nao is forthcoming in 2025. She is a Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she teaches in their MFA in Literary Arts.

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were shortlisted for The Booker Prize. He is also the author of the forthcoming The Road to the Country (2024). His novels have been translated into more than 29 languages. They have won awards including the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the LA Times Book Prize, and been nominated for many others. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018-2019. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. Obioma is the Program Director and a mentor at Oxbelly Writers Retreat. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and divides his time between the US and Nigeria.” (from Blue Flower Arts)

Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.  She the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center.  Her first book _Granted_ won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.