Nonfiction Workshop with Emily Bernard

  • Hannah Keziah Agustin

    Hannah Keziah Agustin is a poet and essayist from Manila, Philippines. She received the 2024 Page Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review, the 2022 W. W. Norton Writer’s Prize, and the 2021 Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner. Her essays appear in North American Review, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and Ninth Letter, while their poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Literary Reportage at New York University, where she is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.

  • Jovonne Bickerstaff

    Jovonne J. Bickerstaff (she/her) is a Black feminist interdisciplinary scholar and writer. A native Ohian, who came of age in Europe and the East coast, her work explores emotions & power, grief & loss, and intergenerational trauma & healing. She's fascinated by how the rememory of Black womanhood is sanctified, silenced, & sullied and how that shapes the ways future generations understand and hold their inheritances & themselves. Jovonne is a member of The Sanctuary writing community and served on the board of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. A writing MFA dropout (New School), she holds degrees in Sociology, Social Psychology, Urban Studies, & Writing from Harvard, the University of Cambridge, & MIT.

  • Christine Deng

    Chris Deng is a socially-engaged artist and writer born and based in New York City. She’s the author of A Journey Ahead, a bilingual collection of oral histories from elders residing in Chinatown, Manhattan. Their writing has appeared in Pigeon Pages and Epicenter NYC. She is a Brooklyn Arts Council 2025 SU-CASA Teaching Resident and a GrubStreet 2025 - 2026 Emerging Writer Fellow.

  • Carole Hsiao

    Carole Hsiao (she/her) is the first-born daughter of Chinese refugees and a community educator.  Her work traces the role of filial piety amidst her family’s flight from China to modern-day America.  For her PhD in Education, she focused on the role of the arts in identity formation for marginalized girls.   She has been a fellow with Anaphora Arts and Roots Wounds Words.

  • Langston Kahn

  • Iris Kuo

    Iris Kuo is a writer, journalist and entrepreneur. She is founder of the Oasis Institute nonprofit initiative for belonging and solidarity. Her award-winning journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Iris is from southern Taiwan, Alabama and Texas.

  • Dianne Siasoco

    Dianne Siasoco (she/her) is an emerging Fil-Am writer and social justice activist living her best intergenerational life in the Midwest with her parents, husband, toddler, and a handful of resilient plants. She's crafting her first book on neurodivergence, mental health, and motherhood.