NBCC Emerging Critics Class of 2026-2027
Learn more about the Emerging Critics program.
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Alisyn Amant
Alisyn Amant is a Wisconsin-born writer and graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Previously, she earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she received the 2024 Nona Balakian Award for her thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Harvard Review, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Tone Madison, and more.
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Anyang Kual Ayai
Anyang Kual Ayai (she/her) is a South Sudanese American writer raised between Nigeria and Tennessee. A graduate of Columbia University (BA) and a Nonfiction MFA candidate at the Columbia School of the Arts, she approaches her work as an interrogation of the effects of displacement, and transcultural upbringing. Her criticism utilizes a postcolonial framework to document and theorize experiences of dislocated diasporic Africans in contemporary culture. She lives in New York City, where she is at work on a collection of essays about African musics.
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Eve Bromberg
Eve Bromberg is a writer, critic, and dramaturg from Brooklyn, NY. She is currently completing her MFA in Dramaturgy at Columbia University where she is writing a thesis on the director Anne Bogart. Eve is currently working beside Bogart, as a dramaturg and script developer, on a production of the work of playwright Charles Mee. Eve’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in Liberties Journal, American Theatre Magazine, Document Journal, November Magazine, 3Views, Brooklyn Rail, Pointe Magazine, and CULTUREBOT where she perviously served as a Co-Editor .
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Corinne Cordasco-Pak
Corinne Cordasco-Pak‘s (she/her) work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Oyster River Pages, among others. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Corinne holds an MFA from Randolph College, where she was a fiction editor at Revolute. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, son, and their two rescue dogs. You can find her online @CECordasco.
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David Emeka
David Emeka is a Nigerian writer and graduate of the Washington University in St Louis MFA program. His work has been published in Isele, Adroit Journal, Epiphany Magazine, Republic Journal, and others, and received support from Tin House and The Outpost Foundation. He is working on a novel and story collection.
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Siobhan Hart
Siobhan Hart is a writer from Queens, NY. Her criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, and Fugue. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, At Length, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers—Newark.
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Lora Maslenitsyna
Lora Maslenitsyna is a writer and scholar whose work explores imperial legacies in literature and cinema, historical identity and memory, and the transformation of reality by algorithmic media. Her criticism has appeared in Public Books, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Words Without Borders, and Full Stop. She is a PhD Candidate in Film and Media Studies and Slavic and Eurasian Literatures and Cultures at Yale University.
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Lana Reeves
Lana Reeves is the author of How to Love a Sinking Island, forthcoming from Penguin in June 2027. Her poetry can be found in The Atlantic, Denver Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Meridian, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Originally from O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, she is currently a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she served as nonfiction editor for Nashville Review.
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Conor Truax
Conor Truax is a Canadian writer living in New York. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and others. His work has been supported by Brooklyn College, A Public Space, and The Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts.
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Suzana Vuljevic
Suzana Vuljevic is a scholar, translator (Albanian and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, or BCMS, to English) and critic interested in the nexus between culture and politics. She earned a Ph.D. in History and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and currently holds the Alexander Nash Fellowship in Albanian Studies at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. A firm advocate of the public humanities, her reportage, criticism, translations and essays have appeared in Artforum, AGNI, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, New Lines Magazine, Undark Magazine, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.