Emerging Critics

NBCC Emerging Critics Class of 2022

Learn more about the Emerging Critics program.

  • Layla Benitez-James

    Layla Benitez-James is a 2022 NEA fellow in translation and the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode but He Had to Make Sure, selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem’s 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. As Director of Literary Outreach for the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid, she edited its poetry festival anthology, Desperate Literature. Poems and essays are published in Black Femme Collective, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latino Book Review, and Poetry London. Layla received an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and writes for Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

  • Kathy Chow

    Kathy Chow is a literary critic, an assistant editor at The Yale Review, and a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University. She holds an MTh in Systematic Theology with Distinction from the University of Edinburgh and an A.B., magna cum laude from Princeton University, where she studied political theory. She is currently based in Cambridge, MA.

  • Summer Farah

    Summer Farah is a Palestinian American poet and editor. She is currently the outreach coordinator for the Radius of Arab American Writers and co-writes the biweekly newsletter Letters to Summer. In 2021, she served as the poetry editor for the FIYAH Lit Palestine Solidarity issue. She is a Winter 2022 Tin House Fellow. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Mizna, LitHub, The Rumpus, and other places.

  • Ella Fox-Martens

    Ella Fox-Martens is an Australian/South African editor and writer, currently living in London. She currently serves as Digital Editor for Wasafiri Magazine, and was previously assistant contributing editor to Soft Punk Magazine. She has been published in The Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review, Observer, The Guardian UK, and others.

  • Ricardo Jaramillo

    Ricardo Jaramillo is a poet and writer from Philadelphia. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Believer, and The Rumpus, among other places. He was an inaugural 2021 PERIPLUS fellow, and a 2019-2020 Fulbright teaching fellow at La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. Currently, he works as a case manager at a school for immigrant youth in the Oakland Unified School District.

  • Ade J. Omotosho

    Ade J. Omotosho is a writer and editor from Texas. He has contributed writing to Art in America, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, and elsewhere.

  • S.M. Sukardi

    S.M. Sukardi is a writer, essayist, and critic who likes to think about queerness, religion, classical music, the archive, and especially any of the weird intersections of the above. They have received fellowships from Periplus and Lambda Literary and published criticism and nonfiction in Nashville Review, Autostraddle, Entropy Mag, and HAD. Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review, a journal for reviews of Asian American literature. Formally trained as a scientist, they also have degrees in biomedical engineering and computer science from Johns Hopkins University.

  • Steffan Triplett

    Steffan Triplett is a Black, queer poet and nonfiction writer from Joplin, Missouri. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Iowa Review, Fence, Vulture, and DIAGRAM, and has been anthologized in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat 2018), Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2019), and the forthcoming It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press 2022). Steffan is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh and the Assistant Director for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

  • Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon

    Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, an interdisciplinary humanities department. Her dissertation asks how a novel’s formal choices are also ethical ones: how texts (especially modernist novels) express an ethical position, and position us ethically. Before Berkeley, she wrote middle school math curricula and then worked in strategy consulting.

  • Liz Wood

    Liz Wood received BAs in Rhetoric and Political Economy from UC Berkeley, where she earned Highest Honors for her thesis evaluating the EU’s multicultural rhetoric through the lens of the debate on Turkish accession. After founding YESYESYES Magazine, celebrating San Francisco’s local arts scene, she discovered a love of writing fiction and left the West Coast for NYU’s MFA program. While at work on her novel, she served as a Features and Music Editor for The Rumpus. She has recently begun to write her own criticism for The Provincetown Independent.

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