Deep Winter Writers 2026

Poet and writer Dr. Holly Pester is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She has worked in forms of experimental, critical and sound-based writing for nearly 20 years, working with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection. Pester's most recent publications include the poetry collection Comic Timing (2021) and a novel The Lodgers (2024). Both out with Granta in the UK, and Assembly Press in Canada. 

Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award (Poetry). Divya is also the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States) and for Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada), and Book*hug Press (Canada). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Czech. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

NASSER HUSSAIN lives in Leeds and teaches Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University, where he is constantly astonished by the work his students produce. He has written reviews for Poetry London, Ambit, and the Poetry School, and has appeared on BBC’s The Verb and Free Thinking. His most recent book is SKY WRI TEI NGS, published with Toronto’s Coach House Books in late 2018, which is a constraint-based collection in which every word is an IATA airport code. His second book with Coach House, love language, was released in the Autumn of 2023. He is currently working on a number of new projects, including an extended piece of asemic visual poems about punctuation.

Joshua Rothes is a writer, publisher, and book designer. He is the founder and publisher of Sublunary Editions, an independent press that specializes in brief forms of literature; the co-publisher of Hanuman Editions, a publishing project aimed at bringing the global avant-garde into conversation; and the founder of Asterism Books, a distributor specializing in small publishers. He is the author of An Unspecific Dog (punctum books, 2017), Six Novellas (Sublunary Editions, 2021), The Art of the Great Dictators (A Contrived Press, 2018), and other miscellany. He is the editor of The Collected Works of Emanuel Carnevali, the co-editor of The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young, and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.