Spring Writers 2026

Haisla/Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s collection of short stories, Traplines, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998. Monkey Beach, her first novel, was shortlisted for both The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2000 and won the BC Book Prize’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her novel Son of a Trickster was shortlisted for The Giller Prize. Trickster Drift, its sequel, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The final book in the Trickster series, Return of the Trickster, was published 2021..

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. With the poet John Murilla, she edited Dear Yusef: Essays. Letters and Poems, for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honours include the Arts and the Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Centre Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment from the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers' Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. His third collection, Avidya, is due from Bloodaxe in 2025. Vidyan Ravinthiran is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022; a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir forthcoming from Icon in the UK and Norton in the US.

Stephen Motika is the director and publisher of Nightboat Books, a leading publisher of innovative poetry and prose in North America. He has also worked at Simon & Schuster, The CUNY Graduate Center, Northwestern University, PEN America, and Poets House, where he served as Artistic Director. He is the author of the book of poems, Western Practice, and several chapbooks, including Private Archive and Arrival and At Mono. He is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman and co-editor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday. His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, the Brooklyn Review, the Constant Critic, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, and Vanitas, among other publications. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.