The Marcia Kinsey Visiting Writers Series

Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky (Europa Editions 2015) and the story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books 2023), chosen by Danielle Evans as the winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have been published by American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, Shenandoah, and many other publications. Born in India and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Austin, Texas. 

Amanda Johnston is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has been published in Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. She is the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate.

Funded in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.

Sasha West is the author of Failure and I Bury the Body and How to Abandon Ship. Her first book won the National Poetry Series, a Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award, and a Bread Loaf Fellowship. Recent poems appear in American Poetry Review, Agni, Georgia Review, and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her collaborative multi-media installations with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design Beeler Gallery, the Texas A&M Wright Gallery, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.