Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writers Series

T Kira Māhealani Madden is a Chinese, Kānaka Maoli writer, photographer, and amateur magician. Madden's debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019), was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir, and is now in development as a feature film. Her debut novel, Whidbey, is forthcoming with Mariner/HarperCollins. Winner of the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award, Madden holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She is the Founding Editor of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest. He is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. Also a musician and photographer, Adjei-Brenyah is the author of the bestselling short story collection Friday Black (2018) and the novel Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon, 2023). 

With writing that often focuses on the Chinese American immigrant experience, Jenny Zhang is known for her frank humor, emotional directness, and subversive thoughts about race, femininity, and love in contemporary America. Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart (2018), conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City and is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Robert. W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the O. Henry Prize. In 2012, she published the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. Zhang’s second collection of poetry, My Baby First Birthday, was published in 2020 from Tin House Books. In addition to her fiction and poetry, Zhang’s essays have been published by the New York Times, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, and Rookie.