MFA: Upcoming Guests

Matt Belford is a Literary Agent at New Leaf Literary & Media. When it comes to creative nonfiction, he primarily looks for projects with unique takes and fresh ideas to be explored. In the adult graphic novel space, he looks for character-driven works that get to the heart of emotionality; he wants to laugh and cry with your characters. No matter the genre, Matt is looking for under-represented voices. Matt received his MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, back when he thought he wanted to be a writer. He’s since learned the error of his ways and is thrilled to instead be working with authors to help bring their ideas to life. Prior to joining the team at New Leaf, Matt has worked at several literary agencies and publishers and joined the team with a decade of experience across formats and genres.

Saadia Faruqi is a Pakistani American author and interfaith activist. She writes the popular children’s early reader series Yasmin and other books for children, including chapter books, graphic novels, and picture books. Her middle grade novels include A Place At The Table (a Sydney Taylor Notable 2021 co-written with Laura Shovan), A Thousand Questions (a South Asia Book Award Honor 2021) and Yusuf Azeem Is Not A Hero (a School Library Journal Best Middle Grade 2021 book). Her graphic novel Saving Sunshine was a Kirkus Best Book of 2023 and a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023, as well as a 2024 Texas Library Association Little Maverick Graphic Novel. Saadia is editor-in-chief of Blue Minaret, a magazine for Muslim art, poetry, and prose. Saadia was featured in Oprah Magazine in 2017 as a woman making a difference in her community. She lives in Houston with her husband and children.

Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist. She is the author of I Was Their American Dream, a graphic memoir published in 2019 about being first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, which won an Arab American Book Award in 2020. Then in 2022, she published It Won't Always Be Like This, a graphic memoir about her summers in the Middle East. By day, she works as a digital editor at NPR for "Life Kit," a lifestyle podcast about health, finance, relationships, and more. Her comics and writing have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Believer Magazine and The New Yorker. You can find her on Instagram @malakagharib or visit her website.

Tonya C. Hegamin, MFA (she/her), is a queer, (dis)abled BIPOC (Lenape/Nanticoke) and an award-winning author. Her honors include awards from the New York Public Library, The Chistopher Foundation, and more. Her books have received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and been featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, Ebony, and Essence. Tonya is a tenured Associate Professor in the English Department at the City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College. She also serves on the CUNY-wide Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board as well as serving as Affiliate Faculty at CUNY’s School of Medicine in its Narrative Medicine program. She holds certificates in Diversity and Inclusion Education and in Wellness Counseling from Cornell University. Professor Hegamin has published scholarly articles about creativity, praxis, and pedagogy in The Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Can Creative Writing Really be Taught?, and Creative Writing Innovations. Her research interests focus on the intersections of creativity, cultural history, disability, gender/queer studies, and healthcare. She has been a patient and victim advocate since 1998, working as an educator and counselor for organizations like Women Against Rape and Planned Parenthood. Visit her website for more information.

Lee Hope is the author of the novel Horsefever, which made its mark on the Small Press Distribution Bestseller List when it was published in 2016 and went on to be a finalist for the Midwest Book Awards. Lee is also is editor-in-chief of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. Her fiction has received grants from both the Maine and the Pennsylvania Arts Commissions. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary journals, such as Witness, The North American Review, Epiphany, and Sou’wester. Her short story “What to Take In Case of Fire” received an honorable mention in American Fiction, Vol. 13 (winner of the 2015 Midwest Book Awards in the anthology category). Founder and former director of a low-residency MFA program in Maine, Lee also helped to found the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. She is currently president of the nonprofit Solstice Institute for Creative Writing and teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which brings literature to people on probation.

Crystal King is the author of the newly released novel In the Garden of Monsters as well as The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow, which was long-listed at the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and designated as a MassBook Awards Must Read. A social media and AI professor by trade, her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy. Crystal has taught writing, creativity, and social media at Harvard Extension School, Boston University, and GrubStreet. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and former co-editor of Plum Ruby Review, she holds an MA in critical and creative thinking from UMass Boston. You can find her at crystalking.com.

Linda LeGarde Grover is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She is author of fiction, poetry, research articles, newspaper columns, and essays. Linda’s research on American Indian boarding schools and effects of federal Indian policies upon communities, families, and individuals has resulted in publications in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is especially drawn to the interwoven aspects of academic research with the experiences and reactions of individuals and collectives in diverse historical and sociological milieu, both in her own work and in the reading of others in varied genres. Linda’s publications have received the Electa Kinney Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, Northeastern Book Award, Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award, and the Native Writers Circle of the Americas Book Award for Fiction.

Beth Little has two degrees in writing: a MLitt with distinction (fiction) from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an MFA (Writing for Young People) from the Solstice MFA Program of Lasell University, where she subsequently worked as the program’s assistant director. Currently, she teaches humanities at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Beth’s work has been published in the anthology Somebody’s Child: Stories About Adoption, Eastown Fiction, the YA Review Network, and Hunger Mountain. She was awarded an SCBWI Magazine Merit Honor in 2016. Her most recent piece of short fiction “On Falling in Love at Boarding School” won the 2023 Flash Fiction Contest for Pigeon Pages, judged by Gina Chung. She attended the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop in summer 2023 and the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2024.

Pushcart Prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including her most recent, Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Dzvinia’s poetry and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Agni, Antioch Review, Field, Guernica, International Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, A Map of Hope: An International Literary Anthology, From Three Worlds, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials by Polish poet Mieczyslaw Jastrun was published by Dialogos (2014). Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Robert Pinsky. More recently, her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’ selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize in Poetry, the 2022 National Translation Award and winner of the 2020-2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize awarded in 2022. Ali and her co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry, Lost in Living, for which Ali and Dzvinia received a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translations grant, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2024. Her newest poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall 2024, and Ali and her co-translation from the Ukrainian of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2025. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor to AGNI and Solstice Literary Magazine and founder of Night Riffs: A Solstice Magazine Reading & Music Series. She is a Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Alex Slater has only ever worked for authors. A UConn graduate with a concentration in creative writing, he has experience in every area of literary agenting, from interning and assisting to selling foreign rights and cultivating his own client list. After two years at the Maria Carvainis Agency and 12 years at Trident Media Group, he’s thrilled to bring his passion for publishing and his expertise in its business to SJGA and GreenburgerKids. As always, Alex seeks to launch careers, especially for writers who have been systematically held back. His clients today include several award-winning and New York Times-bestselling authors. Please query him with smart and innovative thrillers, as well as witty and original rom-coms in the YA space. As for middle grade, he loves graphic novels and hopes to see more grounded sci-fi and fantasy, as well as books that aim for the highest literary prizes. Ultimately, all stories must have that sense of urgency that the best books for children share, and be from writers passionate about their own voice and eager to engage in the diverse and dynamic conversation already ongoing in contemporary literature.