Oneonta Literary Festival 2024

Anna Kornbluh is a professor of English and a member of the United Faculty bargaining team at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where her research and teaching focus on the novel, film and critical theory. Kornbluh is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Realist Form (Fordham University Press, 2014), Marxist Film Theory and “Fight Club” (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, which was recently published by Verso. She has edited special issues for b2o: an online journal, Criticism, Mediations, and Syndicate, and is a frequent guest on The American Vandal and other podcasts. Kornbluh is the founder of the V21 Collective and InterCcECT (Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory) and is the director of Graduate Studies at UIC.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic, and collagist whose notable long poem Drafts is forthcoming in its complete incarnation (two volumes) from Coffee House Press in April 2025. CHAX Press published her Selected Poems 1980–2020 in 2022. Her other recent books include A Long Essay on the Long Poem from the University of Alabama Press (2023); the collage-poem Life in Handkerchiefs (Materialist Press, 2022); and a fierce poetic response to 2020, Daykeeping (Selva Oscura, 2023). In her career as a poet-critic, DuPlessis has written extensively on gender, poetry, and both feminist and objectivist poetics, including The Pink Guitar (1990, 2006), Blue Studios (2006) and Purple Passages (2012), all on the University of Alabama Press. Her considerable work on Objectivist poetry and poetics includes editing of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990). Poetry by DuPlessis in translation includes books in French, Italian, and Russian and individual works and chapbooks appearing in German, Portuguese, and Spanish. DuPlessis received her BA at Barnard College in 1963, her PhD at Columbia University in 1970, and is Professor Emerita at Temple University.

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which (2006); Bringing the Shovel Down (2011); Be Holding (2020), winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022; and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights, was released in September of 2023.

Willy Palomo (he/they/she) is a founding member of Plumas Colectiva, a powerhouse of Latinx visual artists, writers and creatives based in the 801. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry and translations can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. He has performed at or keynoted the National Council of Urban Educators Association, the SUU Pride Film Festival, the Indiana Latino Leadership Conference, El Festival Internacional de Poesia Amada Libertad and the National Poetry Slam. He has taught classes and courses on literature, rap and creative writing in universities, juvenile detention centers, high schools and community centers. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised in Utah, he is the queer son of two refugees from El Salvador. In April 2023, he independently released his debut rap album, Enter Da Boombow. In September 2023, he published his debut collection of poetry, Wake the Others, with Editorial Kalina and Glass Spider Publishing.

Jennifer R. Donohue ’04 grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and their Doberman. A member of the SFWA, she works at her local library where she also facilitates a writing workshop. She is the author of the Run with the Hunted (2018–23) novella series, and her debut novel, Exit Ghost, was released in 2023. Her work has otherwise appeared in Apex Magazine , Escape Pod , Fusion Fragment , and elsewhere. Her werewolf trilogy, Learn to Howl, is forthcoming in 2024.

Rebecca Weil  traces connections within human lives and the natural world. Recent writing has been published or is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Humana Obscura, The Journal of Wild Culture ,  River Teeth’s Beautiful Things , and  Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art , in which her piece, “Old Friends,” was a finalist in the 2024 nonfiction contest. In addition, her poem, “ Hair Thief: Kleptotrichy ,” was a finalist in the 2023 Seneca Park Zoo Nature Poetry Contest for emerging poets. Weil lives in Upstate New York and is the author of the award-winning book  Bring Me the Ocean (1995).

Kristen Tomanocy is a poet, educator, actor, and director from New York. She competed with her college poetry slam team at the ACUI College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational from 2008–11, at one point achieving fourth in the nation. She writes most often about nature, the cosmos, and her beloved mother. She’s currently at work on an onstage poetry project with a SUNY Oneonta Alum in New York. During the day, Kristen is a middle school English teacher at the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in Queens, New York.

Matt Coonan is a poet, emcee, and teacher from New York. He is the author of Toy Gun (Button Poetry, 2023), as well as two chapbooks . His poems have been featured on Button Poetry and published in The Drunken Violet Review , Inklette , The Roadrunner Review , The Southampton Review , and Tinderbox Poetry Journal , among others. Coonan is also a vocalist in the improvisational jazz band Bright Dog Red . Their sixth and seventh studio albums were released in April 2024 from Ropeadope Records.

Professor Stephen Kuusisto , who has been blind since birth, is the author of multiple books, including Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (W. W. Norton, 2006) and the acclaimed memoir Planet of the Blind (Delta, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also published Only Bread, Only Light (2000) and Letters to Borges (2013), collections of poems from Copper Canyon Press. Recognized by The New York Times as “a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor,” Kuusisto has made numerous appearances on programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show , Dateline NBC, National Public Radio , and the BBC. A graduate of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and a Fulbright Scholar, Kuusisto holds the position of director of the Renée Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse University . He speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. His essays and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines including Harper’s , The New York Times Magazine , Partisan Review, and Poetry . He is currently working on a collection of prose poems for Copper Canyon Press entitled “Mornings with Borges” as well as a collection of political poems about disability.

Originally trained in pediatrics and public health, Sayantani DasGupta teaches in the Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, all at Columbia University. She writes and speaks on issues of race, gender, health, and social justice. DasGupta is The New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory–inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books (Scholastic, 2019–21), the first of which—The Serpent’s Secret—was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the Twenty-First Century, and an E. B. White Read Aloud Honor Book. She is also the author of two other series set in the Kingdom Beyond multiverse: the anticolonial- and Indian revolution–inspired Fire Queen series (Scholastic, 2021–22) and the younger middle grade environmentally themed adventures, Secrets of the Sky (Scholastic, 2023–24). She is also the author of She Persisted: Virginia Apgar (Philomel, 2021), as well as two Jane Austen–inspired contemporary novels, Debating Darcy (Scholastic, 2022) and Rosewood: A Midsummer Meet Cute (Scholastic, 2023). Sayantani is a pediatrician by training but now teaches at Columbia University . When she’s not writing or reading, Sayantani spends time watching cooking shows with her trilingual children and protecting her black Labrador retriever Khushi from the many things that scare him, including plastic bags.

Cristina Henríquez is the author of four books, including the recently published The Great Divide (Ecco, 2024), which was a TODAY Show Read with Jenna Pick. The Great Divide is a fictional retelling of the building of the Panama Canal, featuring characters rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course. Her novel The Book of Unknown Americans (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s Ten Best Books of the Year and is the 2024 SUNY Oneonta Common Read . It was the Daily Beast Novel of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, an NPR Great Read, a Target Book of the Month selection, and was chosen one of the best books of the year by BookPage, Oprah.com, and School Library Journal. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Henriquez is also the author of The World in Half (Riverhead, 2009), and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories (Riverhead, 2006), which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection.

Henríquez’s fiction has appeared in AGNI , The American Scholar , The Atlantic , The New Yorker , Ploughshares , and elsewhere, along with the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers (Random House, 2006). Her stories have been featured in the Best American Short Stories 2018 (Mariner, 2018) and on Symphony Space Selected Shorts . Her nonfiction has been published in The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, TIME , Oxford American , and elsewhere, as well as in the anthologies State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (HarperCollins, 2009) and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant (HarperCollins, 2008).

She was a 2020 Fiction judge for the National Book Awards, has been a guest on National Public Radio, and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros in honor of her father. Henríquez earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.