What is the N4
Artists Network?

Dean Ellis is a writer and translator living in New Orleans. His work has appeared in Bloodroot, Guernica, Cosmonauts Avenue, The New Orleans Review, The Puritan, Maple Leaf Rag, Working Stiff (PBS.org), The Springhouse Journal, St. Petersburg Review, the KGB Bar Lit Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and The Iron Lattice. His translation (with Jaime Braz) of Jacinto Lucas Pires’ novel, The True Actor, was published by Dzanc Books in November 2013. Far Flung, his debut collection of poetry, from Portals Press, was released in March of this year. He hosts the radio programs Tudo Bem and The Dean’s List on WWOZ-FM 90.7 (wwoz.org) in New Orleans. 

Hasadri Kelina Freeman is an artist and media student with a focus on feminine and marginalised narratives, the radical history and potential of the publishing arts, and sociology of language. She primarily works with words, images, and manufactured waste artefacts from the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has appeared in YES & NO Magazine, INFRINGE Magazine, the Kenyon Review (forthcoming), the Asian American Literary Review (forthcoming), and LitHub. Sri Lankan/American born and currently finishing her studies in the UK, she continues to work in diverse settings around the world.  https://www.hasadrikelinafreeman.com/

John Freeman, formerly the fiction editor at Granta, is the founder of Freeman’s, a literary annual published internationally. He is the editor of a series of anthologies about inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. He is the author of three books of nonfiction and two collections of poems, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His forthcoming titles as editor include The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, as co-editor, with Tracy K Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, both forthcoming in 2021 (the latter from Vintage).He is the Executive Editor of LitHub, and an Executive Editor at Knopf and an Artist-in-Residence at NYU.

Ru Freeman is an award-winning Sri Lankan and American novelist, poet, editor, and critic, whose work appears internationally and in translation including in the UK Guardian, and the New York Times. She is the author of Sleeping Alone: Stories, and the forthcoming collection of essays, Bon Courage, the novels A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and the editor of the anthologies, Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She teaches creative writing worldwide and directs the Artists Network at Narrative 4.

Assaf Gavron is an acclaimed Israeli writer who has published six novels: Ice, Moving, Almost Dead, Hydromania, The Hilltop and Eighteen Lashes; a collection of short stories, Sex in the Cemetery; and a non-fiction collection of Jerusalem falafel-joint reviews, Eating Standing Up. His fiction has been translated into 12 languages, adapted for the stage at Israel’s national theater, and optioned for movies. He is the recipient of awards in Israel, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Gavron’s latest novel in English, The Hilltop, was published by Scribner in the US in 2014. Son of English immigrants, he grew up in a small village near Jerusalem, and currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. He lived in the US, UK, Canada and Germany.

Ruth Gilligan is a writer and academic from Dublin now based in the UK. She has published five books to date and was the youngest person ever to top the Irish Bestsellers’ List. Her most recent novel, The Butchers, (published as The Butchers’ Blessing in the US) is a literary thriller set in the Irish borderlands during the 1996 BSE crisis. Ruth holds degrees works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. from Cambridge, Yale, UEA and Exeter. She contributes literary reviews to the Irish Independent, Guardian, TLS and LA Review of Books.

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Claire Messud writes, she is “a contemporary Orpheus.” Her recent books include Life in a Country Album, winner of the 2020 Palestine Book Award and finalist for the Foreword Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is a professor at Columbia University, and writes the columns “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine and “Journeys” Publishers Weekly Arabic.

Colm Mac Con Iomaire is an Irish musician and composer. His father’s people came from the Connemara Gaeltacht. On his mother’s side there was classical instrumental music on the violin and piano. His first musical collaboration happened while he was still in school, a contemporary trad band Kíla. Playing in Kíla was accompanied by a long spell busking with band members in Dublin streets. A friendship with another busker Glen Hansard was followed by a leap into the professional mainstream and a new role, playing fiddle with the wildly popular Frames. From there, he was invited to write scores for films and has released his own solo albums. His new record is titled The River Holds Its Breath / Tost Ar An Abhainn.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.

Tania James is the author of three works of fiction, most recently the novel The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf). Tusk was named a Best Book of 2015 by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and NPR, and shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Oxford American, One Story and other venues. James is an associate professor at George Mason University, and lives in Washington DC. Her forthcoming novel, Loot, will be published by Knopf in June 2023. http://taniajames.com.

Beena Kamlani, writer, editor, teacher, has published fiction in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Lifted Brow, World Literature Today, Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, Growing Up Ethnic in America and other anthologies. A short story, “Black Lace,” written at Yaddo in 2021, was published in Epiphany’s Empire-themed issue in summer 2021. Her short story “Zanzibar,” won a Pushcart prize for fiction and a novel-in-progress won the Yeovil Fiction Award (UK). She was a long-time editor in book publishing and worked at Penguin Random House for many years, leaving recently to devote her energies to writing full-time. She taught reading and editing at NYU for eighteen years, earning the university’s award for Excellence in Teaching. Her novel Exile, an exploration of home-going, homecoming, home-leaving, and homelessness, will be published in 2023. 

Phil Klay is an author and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His first book, Redeployment, received the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. His novel Missionaries was named one of the Wall Street Journal’s ten best books of 2020, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. He has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other places. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University.

Jennifer De Leon is author of the YA novel Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Simon & Schuster) and the essay collection White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (UMass Press), which is the recipient of the Juniper Prize. She is also the editor of the anthology Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press). An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Framingham State University and faculty member in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at Bay Path University, she has published prose in over a dozen literary journals including Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and more.

Shaun Leonardo’s performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, arts nonprofit Recess—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.

Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, and recently profiled in the New York Times and CNN. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was recently presented at MICA, MASS MoCA and The Bronx Museum. And his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, recently premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy.

Leonardo recently joined Recess as Co-Director, helping guide the organization’s continuous evolution as an engine of social change. elcleonardo.com

Brian Lindstrom’s award-winning films attempt to reduce stigma and reveal the humanity of people living on the margins. His most recent film was the NYT Op-Doc We Are Forbidden (2019) about the impact of menstrual stigma on women and girls in Nepal, which he made with his wife, Cheryl Strayed. Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse (2013), explores police accountability after members of Portland Police Bureau brutally killed a non-violent man with schizophrenia. Mothering Inside (2015) focuses on the Family Preservation Project’s innovative work uniting incarcerated mothers at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility with their children. Like A Shield (2018) examines the trauma of arrest and incarceration from the point of view of children and mothers separated by the justice system.

Vanessa Manko is the author of The Invention of Exile, which was a finalist for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a Kirkus Reviews’ best book of 2014. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Dance Magazine. Formerly the Dance Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Vanessa trained in ballet at the North Carolina School of the Arts and danced with the Charleston Ballet Theatre. She has taught writing at Wesleyan University, Goucher College, and SUNY Purchase. She currently teaches creative writing at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is an Executive Assistant at Narrative 4.

Colum McCann is President and Co-Founder of Narrative 4, which he began to help shape in 2004. He is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, has been the recipient of many international honours, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. His most recent novel, Apeirogon was a New York Times bestseller, and winner of several international prizes.

Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and winner of a High Plains Book Award. It also was on the longlist for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She currently serves on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council. She teaches at the University of Wyoming and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She is at work on a novel.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015). His work has garnered the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, and three Arab American Book Awards. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, which was selected as a 2018 Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society and named a “highly commended” collection of the year by the Forward Arts Foundation; it went on to receive an Honorable Mention in the Association of Asian American Studies 2020 Book Award for Poetry. Also the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing, he is an alumnus of the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program, and he teaches English at Highland Park High School in Illinois and creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University. He serves as a Master Practitioner with Narrative 4. www.faisalmohyuddin.com

Andres “Jay” Molina grew up in the Dominican Republic where he played minor league ball. In his late teens he left the D.R. for New York’s Lower East Side with dreams of going to college. After serving time in prison, Jay’s plans for a new life were thwarted by a rare lung condition that attacked his vital organs. In 2014 the condition took his ability to walk. Today, Jay is nourishing a passion for filmmaking and animation, and advocating for people with disabilities. His writing has been published in NYU’s Literacy Review and Wheeling & Healing. He’s a recipient of the 2020 NYC Mayor’s Office Safe In The City Grant. An OPEN DOORS Reality Poet, Jay is co-directing the feature-length documentary film Fire Through Dry Grass.

Jennifer Murphy’s memoir, First Responder, follows her journey to becoming an EMT and working during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Mississippi Review, Joyful Noise, Words in Your Face, Uncommon Bonds, and Tell Me Who You Are. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes and Institutional Investor, among other media outlets. As a performer, Jennifer has featured at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and TED. She maintains a parallel career as a crisis manager and investigator. Jennifer graduated with a B.A. from Syracuse University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. from New York University. She is an EMT in Brooklyn.

Joseph O’Neill is the author of four novels, most recently The Dog (2014), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the PG Wodehouse Prize, and Netherland (2008), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Fiction Prize. He has also written a book of short stories, Good Trouble (2018) and a family history, Blood-Dark Track, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.  His stories have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper’s, and his political and literary essays in the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and other publications. Joseph is of Irish-Turkish parentage, grew up mainly in The Netherlands, worked as a lawyer in London, and for many years has lived in New York. He teaches at Bard College.

Chinelo Okparanta’s story collection Happiness, Like Water and her novel Under the Udala Trees have won and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Lambda Literary Award, O. Henry Prize, International Dublin Literary Award, Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, NAACP Image Award, Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and New York Public Library Young Lions Award, among other honors; her most recent novel, Harry Sylvester Bird, was published by HarperCollins/Mariner in July 2022. www.chinelookparanta.com

Rita Omokha is an alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She graduated top of her class and was awarded the institution’s highest awards: The Pulitzer Prizes’ Traveling Fellowship, the Lynton Foundation Award in Book Writing, and the Bill Campbell Award. Her writing on race, social and political issues has appeared in zosmopolitan, The Daily Beast, Teen Vogue, USA Today, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, and WIRED. Her latest enterprise projects: Elle’s America Redefined and Vanity Fair’s They Were Sons examine race in America and police violence against communities of color. Omokha was born in Nigeria, raised in the South Bronx, and lives in Manhattan. Her reporting has been featured on CNN and can be found here. Her Instagram handle is @ritaomokha.

Izhar Patkin is a visual artist known for working in narrative form. His work tells stories and deals with reinventing the structure and technique of visual narrative itself. The results are paintings and sculptures in diverse and innovative media, making imaginative use of materials and highly complex visual metaphors. Patkin’s work is included in many permanent collections, including those of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York: and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; among others. Patkin was born in Israel,1955. He lives and works in New York City.

Ed Pavlić is the author of a dozen books. Among his recent works are: Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes, Another Kind of Madness: A Novel, Let It Be Broke, Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener, Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno, and Visiting Hours at the Color Line. He lives in Athens, GA where he works as Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Take My Hand (Berkley/Penguin Random House 2022). Her previous novels include Wench (2010) and Balm (2015). Dolen has written introductions to a special edition of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (2013), published by Simon & Schuster, as well as Elizabeth Keckly’s Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (2016).  Dolen is the current Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University in Washington, DC.  dolenperkinsvaldez.com

Charles Rice-González born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist, co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hostos Community College – CUNY. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His debut novel Chulito (Magnus Books 2011) has received nearly a dozen awards including a 2013 Stonewall Book Awards – Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association and a “Small Press Highlights” mention from the National Book Critics Circle. He co-edited with Charlie Vazquez, From Macho To Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture/Lethe Press 2011).

Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and author of five books, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian, winner of the
Lenore Marshall Prize and finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. A professor of English, he is inaugural Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden. In this capacity, he leads Quilting Water, a public arts initiative to gather water narratives locally and from around the world. He
has read, taught, and performed widely across four continents and throughout the United States. His newest collection, The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems was released in September 2021.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You and We Cast a Shadow, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize.

Octavia Sexton grew up in the Appalachian tradition of storytelling. With English, Irish and Cherokee ancestors, her stories reflect the melding of these culturally different oral traditions. A talented writer, she has published several short stories and a book of Jack Tales. Along with a degree in history education and years of teaching and performing experience, Octavia presents a variety of educational programs.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. The Prettiest Star was also selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University.

Rob Spillman is an editor at Broadcast from Pioneer Works. He co-founded and edited the seminal literary magazine Tin House, which published from 1999-2019. Tin House was the recipient of the inaugural CLMP Firecracker Award for Magazine of the Year in 2015. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, which was published in 2009. He has guest taught at writing workshops and universities around the world and is currently a lecturer at Columbia University. His memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties, was published by Grove Press in 2016.

Composer, singer-songwriter, actor, author, and activist Sting was born in Newcastle, England before moving to London in 1977 to form The Police with Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. The band released five studio albums, earned six GRAMMY Awards® and two Brits, and was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. As one of the world’s most distinctive solo artists, Sting has received an additional 11 GRAMMY Awards®, two Brits, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, four Oscar nominations, a TONY nomination, Billboard Magazine’s Century Award, and MusiCares 2004 Person of the Year. Throughout his illustrious career, Sting has sold 100 million albums from his combined work with The Police and as a solo artist.

William Sutcliffe is the author of twelve novels, including the international bestseller Are You Experienced? and The Wall, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. He has written for adults, young adults and children, and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. His novel Whatever Makes You Happy was filmed by Netflix under the title Otherhood (starring Patricia Arquette and Angela Bassett). The Gifted, The Talented and Me, was chosen by The Sunday Times as the 2019 Children’s Book of the Year.

TC Tolbert identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, mover, and poet. And, s/he’s a human in love with humans doing human things. S/he is author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014), five chapbooks, and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013). TC was recently awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellowship for his work with trans*, non-binary, and queer folks as Tucson’s Poet Laureate. S/he will be Writer in Residence at Pratt Institute, 2019-2020.

Fayyaz Vellani is the London-born author of Tea with Ms. Tanzania, a novel named “A quintessentially African story that blazes with heart” by Mathangi Subramanian. He lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in The Bookends Review, The F-Word Magazine, and Disability and Society.

Cord J. Whitaker is Associate Professor of English at Wellesley College. Having published widely on medieval literature, the history of race, and today’s white supremacist movements, he is the author of Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Whitaker’s work has appeared in venues such as Politico and National Public Radio’s 1A. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University; has received awards and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other organizations. Whitaker blogs, together with his students, at whatisracialdifference.com, is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Spoke: the blog of the Madeleine K. Albright Institute for Global Affairs, and is one of the lead bloggers at the popular medieval studies blog In the Middle. Whitaker is currently writing a book on how the literature and culture of the European Middle Ages was received and strategically deployed by Black U.S. American writers in the Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth century. https://www.cordwhitaker.com/

Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech. She has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction and is the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College.

Elliott Woods is an Iraq War veteran, journalist, photographer, and host of the National Magazine Award-nominated podcast Third Squad. Since 2008, Woods has reported on conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, environmental crises in Africa and Latin America, immigration, veterans, and the violent overtones of American politics and culture. He is a contributing editor to VQR and a correspondent at Outside, and his work has also appeared in Wired, The New Republic, The New York Times, Businessweek, and The Best American Travel Writing. He is a former Knight-Wallace journalism fellow and is the recipient of a National Magazine Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and a Chairman’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Montana. https://www.elliottwoods.com/index

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, among other honors. She has taught at NYU and Princeton University, and is currently on faculty at Bard College.

Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature and cinema at Harvard University. Lila has contributed criticism, interviews, and essays to a host of publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Le Monde, La Repubblica, and The Paris Review. Lila’s first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, was the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize, delivered by the Center for Fiction, and was published worldwide in thirteen languages. Her forthcoming novel, Of Lovers and Other Madmen, will be published in 2021.