The Maris Review

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Chicago with her family. Her story collection is called Bliss Montage.

Recommended Reading:

Skinship by Yoon Choi • Out There by Kate Folk

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Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard. Her new novel is called The Furrows.

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Jasmine Guillory is a New York Times bestselling author; her novels include The Wedding Date, the Reese's Book Club selection The Proposal, and By The Book. She is a frequent book contributor on The Today Show. She lives in Oakland, California. Her latest is called Drunk On Love.

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Bobby Finger is a writer and co-host of the popular celebrity and entertainment podcast, Who? Weekly. A Texas native, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Old Place is his debut novel.

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Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, criminal justice, and other subjects. In 2022, she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. A 2019 national fellow at New America, she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her work on this book, Strangers To Ourselves. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Nona Willis Aronowitz is the sex and love columnist for Teen Vogue. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Cut, Elle, Vice, The Washington Post, and Playboy, among many others. She is the coauthor of Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism. She is also the editor of an award-winning anthology of her mother Ellen Willis’s rock criticism, called Out of the Vinyl Deeps, as well as a comprehensive collection of Willis’s work, The Essential Ellen Willis, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

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Miriam Parker is the associate publisher of Ecco and the author of The Shortest Way Home and Room and Board. She has an MFA in creative writing from UNC Wilmington and a BA in English from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and spaniel, Leopold Bloom.

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Megan Giddings is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Her first novel, Lakewood, was one of New York Magazine's top ten books of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, a Michigan Notable book for 2021, a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, and was a finalist for an L.A. Times Book Prize. Her second novel is called Women Could Fly. 

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Steven W. Thrasher, PHD holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. A columnist for Scientific American, his writing has been widely published by The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic, Journal of American History, BuzzFeed News, Esquire, and New York. In 2019, Out magazine named him one of the 100 most influential and impactful people of the year, and the Ford Foundation awarded him a grant for Creativity and Free Expression. An alumnus of media jobs with Saturday Night Live, the HBO film The Laramie Project, and the NPR StoryCorps project, Dr. Thrasher has also been a staff writer for The Village Voice and a columnist for The Guardian. He holds a PhD in American Studies and divides his time between Chicago and New York. The Viral Underclass is his first book.

Recommended Reading:

The Prophets by Robert Jones • Heavy by Kiese Laymon • Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam • The Women’s House of Detention by Hugh Ryan • Under the Skin by Linda Villarosa • On Critical Race Theory by Victor Ray

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Elaine Castillo, named one of "30 of the Planet's Most Exciting Young People" by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her new essay collection is called How To Read Now and I barely know where to start.

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