Juniper Literary Festival 2025

Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall

5:00 p.m. — Welcome Reception

6:00–7:00 p.m. — MFA Faculty Reading with Desiree C. Bailey and Gabriel Bump

7:00 p.m. — Reception and Book Signing

7:30 p.m. — Live Lit featuring students from the MFA for Poets and Writers

South College E370 (admitted students only)

11 a.m. — Admitted students Q&A with current students

12 p.m. — Lunch with faculty

1 p.m. —   Campus tour

Herter Hall, 231

3:30–4:30 p.m. — Editors & Publishing Panel

Lily Dolin, Associate Agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc

• Lauren Christensen, editor at the New York Times Book Review, and author of the memoir "Firstborn."
• Nadxieli Nieto, Editorial Director, Algonquin, Co-editor, Gigantic Books, Board Member, Latinx in Publishing
• Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor-in-Chief at Wesleyan University Press

5:00–6:00 p.m. — Alumni Reading featuring Jedediah Berry, Gion Davis, Emilie Menzel, and Okey Ndibe

6:00 p.m. — Reception and Book Signing

Desiree C. Bailey is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. She is the author of What Noise Against the Cane, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize. What Noise Against the Cane was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater, and has work published in the Academy of American Poets, American Short Fiction, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and Callaloo, among other publications. Desiree has a BA from Georgetown University, an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Norman Mailer Center, Kimbilio Fiction, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Poets House, The Conversation, Princeton in Africa and the James Merrill House. She is a recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts award and Poets & Writers’ Amy Award. Desiree was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University from 2022-2024, and is an Assistant Professor in the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Jedediah Berry is the author of The Naming Song, available now from Tor Books. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. His story in cards, The Family Arcana, was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. His Ennie Award-winning tabletop adventure game setting, The Valley of Flowers, was written with Andrew McAlpine and published by Phantom Mill Games. He lives in Western Massachusetts, where he co-runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes.

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award. His second novel, The New Naturals, was a Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book of 2023. He graduated from the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers.

Lauren Christensen is an editor at the New York Times Book Review, and the author of the memoir "Firstborn."

Gion Davis is a trans poet from Española, New Mexico where he grew up on a sheep ranch. His poetry has been featured in HAD, No Tokens, Sprung Formal, The Tiny and others. His debut collection Too Much (2022) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2021 Ghost Peach Press Prize. For the past four years, he has toured and performed with the DIY music collective Clementine Was Right and his contributions to songwriting have been highlighted in publications such as Paste and Stereogum. He graduated with his MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019 and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Lily Dolin joined Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. in 2025, after five years in the publishing department at United Talent Agency. She represents authors in both fiction and nonfiction, including YA, with books ranging from commercial to literary and everything in between. Her list includes New York Times bestsellers, Barnes & Noble book club picks, Book of the Month picks, and Indie Next picks, among others. She loves finding and championing debut voices, especially from underrepresented communities, and is especially passionate about building careers from the ground up. She is actively looking for novels with strong hooks, propulsive plots, dark and offbeat humor, and nuanced female perspectives. She is drawn to sweeping family dramas, strange and unusual women in strange and unusual circumstances, and smart speculative bents. In nonfiction, she is looking for narrative nonfiction, memoirs, or essay collections that are funny, outrageous, shocking, emotional, or all of the above. She particularly loves food stories, true crime, pop culture, and untold history with a feminist angle. Originally from coastal New England, Lily graduated from NYU and still lives in New York City, but tries to surround herself with nature as often as possible.

Emilie Menzel is the author of the book-length lyric The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press, 2024), winner of the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize and named a Debutiful Best Poetry Book of 2024. Her poetry hybridities feature in such journals as the Bennington Review, LitHub, Copper Nickel, and The Offing. She holds an MFA from the UMass Amherst (2019) and serves as the librarian for The Seventh Wave literary community and as a collections librarian at Duke University. Raised on barefoot Georgia summers, she now lives in Durham, North Carolina and online at emiliemenzel.com.

Nadxieli Nieto (she/they) is an editor of literary and upmarket fiction, select nonfiction, and art books, including NYT bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick LA Weather; 2022 Lambda Literary Award finalist My Government Means to Kill Me, Shirley Jackson Award finalists Tiny Nightmares and Tiny Crimes, BCN award-winning Carteles Contra Una Guerra, and others. She is Editorial Director of Algonquin Books. Prior to joining Algonquin, she was an executive editor at Flatiron Books, where her authors included Kaitlyn Greenidge, Manuel Gonzales, Rasheed Newson, María Amparo Escandón, John Manuel Arias, Jessica Hoppe, Monica Brashears, Jean Grae, Wendy Chin-Tanner, Erica Berry, Ben Austen, Marielena Hincapie, and others. Her anthologies, co-edited with Lincoln Michel, have featured work by Carmen Maria Machado, Yuri Herrera, Charles Yu, and Lilliam Rivera, and her collaborative artist books may be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She is the former director of PEN America's Literary Awards, and is on the advisory board of Latinx in Publishing.

Okey Ndibe is the author of two novels, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, a memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction), and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has taught at various universities and colleges, including Brown, St. Lawrence, Trinity College, Connecticut College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). His award-winning journalism has appeared in major newspapers and magazines in the UK, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria, and the US—where he served on the editorial board of the Hartford Courant. He’s completing work on a novel titled Memories Lie In Water.

Suzanna Tamminen is the Director and Editor-in-Chief at Wesleyan University Press, where she has made important acquisitions in poetry, dance, and Connecticut history. She is the sponsoring editor of, among many more titles, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, Rae Armantrout’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Versed, Jean Valentine’s National Book Award winning collection Door in the Mountain, Liz Lerman’s Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance, Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea, and Dan DeLuca’s The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend.