Alumni

Temporary People (Restless Books, Brooklyn) by Deepak Unnikrishnan is the winner of its publisher’s inaugural Immigrant Writing Prize. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.

Ama Asantewa Diaka is the author of Woman, Eat Me Whole: Poems (HarperCollins, 2022). Diaka's book someone birthed them broken is forthcoming this April. Diaka is also the founder of Tampered Press, a new platform for writers and artists in Ghana.

Gabriel Bump's Everywhere You Don't Belong is currently being adapted for television and won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award. The New Naturals (Algonquin 2023) is a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book and a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year. 

Danielle Dutton created Dorothy, a publishing project and award-winning feminist press dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction. Her books include Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press/Prototype UK, 2024), Margaret the First (Catapult/Scribe UK 2016), SPRAWL (Wave, 2018), Here Comes Kitty (Siglio, 2015), and Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky, 2007).

Aja Monet is a poet, vocalist, and composer. Her debut studio album, when the poems do what they do, was released in 2023.

Colin Winnette, author of Users, is a finalist for the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters was published by Fantagraphics (2017). Ferris is the recipient of many awards: 2017 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel, 2017 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Graphic Novel, 2018 Lynd Ward Prize for Best Graphic Novel of the Year, 2018 Eisner Award for Best Writer/Artist, and the 2019 Grand prix de la critique ACBD.

Watch Ferris in conversation with SAIC.

Tricia Park received a Fulbright in South Korea to explore the connection between music, literature, and Korean American Identity. 

Jose Nateras is a screenwriter, novelist, and playwright. As an actor, stage and TV credits include Showtime's The Chi, NBC's Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D., and Fox's Proven Innocent. Nateras published a novel called Testament (Ninestar Press, 2019) and wrote a full-length screenplay, the horror/comedy Departing Seniors.  

Jac Jemc won the 2023 Guggenheim Award for Fiction. Jemc is the author of False Bingo: Stories, (MCD x FSG Originals, 2019), The Grip of It: A Novel (FSG, 2017), A Different Bed Every Time (Dzanc Books, 2014), and My Only Wife, (Dzanc Books, 2012).

Rachel (Slotnick) Robbins' historical romance novel The Sound of a Thousand Stars will be published October 2024 by Alcove Press. She is a commissioned muralist for Chicago’s 35th, 39th, 46th, and 47th wards and her work has appeared in Mad Hat, Thrice Fiction, Driftwood Press, After Hours, Rain Taxi, Newfound, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. Robbins won Rhino Poetry’s Founder’s Prize and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015 and 2017. She is the author of In Lieu of Flowers, available through Tortoise Books.

Cynthia Pelayo is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and International Latino Book Award-winning author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, and The Shoemaker’s Magician. Loteria, her thesis at SAIC, was called by Esquire one of the "Best Horror Books of 2023." Her Forgotten Sisters (Thomas and Mercer, 2024) and other works are reviewed in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Review of Books, and more.

Iliana Reagan's second book, Fieldwork, is critically acclaimed by Publisher’s Weekly.