Hawthornden Brooklyn in Conversation

Past Hawthornden writers in residence Yahya Ashour, Hala Alyan, Shira Erlichman and Leslie McIntosh will read and discuss their work. Taylor & Co. Books will have the authors' books available for sale.

Doors open at 6:00 PM. Space is limited.

If you will need accessible seating, or have any other questions, please email [email protected]. You can learn more about Hawthornden Brooklyn here.

Yahya Ashour

Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and an award-winning author. Born on April 22, 1998, he is currently based in California. He is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book A Gaza of Siege & Genocide, published by Mizna in 2024. Ashour's portfolio also includes three books for children and young adults in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Arrowsmith Journal. His poetry manuscript-in-progress received an honorable mention from the Miami Book Fair's Emerging Writer Fellowship. He has read poetry at over 50 U.S. organizations and universities, including Harvard and Stanford. His poetry has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish and Bengali. He was the 2025 author-in-residence at UCLA and currently teaches at Pitzer of the Claremont Colleges. You can visit his website here.

Hala Nafez Alyan

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses — winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize — and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. Her debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

Shira Erlichman

Shira Erlichman is a writer, visual artist, and musician. She is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Odes to Lithium and the author-illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold: A Friendship Book. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and PBS, among others. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and is the founder of In Surreal Life, a global online creativity school. She has been awarded the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe, the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency, and a MacDowell Residency, among others. She was a finalist for the Lambda Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

Leslie McIntosh

Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) chiefly explores and explodes the morphologies and hermeneutics of AAVE, with an eye toward the pragmatic language of neurodiverse Black folk, among other things. Leslie’s debut volume of poetry, within-group variance, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2025 Changes Book Prize and is forthcoming from Changes Press in Fall 2026. Leslie has received grants and fellowships from Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hawthornden Foundation, Jersey City Arts Council, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, Zoeglossia, and more. Leslie’s poems have appeared in Adi Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Leslie lives on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, presently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.

Host or Publisher Hawthornden Brooklyn