Pushcart Press Reading 2026.

Описание: In what has become a tradition each year, The Writers Studio is honored to celebrate the latest edition - The 50th ! - of the Pushcart Press Best of the Small Presses with readings by (in order of appearance:

Cyrus Cassells is a poet, translator, cultural critic, actor, and professor. His books have earned the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and two Pulitzer Prize nominations. He is the 2025 recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. From 2021 to 2022 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Texas and received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. He is a Regents’ Professor and University Distinguished Professor of English at TXST, where he received the Presidential Excellence Award.

Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian-Danish-American poet, humanitarian, and historian. She is the author of several books, including Echoes in Exile and Spoon and Shrapnel, and the editor of The Poetry of Iranian Women and Seven Valleys of Love. Her poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages, featured in PEN America, Writer’s Digest, The Kenyon Review, PBS, and NPR, and performed at venues including the Tribute World Trade Center, the Smithsonian National Museum, and the Canadian Parliament. A nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Kalbasi has received a United Nations humanitarian award and grants from the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Uche Okonkwo is the author of A Kind of Madness: Stories, Winner of the 2025 High Plains First Book Award, and a Finalist for the 2025 NAACP Image Awards, and the Reading the West Awards. Her stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and Lagos Noir, among others. A former MacDowell Fellow, she is a recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and currently teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include three Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the MFA program at New England College.

Keya Mitra is a professor at Pacific University and a Fulbright Scholar. Her memoir, Almost Born, was a finalist for the 2025 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize. Chapters have won the 2024 Prairie Schooner Nonfiction Prize and The Missouri Review’s Perkoff Prize. Her short story collection, Bad Babies, was a 2024–25 finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, AWP Grace Paley Prize, and Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best New American Voices, Bennington Review, and Southwest Review, and has received the Tobias Wolff Award and a 2018 Best American Short Stories Notable.

Grace Schulman is the recipient of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Poetry and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her ninth book of poems is Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2022. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Baruch College, C.U.N.Y.; editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore; and translator, from the Hebrew, of The Poems of T. Carmi, and co-translator, from the Spanish, of Songs of Cifar, by Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Among her other honors are the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and six Pushcart Prizes.

Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis.