Fall 2024 Readers and Presenters

Anjali Singh

Axton Talk on Literary Publishing:
September 12, 7:00 pm
Chao Auditorium

Axton Discusion on Literary Editing:
September 13, 10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Bingham Humanities (HUM), Room 300

Anjali Singh founded her agency in 2024. Most recently, she worked as a literary agent at Ayesha Pande Literary for nine years; she has also worked as an editor at Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon + Schuster and as Editorial Director of Other Press. She is best known for having championed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis after stumbling across it on a visit to Paris. She has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers and among the literary novelists whose careers she helped launch are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Hunt, Saleem Haddad and Nawaaz Ahmed. She focuses on literary fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction as well as representing graphic novel writers and illustrators across all age ranges.

Fawkes Jen

Jen Fawkes

Axton Reading:
Oct. 10, 7:00 p.m.
Bingham Poetry Room (Ekstrom Library)

Axton Master Class (Fiction):
Oct. 11, 10 a.m. to noon
Bingham Humanities (HUM), Room 300

Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife, a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and Foreword INDIES gold medalist, and Tales the Devil Told Me, a World Fantasy Award finalist and Largehearted Boy Favorite Story Collection of 2021. Her fiction won the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize and has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, the Iowa Review, swamp pink, and others. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize in fabulist fiction, Fawkes lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her debut novel, Daughters of Chaos, called "ferociously, radiantly compelling" by Kelly Link and a "dazzling synthesis of history, myth, and sheer invention" by Charles Yu, is coming in July 2024 from Abrams.

Layli Long Soldier

(in partnership with the Speed Art Museum

Poetry Reading:
Nov. 7, 5:30 p.m.
Speed Art Museum

Axton Generative Writing Session:
Nov. 8, 10 a.m. to noon
Speed Art Museum

Layli Long Soldierearned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.