On March 25th at 7:00pm, in honor of ten years of publishing and cultivating new voices, please join The Common‘s special events team for an evening devoted to emerging talents! Celebrate with poets and prose writers Ama Codjoe, Sara Elkamel, LaToya Faulk, Ben Shattuck, Cleo Qian, and Ghassan Zeineddine. This event will take place virtually via Zoom.

This inaugural festival features readings and conversation, and aims to to raise scholarship funds for the magazine’s Young Writers Program. All contributions will be matched by the Whiting Foundation.

Register for the event, hosted by Tess Taylor, Katherine Vaz, and JinJin Xu, here! 

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Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2022.She has been awarded support from Cave Canem, Jerome, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Crosstown Arts, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell. Her recent poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Bronx Council on the Arts. Read her Issue 18 poem, “Burying Seeds,” here. 

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, and New York City. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Elkamel’s poems have appeared in The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, Four Way Review, The Boiler, Memorious, wildness, Nimrod International Journal, and as part of the anthologies Best New Poets 2020, Halal If You Hear Me and 20.35 Africa, among other publications. Elkamel was named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal, and a finalist in Narrative Magazine‘s 30 Below Contest. Read her Issue 19 poem, “The Way Cacti Quiver,” here.

LaToya Faulk has a BA in English Literature and a MA in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University. She is a third-year MFA student at the University of Mississippi. Her work has been published in Scalawag, Amherst College’s The Common, and Splinter Magazine‘s Think Local series. She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her two children. Read her Issue 20 essay, “In Search of a Homeplace,” here. 

Ben Shattuck (b. 1984) is a graduate and former Teaching-Writing Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the director of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency and the curator of the Dedee Shattuck Gallery. He is the recipient of a PEN America Best Debut Short Story Award and a Pushcart Prize. His writing can be found in the Harvard Review, The Common, the Paris Review Daily, Lit Hub, Kinfolk Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other publications. His essay collection—following Henry David Thoreau’s walks throughout New England—will be published by Tin House in May 2022. He lives on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs a general store built in 1793. Read his Pushcart Prize-winning Issue 16 story, “The History of Sound,” here. 

Cleo Qian is a writer based in New York. Read her Issue 17 story, “Wild Oranges,” here. 

Ghassan Zeineddine is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he teaches Arab American literature and creative writing. His fiction has appeared and/or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Witness, Pleiades, Fiction International, The Common, Epiphany, and the Iron Horse Literary Review, among other places. He is currently co-editing the creative nonfiction anthology Voices of Arab Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2021). He lives with his wife and daughter in Dearborn. Read his Issue 17 story, “The Reincarnates,” here.