Hawthornden Brooklyn in Conversation: Fall 2025 Writers in Residence

Current Hawthornden Brooklyn writers in residence Ching-In Chen, Joshua Garcia, Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, Jared Jackson and Melody Razak 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 YnJvb2tseW4gfCBoYXd0aG9ybmRlbiAhIG9yZw==. You can learn more about Hawthornden Brooklyn here.

Ching-In Chen

Ching-In Chen is author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems; and Shiny City (forthcoming November 2025) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council for Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on Seattle City of Literature’s board. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice and currently serve as the Poet Laureate of the city of Redmond, Washington.

Joshua Garcia

Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024). His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario. An O. Henry Award winning author, her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Dark, PRISM international, swamp pink and elsewhere. Her short story collection The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award and was the runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She recently completed her debut novel, Other Evolutions.

Jared Jackson

Jared Jackson is a writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator born in Hartford, CT. He has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Center for Fiction, Baldwin for the Arts, Instituto Sacatar, and Loghaven, among others. His fiction has been published in The Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, and n+1, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. His debut linked story collection, Locals, is forthcoming from Viking Books.

Melody Razak

Melody is a British Iranian writer who lives in Brighton. Melody has had short stories published in the Mechanics Institute Review, the Bath Short Story Anthology and the Brick Lane Short Story Prize. She has also written for the Observer Food Monthly and The Sunday Times. In 2021, Melody was selected as one of the Observer’s ‘Ten Debut Novelists’ for her novel, Moth, which went on to be shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Desmond Elliot prize, and was selected as the readers jury for the Festival du Premier Roman. Melody is currently writer in residence at Birkbeck University.

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