Sasha Hom, winner of the 2026 Vermont Book Award for fiction, Lucy Ives, a poet and 2026 Guggeheim Fellow, and Shingai Njeri Kagunda, a Kenyan speculative literature writer, will share a reading and conversation about their newest work.

Sasha Hom - Sidework

Sasha Hom's Sidework is a lyric, page-turning novella about a homeless Korean adoptee and mother of four. During her busy Sunday shift waiting tables, her customers— rock stars, locals, and the Grim Reaper himself— bring her face to face with larger issues of motherhood, suicide, environmental degradation, death, and belonging. Intricately woven, lyric, and atmospherically layered, Hom's debut marries the mystic and mythic with the mundane while taking on issues of immigration, colonization, climate change, homophobia, motherhood, and adoption.

Lucy Ives - three six five: prompts, acts, divinations

Though there are 365 exercises for writing in this book, three six five is not simply a book of writing exercises. It is a "how-to" book of questions rather than answers, a diary of contemplation and imagination, an ars poetica of expanding possibility. Tracing the lineage of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Lucy Ives here offers encouragement, candor and a deep appreciation for the vagaries, wonders and challenges of writing life.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda - & This is How to Stay Alive

In & This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Nyokabi’s world unravels after her brother Baraka’s death by suicide. When an eccentric auntie gives Nyokabi a potion that sends her back in time to when Baraka was still alive, it becomes her only goal to keep him that way. Nyokabi learns that storytellers may be the carriers of time, but defying the past comes with its own repercussions.

SASHA WOL-SOON HOM was born in Korea and adopted by a Chinese American family from Oakland, CA. She is the recipient of a Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series Award and a Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing. She’ s received support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Vermont Arts Council. Her work has appeared in The Millions, Kweli Journal, Exposition Review and elsewhere.

SHINGAI NJERI KAGUNDA is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. She has work in or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Baffling Magazine. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive was published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts. Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.

LUCY IVES is a novelist and critic. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, and Vogue, among other journals. She lives in Vermont and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at Middlebury.