2025 Featured Writers, Artists, and Scholars

Cynthia Leitich Smith — Cherie Dimaline, winner of the NSKl Prize

2025 NSK Prize Laureate

Cherie Dimaline (b. 1975) is an internationally bestselling author and the 2025 winner of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s & Young Adult Literature. Her book The Marrow Thieves was named by Time magazine one of the best YA books of all time and won the Governor General’s Award and the Kirkus Prize. Her novel Empire of Wild was named Indigo’s 2019 Best Book and is being adapted into an opera. Hunting by Stars was a 2022 American Indian Library Association Honor Book, and her novel Venco debuted at number one on Canadian bestseller lists. Other recent titles include Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, Anthology of Monsters, and Into the Bright Open. Cherie is a member of Canada’s Georgian Bay Métis community and writes/produces for screen and stage.

Threa Almontaser is the author of the poetry collection The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf, 2021), nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the NAACP Image Award for Poetry, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her debut won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the inaugural Maya Angelou Book Award, the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award, and the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. She is a recipient of writing fellowships from Duke University, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Program. She earned her MFA from North Carolina State University and teaches English to immigrants and refugees in her area.

Maya Arad is the author of twelve books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London. For the past twenty years, she has lived in California, where she is Writer in Residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. The Hebrew Teacher (New Vessel Press), translated by Jessica Cohen, is her first book to appear in English translation and won the National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation for 2025. Her novel Happy New Years, also translated by Cohen, will appear in translation in August this year.

Mexican dancer, choreographer, and teacher Alma Borges is currently pursuing her MFA in modern dance performance at the University of Oklahoma. She also holds a BFA in dance performance from the Centro de Estudios Superiores Sisti. Additionally, she has taken classes with such renowned artists as Daniel Fetecua, Dante Puleio, Roxanne Lyst, Marion Sparber, Raúl Támez, among others. As a choreographer, Ms. Borges work’s Vulnerability of the Canvas and Emptiness have been chosen to be part of the Primate Escénico International Dance Festival and the Pigmentos Dance Festival. As a performer, she has worked with producers like Danza Tres for the inauguration of the volleyball world championship in 2023, Pandora Productions in the musical Pica, Pica, Atayde Circus, and as a former dancer in “CCC” Contemporary Dance Company from 2019 to 2022.

Scholar and poet Polina Barskova is the author of fifteen collections of poems and four books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrei Bely Prize in 2015 and came out in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology, Written in the Dark (UDP), and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press), and AirRaid (Ugly Duckling Presse). Barskova also authored a monograph, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2016) and multiple edited volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad. Barskova teaches Russian literature at UC Berkeley.

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and Corsair/Little Brown in the UK. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech.

Laura Harjo is chair of the Department of Native American Studies, an associate professor, and the Coca-Cola Endowed Professor at the University of Oklahoma. A Mvskoke scholar teaching Indigenous planning, community development, and Indigenous feminisms, her scholarly inquiry is at the intersection of geography and critical ethnic studies with “community” as an analytic focus. Dr. Harjo’s research and teaching centers on three areas: imbuing complexity to Indigenous space and place; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives and antiviolence; and community-based knowledge production. She is the author of Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which employs Mvskoke epistemologies and Indigenous feminisms to grapple with a community praxis of futurity.

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and executive director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Minor Detail,by Adania Shibli, was a finalist for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations have been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literature, and the TA First Translation Prize. Jaquette’s work has been supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, a CASA Fellowship, and several English PEN Translates Awards, and she has served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translated Literature, among other prizes. Formerly, she was executive director of the American Literary Translators Association.

Beena Kamlani’s debut novel, The English Problem, was published in January 2025. She has published work in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, Growing up Ethnic in America, and World Literature Today. Her short story “Zanzibar” won a Pushcart Prize, and a novel-in-progress won the Yeovil Fiction Award (UK). She has won fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, and other residencies. As a former senior editor at Viking Penguin, she worked with Saul Bellow and a wide range of other authors, among them Robert Fagles on his translations of Homer and Virgil. New York University, where she taught for twenty years, gave her an award for teaching excellence.

A British Palestinian author and English literature graduate, Shereen Malherbe is an award-winning author of novels and a children’s book series. Her books have been acquired by international publishers and are being translated into multiple languages. She is recognized for her work with various media organizations as an advocate for authentic Palestinian voices. Her Palestinian novel, Yassini Girls, has received wide acclaim, further cementing her reputation as an important literary voice.

Iheoma Nwachukwu has been a professional chess player, an underground battle rapper, and a kindergarten teacher. He has won fellowships from the Michener Center, the Chinua Achebe Center, and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Nwachukwu’s writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Oxford American, Electric Literature, Southern Review, and other venues. He’s a Flannery O’ Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, and his debut, Japa and Other Stories, was published last year by UGA Press.

Alejandro Puyana is a Venezuelan writer living in Austin, Texas, where he received his MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers. His work has appeared in Tin House, Southern Review, Electric Lit, Texas Monthly, and Time, among others. His short story “Hands of Dirty Children” won American Short Fiction’s inaugural Halifax Ranch Prize and was selected for Best American Short Stories. His debut novel, Freedom Is a Feast (Little, Brown, 2024), was awarded the Westport Prize for Literature.

Dustin Tahmahkera is the Wick Cary Endowed Chair in Native American Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Born in the Comanche Nation capital of Lawton, Oklahoma, Dr. Tahmahkera is a parent of four, playwright and performer of Comanche-centric theater, and teaches Indigenous media and sound at OU. Currently, he is a Generation Now Playwriting Fellow through the Mellon Foundation. He is jointly commissioned by Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles and the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis to write the full-length play Comanche Girl on the Moon. His current book project in Indigenous sound studies is tentatively titled “Becoming Sound: Sonic Quests of Healing in Indian Country.” He also works as a film consultant, voiceover artist, on-camera interviewee, and educational curriculum writer.

Kimberly Wieser-Weryackwe is undergraduate director and an associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma as well as an affiliated faculty member with Native American Studies and Environmental Studies. She also directs the activities of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas at OU. Dr. Wieser serves on the board of the OU Arts and Humanities Forum and is one of the co-chairs for the NCTE/CCCC American Indian Caucus. Her book Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2017, and she is currently editing Indians, Oil, and Water: Indigenous Ecologies and Literary Resistance/Poetry and Prose Honoring the 25thAnniversary American Indian & Indigenous Storytelling Literary Festival. She is a playwright, screenwriter, and actress, with two of her most recent roles being on AMC’s The Son and in the independent film Thistle Creek.

2025 NSK Prize Laureate

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