2026 Neustadt Jury

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.

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. 

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.