New Voices

This series, sponsored by the College, brings early-career writers to campus to read their work alongside student writers from the University of Chicago.  The faculty of the Program in Creative Writing invite writers who have published one or two books; there are separate events for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The Program administers a call for submissions from students, who must submit 3–5 pages of their original work. The visiting writers will each select a student from this pool of anonymized submissions to introduce and to read before them at their respective events. The selected student writers are invited to a celebratory dinner with the visiting writer and Creative Writing faculty members after their reading. In addition, each of the selected students will receive a prize of $100. The New Voices Series fosters excitement and builds community among the students while providing an occasion for students to share the stage with working writers and for faculty to celebrate their students' work.

In February 2026, our visiting writers include Carina del Valle Schorske (New Voices in Nonfiction, Feb. 10, 2026), Alex Foster (New Voices in Fiction, Feb. 17, 2026), and Jake Rose (Phoenix Poets New Voices in Poetry, Feb. 24, 2026).

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer, translator, and wannabe backup dancer. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. It was recently awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. She writes about Caribbean culture, literary politics, diasporic dramas, and the songs she can’t stop singing to herself, and essays have been published many places including The Believer, The Cut, The Point, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is now a contributing writer. Her profile of Bad Bunny was featured on CBS, and her story about grief and belonging on apocalyptic dance floors won a National Magazine Award. As a translator, del Valle Schorske focuses on Puerto Rican poetry, especially the work of Marigloria Palma. Her own poetry has been featured in a variety of small journals and anthologies and has been supported by fellowships from CantoMundo, MacDowell, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has a PhD in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University. 

Alex Foster graduated from the University of Chicago in 2017, majoring in economics with a minor in creative writing, before getting his MFA in creative writing from New York University. His debut novel,  Circular Motion, was published in May 2025 by Grove Atlantic. It was  longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. In addition to writing, he  is a book editor at Macmillan with the Holt and Metropolitan imprints, where he has worked on the publication of  New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning literary fiction and political nonfiction.

Jake Rose is a poet, artist, and educator living in California’s Central Valley. Rose teaches at the University of California, Davis, and has published poems in West Branch, The Seventh Wave, and  Adult Groceries, among other journals.  JOAN, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poets Book Prize from the University of Chicago Press, is forthcoming in March 2026. Other projects include  The Art of the Death, a book-length erasure poem;  Spectropoetics, a land-based project in interspecies writing; and The Month Books, a series of handmade chapbooks exploring chronic illness and hybrid form. 

2024
Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Justin St. Germain
Cleo Qian

2023
Tracy Fuad
Kate Folk
Raquel Gutiérrez

2022
Julia May Jonas
Hasanthika Sirisena
Wendy Xu

2021
Divya Victor
Rebecca Sacks
Anna Della Subin

2019
Halle Butler
Sawako Nakayasu
Francisco Cantú

2018
Cody-Rose Clevidence
RO Kwon 
Joshua Rivkin

2017
Catherine Lacey
GC Waldrep
Mary Norris

2016
Margaret Ross 
Jeannie Vanasco
Chinelo Okparanta