The New Voices series brings emerging writers to campus to read with a University of Chicago student. The faculty chooses writers that have published one or two books. We have a separate event for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry. These are particularly special events for our Program because it is one of the opportunities for our students to showcase their work.
Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), and has been named notable by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. They have received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. They are currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and a member of the editorial board at Great Circle Books an imprint of University of North Carolina Press. Their short story collection, The Other One, (The University Massachusetts Press) won the Juniper Prize and was released in 2016. Their essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books, 2022) won the Gournay Prize and is a finalist for a 2022 Lambda Literary Award.
Kihana Wilson is a third-year in the College from Houston, Texas majoring in Astrophysics with a minor in Creative Writing. She is involved in cosmology and astrophysics research at institutes here at Uchicago and at Stanford. Although she is pursuing a career in STEM, she has been a writer all her life. Her most frequent form is creative nonfiction, but she later plans to write speculative fiction and sci-fi novels. Outside of research and academics, she works part-time as a math instructor for Math Circles of Chicago and is a newly minted science writer for The Triple Helix. Her hobbies and interests include martial arts, weightlifting, slam poetry, content creation, and science communication. She is passionate about many social and environmental justice issues but hopes to use her platform for representation and advocacy to help make science more accessible to underrepresented groups traditionally excluded from STEM fields.