J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of Lush Lives (an inaugural title of Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic), the Audible Original The Groves, and Meet Me in Madrid, written under the pseudonym Verity Lowell. A James Baldwin fellow at MacDowell and Bread Loaf Contributor in Nonfiction, she received a PhD in the history of art from UC Berkeley and teaches visual culture–with a focus on race, queerness, and gender–at Bennington College in Vermont.

Sponsored by The Puknat Literary Endowment, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Laurie Sain Endowment, The Humanities Institute, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and Two Birds Books (where the writers’ books are available for purchase)