05/20/2026
📝 Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase tomorrow, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP using the link in our bio.
Learn more about our Final Prose Judges for the Luminarts Fellowship in Creative Writing:
✒️ Naeem Murr is the author of three previous novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book, The Genius of the Sea, and The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Commonwealth Writersʼ Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His new novel, Every Exit Brings You Home, was published by W.W. Norton in February 2026. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, among his awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.
✒️ Ploi Pirapokin is a Thai-born, Hong Kong raised, speculative fiction writer and lyric essayist, whose writing explores the personal impact of postcolonial poetics, imperialism in Asia, and our relationship with biology. She sits on the board for Khōréō magazine, Hivemind: Global Speculative Fiction Magazine, Kearny Street Workshop, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work is featured in https://zurl.co/vdFgL, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Art and Craft of Stories from Asia: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, and Speculative Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology both from Bloomsbury Academic, and more. She has received grants and fellowships from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Creative Capacity Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, Kundiman and others. A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she is currently the writing coordinator at the James Welch Native Lit Festival, and teaches at the Writers Program at UCLA Extension, https://zurl.co/V4dIJ, and as part of the Core Faculty at Story Studio Chicago.
