We’re thrilled to announce that Megan Fernandes, Leora (Lee) Kava, Lisa Ko, Mariah Rigg, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Madeleine Thien will join us as Faculty at the 2026 Kundiman Retreat, taking place this summer at Pratt Institute's Brooklyn Campus in New York City.
During the Retreat, Faculty members will be leading craft classes in either poetry and fiction for Retreat attendees, known as Kundiman Fellows. Each Fellow will also attend a mentorship meeting where they can speak with a Faculty member about craft, career questions, and the writing life. Our hope is that these craft classes and mentorship meetings inspire Kundiman Fellows to forge deeper relationships to their artistic processes and encounter their work with renewed focus and energy.
We’re honored to welcome these esteemed writers to the 2026 Kundiman Retreat.
2026 RETREAT POETRY FACULTY
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, among others. Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023) was named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Vogue, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, LitHub, etc. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Yaddo Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, etc. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Leora (Lee) Kava is an Assistant Professor of Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies, housed within the department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a poet and musician of mixed, Tongan descent, and dedicates her work to her family, community, students, and genealogies of creativity and liberation within and beyond Oceania. Alongside Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Craig Santos Perez, she co-edited the anthology Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (UH Press) and has reviews of Pacific Islander poetry in Poetry Magazine and The Contemporary Pacific. Her writing can be found in Amerasia Journal, KorePress.org, The Hawaiʻi Review, Academy of American Poets, and Orion Magazine, with recordings available on podcasts It’s Lit with PhDJ (based in Honolulu) and For The Qultures (based in the San Francisco Bay Area).
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist, and the author of Terror Counter (Deep Vellum, 2025) and Antigone. Velocity. Salt. (Deep Vellum, 2027).
2026 RETREAT FICTION FACULTY
Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.
Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. She is the author of the short story collection EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD (Ecco/HarperCollins), which was named a best book of 2025 by Esquire, Electric Lit, Debutiful, and Chicago Review of Books, receiving praise from Vulture, Oprah Daily, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, Ms. Magazine, and more. Her hybrid creative nonfiction chapbook, ALL HAT, NO CATTLE was published by Bull City Press in 2023. Rigg is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Mount, Oregon Literary Arts, Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, and Lambda Literary. Her work has been featured in The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, The Common, Joyland, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver and lives in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of five books, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize, and won the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Book of Records which was named a book of the year by Time, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The New York Public Library, included on President Obama’s list of favourite books of 2025, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Madeleine’s novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages, and her essays and stories can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Since 2018, she has been teaching in the MFA Program at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.