2025 - Gina Caison
Gina Caison is the Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature at Georgia State University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. From 2020-22, she served as president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and during the 2020-21 academic year, she was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest.
Her first book, “Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies” (UGA Press, 2018) won the 2019 C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book in southern literary studies. Along with Lisa Hinrichsen and Stephanie Rountree, she is co-editor of “Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television” (LSU Press, 2017) and “Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South” (LSU Press, 2021). Their next edited collection, “Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South out of Region,” is forthcoming with LSU Press for publication in 2026. She also serves as an associate general editor of the Broadview Anthology of American Literature.
In addition to these projects, Caison’s work has appeared in academic journals including The Global South, Mississippi Quarterly, Native South, and PMLA. She has been a short-term research fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the UNC Southern Historical Collection, and she has participated in NEH-sponsored programs at the Newberry Library, UNC-Chapel Hill’s American Indian Center, and Georgia College & State University’s Flannery O’Connor Collection.
2024 - Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” an Oprah Book Club selection, “Krik? Krak!” a National Book Award finalist, “The Farming of Bones,” “The Dew Breaker,” “Brother, I’m Dying,” “Create Dangerously,” “Claire of the Sea Light,” “The Art of Death,” and “Everything Inside,” a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir, and Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for children and young adults: “Anacaona,” “Behind the Mountains,” “Eight Days,” “The Last Mapou,” “Mama's Nightingale,” “Untwine,” “My Mommy Medicine,” and a travel narrative, “After the Dance.” Her memoir, “Brother, I'm Dying,” was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.
She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” fellow, the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize, the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award, the 2011 Bocas Nonfiction Prize and 2020 Bocas Fiction Prize, the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, a two-time winner of The Story Prize, and the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her essay collection, “We’re Alone,” was published in September 2024. She teaches at Columbia University.
