The 2026 Firecracker Awards Judges

Stacie Shannon Denetsosie is a citizen of the Navajo Nation; her clans are Todích’íí’nii (Bitterwater Clan), born for Naakaii (Mexican Clan). A fiction writer and poet, she was named a 2025 National Book Foundation 5 Under 25 Honoree. Her debut short story collection, The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories (Torrey House Press, 2023), was named a 2024 Southwest Book of the Year, a Foreword INDIES Book Award winner, and a 2024 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize finalist. She received her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her MA from Utah State University. Originally from Kayenta, Arizona, she currently resides in Northern Utah.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the author of Obligations to the Wounded: Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), which won the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction. Kalimamukwento’s other books include The Shipikisha Club: A Novel (forthcoming from Dzanc Books, 2026), Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies: Poems (Wayfarer Books, 2025), unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press, 2022), and The Mourning Bird (Jacana, 2019). Her creative work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Contemporary Verse 2, Isele Magazine, Kweli, and Overland, and on Netflix, and elsewhere. Kalimamukwento founded Ubwali Literary Magazine, co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop, and serves as a mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Mikey LaFave is the operations manager (among several other hats they wear) at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. Previously, LaFave taught writing and British literature as a graduate student at the University of Georgia. They appreciate the strange and unusual in fiction, films, and life and have been known to attempt to read a book squinting in a corner during a band’s set change.

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (West Virginia University Press, 2022), was named a best LGBTQ+ memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the New England Book Award, and the Weatherford Award. She lives in Boston.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, and community and cultural organizer. She is the director of popular education at Press On, a Southern movement media collective. Her debut book, Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast (Hub City Press, 2024), was recognized by Poets & Writers Magazine as a 2024 top nonfiction debut and by Publishers Weekly as a 2024 “Big Indie Book.” A finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing and the Georgia Author of the Year award, Come By Here has also been featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, NPR, and PBS. She lives in Atlanta/traditional Muscogee territory.

Riley Rennhack is the bookstore manager and book buyer at Deep Vellum Books, the storefront and headquarters of Deep Vellum Books & Publishing, a nonprofit literary arts organization and publisher of literature in translation located in Dallas, Texas.

José Angel Araguz, Ph.D., is the author of the lyric memoir Ruin & Want (Sundress Publications, 2023), as well as the poetry collections Rotura (Black Lawrence Press, 2022) and La esperanza espera (Valparaiso Ediciones, 2023). He blogs and reviews books at The Influence, and his poetry and prose have appeared in The Acentos Review, Oxidant | Engine, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and Split This Rock, among others. He is an associate professor at Suffolk University and a faculty member at large for the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.

Danny Caine is the author most recently of Jewish American Dream (2025), winner of the inaugural Sarabande Chapbook Prize. He’s also written four poetry collections, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why (Microcosm Publishing, 2023) and How to Resist Amazon and Why (Microcosm Publishing, 2022). He’s a former owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, winner of Publishers Weekly’s 2022 Bookstore of the Year award. His poetry has appeared in Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, HAD, LitHub, and The Slowdown. He lives in Ohio.

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place (2025), winner of the 2023 Alice James Award and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. She is also coeditor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024). A recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Award, she was a 2019-2020 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017-2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, she is a critic-at-large for Poetry Northwest, and she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community.

Mandana Chaffa is a writer, editor, and critic whose work has appeared in a variety of publications and venues. She is founder and editor of Nowruz Journal and an editor-at-large at Chicago Review of Books. She serves on the boards of Brooklyn Poets; the National Book Critics Circle, where she is vice president of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize; and The Flow Chart Foundation, where she is president of the board. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

Joyce Chen is a writer, editor, and community builder who draws inspiration from many coastal cities. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, Poets & Writers Magazine, Lit Hub, Narratively, and Slant’d, among others; and she contributes book reviews to Orion and Hyphen magazines. Chen is the coeditor of the anthology Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2026. The most recent Hugo House writer-in-residence and a 2019-2020 Hugo House Fellow, she has also received support from Artist Trust, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Centrum, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, and VONA. She is the executive director of the Seventh Wave, an arts and literary nonprofit that champions art in the space of social issues.

Emily Nemens is the author of the novels Clutch, forthcoming from Tin House in February 2026, and The Cactus League (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her stories have appeared in BOMB, The Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere. Nemens spent a dozen years editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review and serving as coeditor of The Southern Review. She held the Picador Professorship at the University of Leipzig and teaches fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars.