Letters Festival Kick-Off Event at Lostintheletters

Join us for a the Letters Festival Kick-Off Event on Monday, November 9, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at Lostintheletters! Join us for readings from Justin Haynes, Maya Marshall, and Victoria Kornick! More about the authors Justin Haynes was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and later moved to Brooklyn, NY as a teenager. His writing has been published in various journals including Caribbean Quarterly, SX Salon Small Axe Project, and Pree. His debut novel, Ibis (2025) has been awarded the PEN Open Book Award, the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction. In 2026, Haynes was named Author of the Year by Georgia Writers Association in the First Fiction category. He teaches English and creative writing at Oglethorpe University. Maya Marshall, a poet and essayist, is the author of author of All the Blood Involved in Love, winner of the Holmes National Poetry prize. Marshall cofounded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, and Emory University, among others. Her poems and essays are featured in numerous publications including Prose for the People (Penguin Random House), the American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Boston Review. Marshall is a program consultant for the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a literary fellowship for system-impacted writers. She serves as poetry director and senior editor for Haymarket Books. Victoria Kornick is the author of Relief, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2025 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry series, 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review. Victoria holds an MFA in Poetry Writing from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow, and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern California. She teaches creative writing at Emory University.