Oksana Marafioti moved to Hollywood from the Soviet Union when she was fifteen years old. Trained as a classical pianist, she has also worked as a cinematographer. ...

The author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, which became a New York Times bestseller, ...

Weil’s short fiction has garnered a Pushcart Prize and appeared in Granta, Esquire, Tin House and One Story, among others. ...

Born in Manila and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is a Filipina poet and author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017)...

He was born in Chennai, India and moved to the United States as an infant. His short stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney's, Zoetrope: All-Story and Fiction.

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize winning writer and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown.

He received a BA from the University of Iowa and an MA from Brown University in English/Creative Writing.

He is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), for which he received the annual Bard Fiction Prize.

His first novel «We the Animals», a national best seller, has been translated into fifteen languages and is currently being adapted into a feature film.

The democracy of language and literature is a key note of the Picador Guest Professorship. This vivid mediation of literature will contribute to distinguish the subject according to international standards and place it among the leading programmes for the promotion of Anglo-American Studies in Germany.