Artist-In-Residence Author Interview Event

SHEENA DAREE ROMERO is an essayist and doctoral student at Columbia School of Journalism. She researches ways comedy is used to provoke, widen, and distort sentiments about race and social movements in the US and Germany. Her writing has been published in Ms. Magazine, Autostraddle, and elsewhere, featured on Longreads Best of 2022 list, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions Anthology. Sheena is a Brooklyn Public Library Incubator grantee and a Margolis Social-Justice Journalism Award finalist, and has received support from Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, Kimbilio, and other literary organizations. She’s working on an essay collection that bridges memoir and cultural criticism to meditate on blackness in far flung places. Sheena was born and raised in Columbus, lives in New York, and dreams of Helsinki.

MARGOT SINGER is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House), and a collection of linked short stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press). She is also the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury Academic).

Singer’s work has been recognized with the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay. She was short-listed for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and received an Honorable Mention from the judges of the PEN/Hemingway Award. She has also been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Prose, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, as well as artist’s residencies at Ucross, Radgale, and Yaddo.

Singer is a Professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she teaches creative writing and literature and directs the creative writing program. She is also currently the Director of Denison’s Eisner Center for the Performing Arts.