This after party at The James is in celebration of The Sun Magazine’s 50th anniversary. Join us for these featured keynote speakers, poets, and authors:

Camonghne Felix

Camonghne Felix is a poet, essayist, political strategist, and cultural worker. She is the author of Build Yourself a Boat, which was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the PEN/Open Book Awards, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, LitHub, PEN America, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essays have been featured in Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue and more.

Camonghne is currently working on a literary nonfiction collection, Dyscalculia, and a collection of essays, Let the Poets Govern

Michael Torres

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and named one of NPR’s Books We Love, 2020. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center.  Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com

Zoe Bossiere

Zoë Bossiere is a genderfluid nonfiction writer from Tucson, Arizona. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the co-editor of The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). She is also co-editor of The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins anthology (Wayne State University Press, 2023).

Joe Wilkins

Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Born and raised in eastern Montana, Wilkins lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University.

Rachel Yoder

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (Doubleday), her debut novel released in July 2021. A film adaptation produced by Annapurna, directed by Marielle Heller, and starring Amy Adams will be released in 2023. Searchlight will distribute worldwide. Rachel is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. With Mark Polanzak, she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. Rachel grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio and now lives in Iowa City.