Writers@Grinnell Welcomes Santiago Jose Sanchez & Larissa Pham

Santiago Jose Sanchez, Grinnell College Mellon fellow in fiction, is a queer, Colombian American writer based in Iowa City. Their stories have been published in McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland, as well as distinguished in the Best American Short Stories 2020. They have received fellowships for their writing from the University of Iowa and the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat, where they were a 2017 Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow.

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Guernica, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of Fantasian (2016). “Crush” is adapted from her collection Pop Song (Catapult Books in May 2021). She was a 2017 Yi Dae Up Fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, and she has taught creative writing at Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the New School.

A roundtable event will also take place on Thursday, Sept. 23, at 4:15 p.m. with special guests alumni Emily Mester ’14 and Clare Mao ’14 in Humanities and Social Studies Center (HSSC) Room S1325. 

Emily Mester ’14 is currently working on a collection of essays about hoarding, dead malls, and The Cheesecake Factory. She received her MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa.

Clare Mao ’14 is a literary agent at Europa Content. Her clients include poets, musicians, journalists, illustrators, bar owners, and Emily Mester ’14. She was born and raised in Queens, New York, and now lives in Brooklyn.