Our New Histories: The Debut BIPOC Writers Reshaping Literature
Restless Books, Tin House, Amistad, and Ecco present four ascendent authors whose first releases shook 2025. Camille U. Adams traces her family’s legacy of secrets and abandonment in the Trinidadian memoir How to Be Unmothered; individual longing and a Yoruba prophecy collide in Olufunke Grace Bankole’s intergenerational novel, The Edge of Water; Tramaine Suubi follows the waxing moon from anxiety to ecstasy in their poetry collection, phases; and Jared Lemus turns a cinematic eye to reluctant outlaws and would-be saints in the stories of Guatemalan Rhapsody. Moderated by M Lin.
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2025 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Camille U. Adams, PhD, is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her memoir, How to Be Unmothered, was recognized as a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2023. She earned her MFA in Poetry from City College, CUNY, and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Florida State University. Honors for her work include Best of The Net: Nonfiction 2024, five nominations for the Pushcart Prize, three Best of the Net: Nonfiction nominations, and recognition for a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. Among Adams' awarded fellowships are an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellowship, an inaugural Granta Nature Writing Workshop fellowship, an inaugural Anaphora Arts Italy Writing Retreat Fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship. She is a Tin House alum and has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, VONA, and others. Adams served as a juried reader for Tin House, a creative nonfiction editor at Variant Lit, and an assistant editor at Split Lip Magazine and The Account. Her writing has been featured in Passages North, Citron Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, Variant Literature, The Forge Literary Magazine, Kweli Magazine, and elsewhere.
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. The Edge of Water (Tin House), her debut novel, has been praised by Oprah Daily, Goodreads, Ms. Magazine, The Root and more; named a Best Book of 2025 by Apple; and is a Finalist for the Westport Prize for Literature. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Tramaine Suubi is a multilingual writer from Kampala, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of phases and stages. She has also published creative writing in over fifteen literary anthologies, journals, magazines, and reviews. Tramaine works towards the total liberation of all oppressed people by any means necessary
Jared Lemus is the author of the short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, published with Ecco-HarperCollins on March 4th 2025. His debut novel is forthcoming with Ecco-HarperCollins. Lemus’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Story, The Pinch, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language; her mother tongue is Mandarin, which she favors in speech. Her short story collection, The Memory Museum, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in April 2026.
Her work has been published in Ploughshares, swamp pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023 (Catapult). Her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her translation appears in Harper’s Bazaar China, Words Without Borders, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins.
M holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and a BFA in Film from New York University. An amateur pianist and a certified yoga teacher, she lives in New York with her partner and two furry children, Lisbon and Rothko.