Poets & Writers has announced the Fall 2025 fiction cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers an opportunity to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity presented by their first or second major book publication.
Each of the ten writers selected has a book forthcoming in late 2025 or 2026. They are pictured from top left:
Hillary Behrman’s award-winning stories have been described as deeply humane and unsettling and have been published in journals, magazines, short story dispensers, and anthologies. Lake Effect, her debut collection of stories, was chosen by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande Books in May 2026. Groff praised Lake Effect as a book of “great moral power and heart” by “an author of extraordinary grace.” Hillary lives in Seattle, where she’s raised two kids and worked as a children’s civil rights attorney and public defender.
Denise Derya Brandt worked 20+ years in international development, leading women’s health projects in Afghanistan, Liberia, and Myanmar, before pursuing her writing career. A Book Incubator graduate and 2024 Women’s Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award finalist, she holds degrees from Arizona State University and The London School of Economics. A Turkish-American with Turkish language skills that can fool tourists but not taxi drivers, Denise is originally from Arizona and now lives in Northern Kentucky with her husband and very spoiled French Bulldog.
Kim Coleman Foote is the author of Coleman Hill, a novel that blends fact and fiction about her family’s Great Migration journey to suburban New Jersey, where Kim grew up. The novel was a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize and NAACP Image Award, among others, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Additional honors include residencies at Hedgebrook, Yaddo, and MacDowell, literature fellowships from the NEA, NYFA, and Kimbilio, and a Fulbright to Ghana, where Kim conducted fieldwork for her second novel, Salt Water Sister. Forthcoming from SJP Lit/Zando, the novel explores the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its repercussions in the 1700s and present day.
Sophia Huneycutt’s novel, The House Built on Alligator Bones, is forthcoming from Dutton / Penguin Random House in fall 2026. She has received creative and financial support from Tin House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The de Groot Foundation, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. Her short fiction has won the Porch Prize, judged by Kevin Wilson, and appears in or is forthcoming from STORY, Nashville Review, The Greensboro Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in English Literature from Davidson College and an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University.
Rachel León (she/they) is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Managing Director for Chicago Review of Books and is the editor of The Rockford Anthology, forthcoming from Belt Publishing in October 2025. Her debut novel, How We See the Gray, will be published by Curbstone Books in 2026.
Kat Lewis is a fiction writer and video game narrative designer based in Tampa. She is the founder of Craft with Kat, a bestselling Substack newsletter with practical craft lessons for writers. Her debut novel, Good People, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, who goes by “Raj”, originally trained as a scientist. After earning a Ph.D., Raj launched a career in science communications. For nearly two decades, she worked as a science storyteller in various forms, including as a journalist and the leader of an award-winning custom content studio. Now an association executive, Raj keeps the storytelling flame burning by writing creative nonfiction and fiction in her personal time.
Radhika Singh is a writer and editor living in Queens, New York. Her fiction speculates on the presence of magic in this world, the connection to spirit and consciousness, and the power of the people to organize for collective liberation. Her novel Weirdly Tuned Antennae, winner of the 2025 Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, is forthcoming from FC2 Press. Her novel Earthly Playing Field is forthcoming from Common Notions/ Nonaligned Press.
New Mexico-based fiction writer Grace Spulak is the author of the short story collection, Magdalena is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Press Rising Writer’s Prize. Grace’s work has been awarded Witness Magazine’s 2021 Literary Award in fiction, and has appeared in the Ploughshares Blog, Witness Magazine, and Southwest Review, among other places. Grace holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
Born in the Hebei province of China and raised in the American Midwest, Diana Xin‘s work appears in Electric Literature, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She studied creative writing at the University of Montana and is a recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, the M Literary Residency in Beijing, and the Sitka Center for Art. Book of Exemplary Women is her debut collection of short stories. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
The cohort will be led by May-Zhee Lim, who is a freelance publicist living in New York. She previously worked at Riverhead Books, where she helped launch the careers of debut authors and expand the readership of prize-winning authors, including Hernan Diaz, Olga Tokarczuk, James McBride, Masha Gessen, Patricia Lockwood, C Pam Zhang, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Sigrid Nunez, just to name a few. In 2021, she made the Publishers Weekly Star Honoree list for her creative, out-of-the-box publicity ideas, including a partnership with a New York City bakery to print a short story by Etgar Keret in cake wrapping and an open-air, pop-up reading room series around the city.
Get the Word Out participants will work closely with a publicist over several months to learn, develop, and execute strategies that will help them maximize the exposure of their forthcoming poetry collections. They will also take part in seminars with media and events professionals, as well as established authors who will speak to their own experience and strategies for book promotion.
Applications for the 2026 poetry cohort for Get the Word Out will open on December 1, 2025.