Poets & Writers has announced the Fall 2026 fiction cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers the chance to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity of their first or second major book publication.
Each of the ten writers selected has a book forthcoming in late 2026 or 2027. They are pictured from top left:
Itoro Bassey is a Nigerian American author and journalist whose work explores the tension between societal expectation and selfhood, particularly in the lives of African women and daughters. Her writing moves across questions of family, class, migration, race, and belonging, asking what becomes possible when women begin defining their lives for themselves. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Callaloo, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere, and her forthcoming story collection, Ajébutter Women, won the 2024 W.S. Porter Prize and will be published by Regal Publishing in 2027. Through her writing, she invites readers into intimate, searching conversations about inheritance, freedom, and what it means to become yourself.
Doris W. Cheng is a Taiwanese American writer and editor. Her debut novel, Keep Your Enemies Close, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in August 2027. She is the author of a fiction chapbook, Earthling, and her stories, essays, and interviews appear in Boston Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Review of Books, Witness, and other literary magazines. She was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshops, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds an MA in English Literature from Columbia University and is fiction editor for Bellevue Literary Review.
Manola Gonzalez Rosillo is a Mexican Spanish American writer originally from San Diego, California. She is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellowship Finalist and Columbia MFA grad, where she received the Fondation Femme Debut scholarship and the Writing Program scholarship. She has been published by the Bare Life Review, Columbia Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, and Longreads. Her debut novel, Gringas, which follows a wealthy Mexican matriarch whose secret decision forces her family to flee to the United States, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2028.
Sakinah Hofler’s work has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and elsewhere. She has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Hurston/Wright Foundation Award for College Writers in Fiction, the Yemassee Poetry Prize, the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. Hofler received a 2026 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Hofler resides in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey, with her family and teaches at Princeton University. Her novel, Stable, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2027.
Shelby Kinney-Lang is a fiction writer from Laramie, Wyoming. He earned a master’s from the University of Oxford and an MFA from the University of California in Irvine. His stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Chicago Quarterly Review, Witness, Santa Monica Review, Joyland, and elsewhere, and he is a recipient of the 2023 O. Henry Prize, selected by Lauren Groff. His debut story collection, SNAKE & SUBMARINE, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press in fall 2027. He lives in western Massachusetts.
Abby Manzella, a Pushcart Prize winner, is the author of the short story collection, Ripples Into the Wild, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in February 2027. Her academic book, Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements (Ohio State University Press, 2017), won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. Originally from Pennsylvania, she now lives in Missouri where she teaches at Truman State University. Previously an artist-in-residence at PlySpace in Indiana, a resident fellow at Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research, and a scholarship recipient to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Manzella’s stories, essays, interviews, and reviews have been published by places such as Threepenny Review, Pleiades, Literary Hub, and the Boston Globe.
Daniel J. O’Malley’s debut collection, The Younger and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Hub City Press in 2027. His fiction has appeared, in print or online, in the Atlantic, McSweeney’s, the Kenyon Review, Granta, and The Best American Short Stories 2016, among other publications. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.
Andrea Ruggirello’s debut novel, The Memory Token, is forthcoming from Harper Horizon in 2027. She was a 2024 New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow in prose, holds an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University, and is an alumnus of the Tin House Workshop. Her writing appears in Joyland, Redivider, Third Coast, the Baltimore Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, the anthology Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Born in Korea and raised in New York City, Andrea lives in the Washington, D.C.–Maryland suburbs with her husband and dog.
Jared Silvia is a writer, musician, and event organizer in Orlando, Florida. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Sierra Nevada Review, decomP, Monkeybicycle, Rabble Lit, and elsewhere. He received the 2017 Brian Turner Literary Arts Prize in Fiction from Sierra Nevada College, and was a recipient of a Luso American Scholarship from the Disquiet International Literary Conference in 2013. He runs Circuit Church, an independent electronic music label. His debut short story collection, Ways This Could Go, is forthcoming from Burrow Press in 2027.
Rose Whitmore is the recipient of the 2021 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from the Southern Review, and the William Peden Prize from the Missouri Review. She has received fellowships from Hemingway’s House in Ketchum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, the San Leandro Arts Commission, and the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford University where she was a Jones Lecturer. Her work has recently appeared in Story Magazine, the Sun, and the Missouri Review. Her debut novel, Exiled, will be published by Dzanc Books in 2027.
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.