Art
Leticia Sánchez Toledo (Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, 1985) is a contemporary painter based in Miami, known for creating figurative compositions that depict human figures in interior spaces. She received her degree in Design from the Higher Institute of Design (ISDI) in Havana, Cuba. Working primarily with oil and drawing, she creates intimate scenes centered on serene gestures, states of rest, and moments of vulnerability.
Her paintings address themes of solitude, tenderness, and the emotional atmosphere of everyday life, often focusing on the female figure. Sánchez Toledo is interested in spaces where intimacy can exist beyond the pressures of productivity or social roles—moments in which a person can rest, feel, or simply exist. Recurring subjects in her work include figures in quiet interiors, often relaxed, sleeping, or absorbed in introspective states within domestic or temporary environments.
Influenced by the atmospheric language of cinema, her paintings use restrained color palettes, loose brushwork, and carefully structured interiors to construct contemplative scenes. Within these spaces, she observes how bodies inhabit private environments and how these can become emotional refuges. Painting also functions for the artist as an act of memory, preserving traces of shared time and lived experience.
Sánchez Toledo has presented solo exhibitions including Intimate Pauses at Pan American Art Projects, Miami, and Punctum at CEART in Madrid. Her work has also appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCAA), Miami, and the Instituto Cervantes in São Paulo. She has participated in art fairs including Pinta Miami, Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, Art Miami, and Art on Paper, New York. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Coral Gables Museum, MoCAA, the Jorge Pérez Collection in Miami, and the Luciano Benetton Collection in Italy. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2025) and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2026), and participated in the residency program at the Vermont Studio Center (2024).
Fiction
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, the LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in September 2026.
Nonfiction
Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson is also the author of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, described by the New York Times, as “A coffee-table book that elevates the subject to the same decorative status as a Dior or Gucci monograph.” Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire.
Jackson is also a well-regarded speaker who has delivered lectures and keynote addresses both in the US and abroad, including the TED Conference, the Ubud (Bali) Writers and Readers Festival, the Sydney Writers’ Festival; the Hegra Conference of Nobel Laureates and Friends; as well as at Yale University, Brown University, Cornell University, Columbia University, Oberlin College, UCLA, and other esteemed institutions. A formerly incarcerated person, Jackson is also a social justice advocate who, as part of his outreach, visits prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad.
Poetry
Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021) was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss is a member of the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. She was a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home. Her seventh collection, Althea: Poems, is forthcoming in 2027.