Announcing Granum’s Guest Readers for 2026

Okwudili Nebeolisa, Granum Prize finalist, 2021

Edwardson Ukata, Granum Prize finalist 2025

May 12, 2026 – The Granum Foundation will be joined by four special guest readers for this year’s Granum Prize competition.

Pete Hsu, winner of the 2025 Granum Prize; Na Mee, 2025 finalist; Okwudili Nebeolisa, 2021 finalist; and Edwardson Ukata, 2025 finalist, will each offer their unique perspectives as we determine this year’s longlist, shortlist, finalists, and winners.

Hsu is a first-generation Taiwanese American writer. He is the author of the story collection If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home (Red Hen Press) and the experimental chapbook There Is A Man (Tolsun Books). He teaches creative writing at the UCLA Extension Writers Program and hosts events at the historic Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California. He won the Granum Foundation Prize in 2025 for his novel in progress, Sunder.

Na Mee is a poet, storyteller, facilitator, and teaching artist. Her wish for her work is to make you feel at home with yourself, with others, and with the world. She is a 2024 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, a Narrative Prize finalist, and three-time Rasmuson Foundation Award recipient. Her memoir-in-progress was a finalist for the 2025 Granum Prize, and her work can be found in The Sun, AGNI, The Rumpus, The Offing, and Lit Hub. In 2010 she co-founded and led Woosh Kinaadeiyí, a grassroots spoken word organization.

Nebeolisa is the author of Terminal Maladies (Autumn House Press, 2024), selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize. The collection also was a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards for Best Gay Poetry, the 2025 Zora (Hurston/Wright Legacy) Award, and the 2026 Minnesota Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights Prize for Fiction. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Cincinnati Review, Image, The New England Review, POETRY, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. His fiction has appeared in Evergreen Review and is forthcoming in Georgia Review, while his nonfiction has been published in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He is a recipient of support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Granum Foundation, and the Center for the Art Crested Butte.

Ukata is a queer nonbinary writer from Nigeria. They are the winner of the 2024 C.D. Wright Poetry Prize by The Arkansas International, selected by Richard Siken; a finalist for the 2025 Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize, the 2023 Bergen International Writing Competition, and the 2022 Anzaldua Poetry Prize by Newfound; and they were shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Poetry Prize. They are currently an MFA candidate and graduate instructor in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, and have been published in POETRY, Lolwe, Channel, FOLIO, and Consequence, among others, with more forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Arkansas International, OBSIDIAN, and elsewhere.

Davin MalasarnMay 12, 2026