The Loft Blog

Our community in the Twin Cities has been engaged for nearly a year in the uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd—an uprising that keeps rising in wave after wave. In a moment of transformation like this, good books, true books, often become guides and illuminators.

Kareem Tayyar’s novel The Prince of Orange County (Pelekinesis) received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Award for Young Adult Fiction, and he is a recipient of a 2019 Wurlitzer Poetry Fellowship. Previous books of his include the poetry collections Immigrant Songs (2019) and Magic Carpet Poems (Tebot Bach).

Taylor Zhang is a teaching fellow at Columbia University, where she recently received her MFA in nonfiction. She runs a small Risograph press (Choo Choo Press) that publishes literary zines and chapbooks with an emphasis on queerness, nostalgia, obsession, and states of liminality.

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, is a romance novel about an autistic woman, Stella, who hires a professional escort to teach her how to have sex. And it's sexy. It also uses some really great strategies in its depiction of sex.

See some new faces in the Wordplay 2021 lineup? This year’s festival features several debut and up-and-coming authors who we’re so excited to share with you. To guide you as you explore these less-familiar faces, we’ve connected each new author with several books in similar styles.

Matthew Salesses's Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a novel about doubling and disappearing. It's funny and frightening and sad. It's also very much interested in what is real and what is imagined, what is said out loud and what is merely thought.

Jessica Mattson is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She enjoys writing middle grade and young adult and likes to play video games in her spare time.

Maria Burns Ortiz is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and video game studio founder. Her book My Fight/Your Fight with Ronda Rousey hit No. 5 on the New York Times list, was named U.K. Sports Book of the Year, and has been translated into nine languages.

Holly Day has worked as a freelance writer for over 30 years, with over 7,000 published articles, poems, and short stories and 40 books and chapbooks. Her writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, a 49th Parallel Prize, an Isaac Asimov Award, eleven Pushcart awards, and more.

Tony Jones is the author of Did God Kill Jesus?, the award-winning Boundary Waters Passage series in the StarTribune, and he was a senior acquisitions editor for a decade. He’s written a dozen books, hosts the Reverend Hunter Podcast, and teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Tasslyn Magnusson received her MFA in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University in Saint Paul, MN. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Broad River Review, Room Magazine, The Mom Egg Review, The Raw Art Review: A Journal of Storm and Urge, and more.

Angela Ajayi's essays, book reviews, and author interviews have appeared in The Common Online, Wild River Review, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she is a contributing book critic. She holds a BA in English lit from Calvin College and an MA in comparative lit from Columbia University.