15 Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List
We’re highlighting books by NYFA-affiliated authors to bookmark for your summer reading–including a few that are hot off the presses!
New York Foundation for the Arts’ flagship NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program offers grants in 15 artistic disciplines spanning literary, performing, and visual arts, and more. Below, we’re rounding up some recently-released books by literary arts Fellows–some whose names you may already know and others who will now be on your reading radar.
We’ll be announcing our 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows later this year, including those in the categories of Nonfiction Literature and Poetry…so stay tuned! Our 2027 application cycle, which will offer grants in categories including Fiction, will open this fall.
Click here for more details on the program and here to see our illustrious list of past recipients which in the literary categories includes such names as Paul Beatty, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Jennifer Egan, Min Jin Lee, Terry McMillan, Gregory Pardlo, and Sigrid Nunez.
All the Possible Bodies (Alice James Books, 2025) is the latest book of poetry by Iain Haley Pollock (Fellow in Poetry ‘23). Wrote Ron Charles in The Washington Post Book Club: “The traumas of racial prejudice are met with poise and thoughtfulness, even humor, in Iain Haley Pollock’s third collection, All the Possible Bodies. [Pollock] moves nimbly from Michael Jackson’s lyrics to American lynchings, from quarterbacks to police brutality.” From Shara McCallum: “Iain Haley Pollock is a gifted storyteller and All the Possible Bodies is an unflinchingly honest portrait of a mixed-race Black man, a father and teacher in contemporary America. Fed by the past, pitched toward the future, Pollock’s voice is one of abiding conscience. In deeply moving poems, he probes the ethical question, what it means to be good, and the existential one, what it is simply to be—scoring myths of the land and self we ‘know by heart’ and ‘stumble through.’”
Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays (Crown Publishing Group, 2025) by Edgar Gomez (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature ‘23), is based on the Florida survival trick of running away in zigzags to avoid a wild alligator. It’s this lesson that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life. Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw their family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth. The memoir was winner of the Florida Book Award Bronze Medal Prize, in addition to being a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and a Them and Electric Literature “Best Book of the Year.”
The Animal Room* (Grove Atlantic, 2026) by Lauren Acampora (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction ‘21) delves deep into the small town of Old Cranbury, CT, and its eclectic mix of residents. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor’s garage. A psychiatric patient believes she’s becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie—what could go wrong? Rumors spread and fires burn in this second short story collection from award-winning author Acampora. The book received starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, and was called “Intelligent and shimmering” by Publisher’s Weekly.
*New and adjusting our book count to 16!
Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), the follow-up to Cathy Linh Che (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature ‘23)’s acclaimed poetry debut Split, documents Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness. It was a Finalist for the National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Finalist, a RUSA Award Finalist, Winner of the APALA Asian American Poetry Award, and an NPR “Books We Love” selection.
Boomhouse (The 3rd Thing, 2023), a collection of poems by Summer J. Hart (Fellow in Poetry ‘23), thrums with loss, complicated love, and fortitude. The poems travel a chain of rivers and lakes from the great timber stands of Canada to the dying mill towns of Maine, bending and rippling through history, oral accounts, superstitious customs, family lore and memory. Hart navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native (she is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation) and settler. She weaves stories and spells from the most delicate and indelible details. Boomhouse was the winner of the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize. Coming this August: Hart’s second poetry collection, What Came Down in the Smoke (Jackleg Press). Hart wrote this book with the assistance of the 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship!
Coming soon (!) on June 9 is Don’t Buy What I’m Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self by Lu Chekowsky (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature ‘23). Part memoir, part tongue-in-cheek burn book about the ad industry, Don’t Buy What I’m Selling is the brutally honest, hilariously dark story of Lu– a woman who knew how the sausage of capitalism got made and she still wasn’t safe from it. The book traces her lifelong relationship with advertising–from her early days as a chubby girl who believed the Special-K ads when they promised she’d be unlovable if she could “pinch more than an inch,” to her high-level advertising career spending days making commercials that got a new generation of girls to hate themselves just as much.
The Hearing Test (Catapult), Eliza Barry Callahan (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature ‘23)’s debut novel, was published in Spring 2024 and has been translated into multiple languages. The novel won the Bard Fiction Prize (2025), was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lion Award, and was long-listed for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.
I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY (Switchback Books, 2025), by Rachel Jihye Han (Fellow in Poetry ’23), explores and maps liminal experiences—the posthuman, hybridity and diaspora, the afterlife, and the uncertainties of our real and imagined dystopias—through work that pushes genre boundaries and interweaves the primordial and futuristic, documentarian and autobiographical, narrative and musical, and sacred and profane. Through a pentaptych structure, these poems illuminate the pathways we may uncover as we press deeper into the dark: fashioning beings of metal, electricity, and light, only to return home to ourselves, to the softness of the body. Questions which arise are: How do we protect what is sacred to us through this new dark? What do we carry with us through the fires, and how do we carry it so it does not burn? There is alchemy in this process of searching. I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY was the winner of the 2024 Gatewood Prize.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Hala Alyan (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction ’24), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is a rich and deeply personal debut memoir by the award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist. Alyan’s experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future. The book was also longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, was an NPR “Book of the Year,” and one of TIME’s “100 Must-Read Books of the Year.” In The New York Times Book Review, Safiya Sinclair wrote: “Gorgeous, lyrical…[Alyan’s memoir] examines with a poet’s precision the many ways in which storytelling is rooted in matriarchy, carrying messages between mothers and daughters as a means of survival…”
Impossible Things (Duke University Press, 2024) by Miller Wolf Oberman (Fellow in Poetry ‘23) offers an intimate account of intergenerational grief–exploring Oberman’s experiences as both a transgender child and father. He weaves in passages from his own deceased father’s unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father’s trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity.
Love is a Burning Thing (Dutton, 2024), by Nina St. Pierre (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature ‘23), is a riveting memoir about a daughter’s investigation into the wirings of her loving, unpredictable mother: a woman who lived her life in pursuit of the divine, and who started two big fires, decades apart. The first fire occurred 10 years before Nina was born with her mother lighting herself on fire in a dual suicide attempt. During her recovery in the burn-unit, a nurse initiated her into Transcendental Meditation. From that day on, her mother’s pain became intertwined with the pursuit of enlightenment. The book, which examines mental health, stigma, poverty, and gender–and the role that spirituality plays within each–was recognized with the 2025 Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction; awarded a Kirkus Star; and featured in People Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and Esquire.
Mercy Hill (Doubleday, 2026), Hannah Thurman (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction ’24)’s debut novel, was released on May 5, 2026! The story follows four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. It is a richly-moving portrait of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America. It was named an “Apple Best Book of the Month” pick, and was described as “Unique and utterly engrossing…a deeply moving and unusual tale about how the bonds of sisterhood are formed and tested” by Publishers Weekly.
Mutual Interest (Bloomsbury USA, 2025), by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction ’24), is an enthralling, dishy novel about ambition, sexuality, and the rise of a capitalist empire in post-Gilded Age New York. At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her hometown of Utica, NY, and live a life worthy of the society pages she writes for. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a queer middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants. Their partnership is complete with the addition of money-man Squire Clancey, and together they build an empire of personal care products. But exposure threatens, and all three partners are made aware of how much they have to lose. The New York Times Book Review called the book “Witty…and a great deal of fun.”
New Skin (Little, Brown, 2026), released on May 12 and authored by Sarah Wang (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature ‘23), is a scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral. When the daughter, Linli, attempts to rescue her mother, Fanny, from the sinister subculture that has claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.
Pig Years (Vintage, 2024), the debut memoir by Ellyn Gaydos (NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction ‘23), is a “startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals” (Anthony Doerr, best-selling author of All the Light We Cannot See) as an itinerant farmhand chronicles the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth. A farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Pig Years draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and crisp full moons, the sharp cold days lived near to the land. In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. A New Yorker “Best Book of the Year,” Pig Years gained additional praise from Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine, among others.
Steppe (Catapult, 2026), a novel by Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter (translator, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction ’24), is visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a long haul truck driver secretly dying of AIDS. As her father drives her across desolate landscapes in his freight truck, the narrator tugs on the few threads that make him her family, and reflects on her father’s small role in Russia’s violent patriarchal structure and the chaos and depravity of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the austere beauty and mercurial nature of the steppe reminds her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship—both natural and forced, intimate and alienated. Wrote Tobias Carroll for Words Without Borders: Steppe is “a clarifying portrait of post-Soviet Russian life, cycles of violence, and the ways that ideological training can seamlessly shift into behavior more suited for a criminal underworld. The more specific this narrative gets, the more searing its emotional connections become.”
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