Lina Ferreira’s book Don’t Come Back has been hailed by Philip Lopate for “perfectly fusing the carnal and the spectral, tenderness and unflinching grit, wry humor and recovered sorrow. . . an extraordinary, shockingly good collection.” Lina is also the author of Drown Sever Sing, published by Anomalous Press, and regularly contributes essays to magazines such as Medium, Guernica, Eleven Eleven, Arts and Letters, Drunken Boat, Brevity, and elsewhere. The recipient of the Best of the Net Award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discover New Voices Award, Lina has also received the prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

“It is hard to say exactly what the NWP means to me. Partly because of a fear that I will cross into the overly grateful tone that comes with the immigrant experience, but mostly because there is nothing but sincerity in my gratitude to this program. I can’t imagine my writing or my life today without my professors, friends, and peers from the NWP.  There I found people of completely varying aesthetics, styles, and backgrounds unified singularly by their unyielding focus to write beyond their perceived limitations and others’ expectations. There I found people willing to indulge the madness of multi-media essays, multi-genre essays, lyrical ballads, violent philosophies, odes to trees and other kinds of projects that most other programs might have deemed unmarketable, even though they continue to find their way into the market, and which we all continue to read in great awe. I wouldn’t trade my experience in the NWP for the world, and I am unapologetically grateful to those brilliant, generous, and exigent professors to whom I still look for guidance, and for my extraordinary peers who challenge and encourage me, and with whom I continue to meet regularly so I can find my next impossible project.”