Featured Readers RBF 2026

Photo by Vilerx Pérez

Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), the Winner of the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julián is also the author of ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017) an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award.

Watch Julián's TED Talk Here. 

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Cat Sebastian is an award-winning author of queer romance. Cat’s books include We Could Be So Good and You Should Be So Lucky, and have received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. We Could Be So Good won a Lambda Literary Award in 2024. In her spare time, she acquires too many houseplants and misplaces things.

The best way to keep up with Cat’s projects is to subscribe to her newsletter, but she’s been known to post silly graphics on her Instagram.

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Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, American Short Fiction, VQR, and elsewhere. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow,was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance,was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.  

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