About – Village of Crickets

Village of Crickets is a literary community based in NYC, founded in 2015 by Dani Barnhart & Iris Mahan. Events & operations have been temporarily stilled due to Covid-19, and the subsequent dissolution of our partnership with the Adelphi University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. We hope to be up & running again by summer of 2021. For inquiries about future projects, partnerships, or sponsorship, please email Dani Barnhart here. We wish you all safety, wellness, and love.

VOC’s mission is to foster meaningful engagement within the literary community, and beyond. We aim to forge bonds between emerging and celebrated writers, between teacher and student, and to welcome those who may not feel they have a community of writers or artists. We host readings, panels, conversations, and literary events independently, and in collaboration with various cultural institutions & literary non-profits.

VOC strives to amplify marginalized voices, cultivate literary citizenship, promote progressive ideas, strengthen our sense of community within the arts, and to celebrate the myriad intersecting identities and experiences of writers and artists.

We are deeply invested in the idea that meaningful connections between compassionate, creative, and curious people are essential to a healthy literary community—and to the process of making in and of itself. Each os us is finding our way toward the liminal space between that which inspires us, and the moment of creation. Recognizing this in one another is necessary to achieving a more loving, emotionally literate, and vibrant world.

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DANI BARNHART is co-founder of Village of Crickets, formerly in partnership with Adelphi University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She is co-editor of the widely celebrated anthology, Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (O/R Books 2018) with work from fifty living artists, ranging from National Book Award winners to emerging writers. Dani creates, produces, and hosts literary events in New York City, and across the country, collaborating with writers, artists, literary nonprofits and cultural institutions. She is a writer, a creative writing instructor, and a mother of two.

IRIS MAHAN is Co-founder & Development Coordinator at Village of Crickets. She is a graduate of Adelphi University’s MFA Program, where she was the recipient of The Robert Muroff Scholarship in Creative Writing. She spends her days in development for The Center for Fiction, and her nights in translation and poetry. When not writing grant proposals and contemplating the arbitrary nature of language and existence, Iris can be found drinking cheap wine and reading a worn copy of “Juego y teoria del duende” to her trilingual Dachshund pup, Olive.

“Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and the jellyfish veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.”

—Federico García Lorca

Our deepest gratitude to the brilliant and generous collaborators, contributors, & guest speakers who have shared their voices with us, and in doing so, have helped to build this village of crickets. Many thanks to our families, friends, and co-conspirators for all of their continued support throughout this invigorating and exacting labor of love, and special thanks to our mentors, faculty, students and alumni of Adelphi University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

We are ever grateful to our fabulous past Editors-at-Large, Robin Gow, Clara Burgelea, & Josh King, to our beloved Programs Assistant, Benny Sisson, and to Gary Barnhart for web design & technical support.