Stephen Narain is the author of the novel The Church of Mastery (Restless Books, 2027). He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami where he works under the supervision of Patricia Saunders and Kelly Baker Josephs.

Raised in Freeport, Bahamas by Guyanese educators, Narain moved to Miami at seventeen. He holds an A.B. in English with High Honors from Harvard College and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellow.

His writing has appeared in Small Axe, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wasafiri, Moko, and Landscapes of Consciousness. In 2025, he received the Steven G. Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, and his essay “Superpositional Minds: Multilocal Consciousness, AI, and the Posthuman Turn” was shortlisted for the Berggruen Institute’s Essay Competition.

His current academic research examines C.L.R. James’s engagement with the work of Herman Melville. A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Narain writes on free speech, higher education, and issues facing Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. Prior to beginning his Ph.D., Stephen spent over a decade teaching writing and literature at the University of Iowa, Valencia College, and The Door: A Center of Alternatives, a youth advocacy center in Lower Manhattan. He currently serves as a Research Fellow at Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal.