Students

Genre: poetry

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, POETRY, and elsewhere. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry.

Website: https://www.ariaaber.com/

Genre: poetry

Amelia Ada is a trans poet and essayist. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University, and she graduated with honors from both the undergraduate journalism and creative writing programs at Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including ZYZZYVA, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Southwest Review, and West Branch. Her first book manuscript was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series Open Competition. She lives in Los Angeles and co-hosts the podcast You Shouldn’t Let Poets Lie To You.

Website: https://amelia-ada.com/

Genre: fiction

Akhim Alexis is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. He received his BA and MA from The University of the West Indies. He is the winner of the Brooklyn Caribbean Lit Fest Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean. He was also a finalist for the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, the Grist Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors Contest and the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize for poetry. His writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Genre: poetry

Taneum Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press 2022), and Vantage (American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award 2019). A 2020 Stegner fellow, their work can be found in the New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, PEN, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers Conference, and a scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Genre: fiction

Remy Barnes’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, The Southampton Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Cornell University where he taught courses on fiction, poetry and film. He is at work on a novel.

Website: www.remybarnes.org

Genre: fiction

Damien Belliveau is a fiction fellow at the University of Southern California. As a creative writer, he has two dissertation projects: one creative, the other critical. The creative project is an autobiographical coming-of-age story inspired by his time serving as a medic in the U.S. Army during the mid-90s. The critical project examines book-to-film adaptations where he explores the editorial strategies employed to translate literature to cinema. Damien’s been a reality television editor for nearly two decades; his credits range from “The Real World” to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” to “Bill Nye Saves the World.” He’s directed episodes of reality TV, but in the non-scripted space, he prefers the power of the edit bay. A PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Epiphany Magazine, The Spectacle, and more.

Website: www.damienbelliveau.com

Genre: fiction

Ben Bush is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a 2017-2018 Fulbright Fellow to Bulgaria, and a Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California creative writing PhD program. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Yeti, The Fanzine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. His non-fiction and interviews have appeared in Bookforum, The Believer, Poets & Writers, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Bitch, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Truman Capote Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Wesleyan Writers Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and Key West Literary Seminars. He is a former managing editor of the Organist podcast from McSweeney’s and KCRW and has taught creative writing in Morocco, Bulgaria, and at the University of Iowa.

Genre: poetry

Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program. He has been published in Guernica Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Bryan received a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles.

Website: https://bryanbyrdlong.com/

Genre: nonfiction

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, CA, with an M.F.A. in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. Currently, he pursues a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, focusing his creative work on genre-bent nonfiction, and his critical work on the intersections between Latinx literature, Black literature, Decolonization, and Punk Rock. He has a poetry chapbook, Nurture the Open Wounds, through Glass Poetry Press, and will be releasing a full-length book of mixed-genre prose titled ¡PÓNK! with Nightboat Books. A few other publications include the Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland Magazine, Indiana Review, Apogee Journal, Passages North, Black Punk Now!, and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock. In his free time, he also screams and plays guitar for local LA punk band, tudors.

Website: https://marcus-clayton.com/

Genre: nonfictoin

Antonia Crane is a queer sex worker, activist, and filmmaker. She’s the author of the memoir, Spent (Rare Bird Lit/Barnacle Books). She was awarded the Outstanding Community Service & Activism Award from Antioch University Alumni Association in 2018. PRISM International magazine named Antonia the grand prize winner of their 2019 creative nonfiction contest. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Quartz:  Atlantic Media, CNN.com, Buzzfeed, N+1, Playboy, Los Angeleno, Cosmopolitan, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, DAME, The Los Angeles Review, Bustle, and lots of other places. Most recently, her work has appeared in the anthologies: Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work and Life, edited by Lizzie Borden, and Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21^st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance, edited by Anthony Arnove & Haley Pessin. She lives in Los Angeles.

Website: https://www.antoniacrane.com/

Genre: poetry

Website: https://www.ashleydaileypoetry.com/

Genre: fiction

Joseph is a fiction writer from Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Genre: poetry

Darren Donate is a Mexican American writer. He previously received an MFA in poetry at the University of New Mexico where he taught courses in creative writing and technical communication. He is interested in the intersections of race and labor. You can find his work in Berkeley Poetry Review, the minnesota review, ANMLY and others.

Genre: fiction

Kyle Edwards grew up on the Lake Manitoba First Nation in Manitoba. A graduate of Ryerson University, he has worked as a journalist for Native News Online, ProPublica and Maclean’s, and has been a Nieman Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, where he is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature. His debut novel is forthcoming from Pantheon in spring 2025.

Genre: nonfiction

Leesa Fenderson’s work has appeared in Callaloo Journal, Uptown Magazine, Moko Magazine, and she was a Finalist in Paper Darts’ Short Fiction contest. Leesa completed her MFA at Columbia University. She is an attorney, a teacher, and a Jamaican immigrant who hails from New York. She currently writes in Los Angeles where she is a PhD fellow in USC’s Writing and Literature Program.

Website: https://www.leesafenderson.com/

Genre: fiction

Emily Geminder is the author of Dead Girls and Other Stories, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is currently a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.

Website: emilygeminder.com

Genre: fiction

Carrie Guss is a Canadian writer and artist. She has worked with clients including Dzanc Books, The Baltimore Review, CBC shortDOCS, the Florida Writers Festival, Persea Books, Quarter After Eight, Lucky Peach, and AOL News, and held editorial positions at Subtropics and Ricochet Editions. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the MASH Stories Prize, longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize, and has appeared most recently in Nat. Brut, NANO Fiction, and The Collagist. She has been awarded two Writers’ Reserve Grants by the Ontario Arts Council, and was honored on the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Top Prospects List. She holds a BA in Politics from Pomona College, an MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

Genre: poetry

Stephanie Horvath’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She completed her MFA at Indiana University, where she was awarded the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in poetry. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Genre: fiction

Victor Imko is an essayist from Charleston, SC. They studied queer theory and literature as a Mellon Fellow at Northwestern University. They’ve taught classes in composition and creative writing at the University of Florida and Trident Technical College. Today they live in LA, writing as a Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California.

Genre: fiction

Jane Kalu’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Boston Review, The Hopkins Review, Isele Magazine, Munyori Journal, and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Mexico, where she was the recipient of the Joseph Badal Prize and the Hillerman/McGarrity Prize. Other awards include residencies and fellowships from StoryKnife and American short fiction. She is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Website: https://janekalu.com/

Genre: fiction

Rebecca Kantor is a writer from Plano, Texas. She taught English in Madrid, Spain, for two years, then received her MFA in fiction from Vanderbilt University. Her fiction often deals with themes of girlhood and hauntings. She is currently at work on a novel.

Genre: fiction

Matt Kessler grew up in Mobile, Alabama and has since called many places home, including Chicago, Oxford and the Hudson Valley. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, MTV News, Dazed and Confused, Pitchfork, Candy, Vice & The Rumpus. His radio work has been broadcast on Mississippi Public Broadcasting & Illinois Public Media. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Mississippi, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Website: www.matt-kessler.com

Genre: fiction

Brian Lin is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing and Literature. He has attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the VONA Summer Workshop. He was a resident at Ragdale and The Cabins and a fellow at the Community of Writers Workshop and the Writing by Writers Workshop. His stories and essays can be found in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Margins, Lambda Literary, Hyphen Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Brian is working on a novel and other books of prose.

Website: https://www.brianlinlit.com

Genre: poetry

Erin Marie Lynch is the author of Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, 2023). Her writing appears in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles.

Website: http://www.erinmarielynch.com

Genre: fiction

Stephanie Mullings is a fiction writer from Chicago and a graduate of Boston University’s MFA program. She is a 2021 First Pages Prize winner and a finalist of the 2021 Arkansas International Emerging Writer’s Prize and CRAFT’s 2022 Short Fiction Prize. A PEN/O. Henry Prize nominee, her stories have appeared in Boulevard, Catapult, the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, Swamp Pink, Wigleaf, and elsewhere.

Genre: fiction

Charlie Napolitano was raised in Florida and received their MFA from the University of Central Florida. Their short story “Cobra” won the 2016 AWP Intro Journal Awards. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Currently, they are a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

Genre: nonfiction

Rose Nguyễn is a writer from Honolulu, HI. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MA in Literature from UC Berkeley. Her criticism has appeared in The Drift, and her essay in the Indiana Review, which won their 2021 Creative Nonfiction Prize, is a notable essay in Best American Essays 2023. She is currently based in Los Angeles.

Genre: poetry

Katharine Ogle is a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. She holds a BA with distinction from the University of Virginia and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She has worked as an Associate Editor of Poetry Northwest, as a writer-in-residence for Seattle Arts & Lectures, and as a lecturer for the University of Washington’s creative writing programs at Friday Harbor Laboratories and at the UW Rome Center. Her work has been published in Pleiades, Five Points, Poetry Northwest, by The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and at a public bus stop in Seattle, among other places.

Genre: poetry

Michelle Orsi is a writer from Spokane, Washington. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellow and worked as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in Argentina in 2020.

Genre: poetry

Catherine Pond is the author of Fieldglass (Southern Illinois University Press 2021), winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Best American Nonrequired Reading, AGNI, Salmagundi, The Adroit Journal, Narrative, and other publications. Pond is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Genre: fiction

Before devoting her time to writing, Crystal Powell was the VP of Production & Development for Electric City Entertainment and Silverwood Films, where she developed, co-produced, and associate-produced several features, including Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic starring Viggo Mortensen and Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond The Pines, starring Bradley Cooper, Ryan Gosling, and Eva Mendes. Crystal was also a production executive on Tim Burton’s Big Eyes. She went on to study creative writing as a Lillian Vernon MFA Fellow at New York University. After graduating, she was a Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellow, a Jack Jones Literary Arts Fellow, and a fiction finalist for both the Disquiet Prize and a New York Foundation For The Arts Fellowship. She’s working on her first novel while pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

Genre: fiction

Jianan Qian writes in both Chinese and English. In her native language Chinese, she has published a story collection, a novel, an essay collection, and a letter collection. In English, she is a staff writer at The Millions and her works have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Guernica Magazine, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in English Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Southern California.

Genre: fiction

Thomas Renjilian is a fiction writer and poet originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from Oregon State University. His stories and poems appear in The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and other publications. He is the editor-in-chief of Gold Line Press and a fiction editor for Joyland Magazine. He previously served as managing editor of Ricochet Editions. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Website: https://www.thomasrenjilian.com

Genre: fiction

Laura Roque is the daughter of Cuban exiles and was raised in Hialeah, Florida. In 2018, she won Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest and Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest. She is currently a Wallis Annenberg fellow at the University of Southern California and a PhD candidate in their creative writing program. Her novel-in-progress, Aguanta, Diana, has received support from the American Association of University Women and was awarded a dissertation fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year, as a project important to advances in equity for women and girls.

Website: lauraroque.com

Genre: poetry

Austen Leah Rose’s debut book of poems Once, This Forest Belonged to a Storm was the 2022 winner of the Juniper Prize and published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her poetry has appeared in Zyzzyva, AGNI, The Southern Review, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, and Djerassi. In 2018, she was awarded the Walter Sullivan Award from The Sewanee Review. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Website: https://austenleahrose.com/

Genre: fiction

Lindsey Skillen is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction) & Literature at the University of Southern California, where she has taught in the honors writing program, directed the Association of English Graduate Students, and served on the editorial board of Ricochet Editions. Her most recent publications can be found in -tele and Cosmonauts Avenue, where she was long-listed for a prize judged by Ottessa Moshfegh. She was the recipient of the Ann & Gordon Getty Foundation Scholarship for the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley workshop, and the Vaclav Havel Scholarship for the Prague Summer Program for writers, and had also received support from Tin House Summer and Winter workshops and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She received an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow, Managing Editor of Washington Square Review, and a Provost Visiting Graduate Student Fellow at the NYU Global Research Institutes in London and Prague. She’s read at the LA Times Book Festival, the NYU Emerging Writers reading series at KGB Bar in NYC, and The Wooly and Broken Shelves in Gainesville, FL. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida her work was featured in Prairie, The Fine Print, and Tea Literary Magazine, where it was awarded the Palmetto Prize for Fiction. Her story “A Sunny Place for Shady People” was selected for publication in plain china, a national anthology of the best undergraduate writing. She was hand-selected by Joyce Carol Oates for participation in her Master Class and spent a summer reading for The Book Group Literary Agency. She has volunteered her time with Still Waters in a Storm, Women Who Submit, and as a mentor with WriteGirl.

Genre: poetry

Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She is the author of the chapbooks But For I Am a Woman, winner of the 2022 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and Whistler’s Mother, published by Bull City Press in 2021. A graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, Sophia has also received fellowships and support from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Collegeville Institute, and Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She is the winner of the 2021 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast; recent poems and essays can be found in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and the Kenyon Review.

Website: https://www.sophiastid.com/

Genre: poetry

Essy Stone is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Southern California. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and recently completed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, 32 Poems, and Prairie Schooner. Her first book, What It Done to Us, was awarded the Idaho Prize in Poetry and was published by Lost Horse Press in 2017.

Genre: nonfiction

Clancy Tripp is a queer Midwestern writer, graphic artist, and humorist. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Catapult, december magazine, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Slice, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Reductress, and elsewhere. She won the 2020 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction (selected by Leslie Jamison), the 2021 Witness Literary Award in Nonfiction (selected by Cinelle Barnes), and the 2023 Spring Flash Fiction contest at F(r)iction. She has an MFA from the Ohio State University and an MA from Columbia University.

Website: www.ClancyTripp.com

Genre: fiction

Katrin Tschirgi is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Literary Review, Washington Square Review,  Quarterly West, and The Normal School. She is from Boise, Idaho.

Website: https://www.katrintschirgi.com/

Genre: poetry

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination,  and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and an essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles.

Website: https://vanessaangelicavillarreal.com/

Genre: poetry

Jorrell Watkins is from Richmond, VA. He received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Fulbright Japan, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry and his debut full-length collection, PlayHouse: poems, is forthcoming in 2024 with Northwestern University Press.

Website: https://jorrellwatkins.com/

Genre: nonfiction

Thalia Williamson is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, The Audacity, Longreads, BRINK, The Masters Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

She was a finalist for the 2023 BRINK Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing and a semifinalist for the 2022 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest. Her work has received support from the Tin House Scholarship for Trans Writers, the Marius DeBrabant Fund, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Tennessee Williams Scholarship.

She was born in London and now lives in Los Angeles, where she is completing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and a BA in Philosophy from King’s College London.

Website: thaliaw.com

Genre: fiction

Joliange Wright’s short stories have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Midwestern Gothic, and Consequence Magazine. She has an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was editor of The End of the World, June 2017. She is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she holds a Wallis Annenberg Fellowship. She volunteers for 826LA and InsideOut Writers.