2022 Summer Scholars

Angie Sijun Lou is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Best Small Fictions, Joyland, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a Fiction Editor at FENCE, a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an instructor at San Quentin State Prison. She has received fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Millay Arts, the Calfornia Arts Council, and the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference. She lives in Oakland.

Autumn Fourkiller is a writer from rural Oklahoma. She is a 2022 Ann Friedman Fellow and Tin House Summer Scholar. Her work is current or forthcoming in Longreads, Catapult, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Her newsletter, "Dream Interpretation for Dummies," (sadboyhowdy.substack.com) is where Dear Abby meets Native Americana. She is currently at work on a novel about "ghosts," Indigenous and otherwise. Find her on Instagram (@sadboyhowdy) or at autumnfourkiller.com.

Bahareh's hometown in Iran is called Khooninshar, or “city of blood” for the carnage it saw as the primary battlefront of the Iran-Iraq war. It forced her indigenous ethno-religious community to diaspora. After escaping to India, she almost died of malaria, inspiring her to become a pediatrician. Through it all, she found solace in poetry and writing. She can be found at baharehkeith.com, Instagram: @baharehkeith, and Twitter: @BaharehWrites

Carolina Hotchandani is a poet and Goodrich Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she teaches courses on literature, writing, and the medical humanities. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Missouri Review (poem of the week), New Ohio Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She received two Rona Jaffe scholarships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2021 and was a Pushcart nominee in 2017. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska with her husband and daughter.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is also the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book A Is for Asian American (Haymarket Books), which will be published in May 2023. You can find her @cathylinhche on social media and at cathylinhche.com.

Em North is a genderqueer writer who has lived in eleven states in the past decade. They received their MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University, and their work has appeared in Conjunctions, Lightspeed, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and elsewhere. In previous lives, they’ve done research in observational cosmology and Lie algebras, caretook a ranch in the San Juans, taught snowboarding and creative writing, and trained horses. Their debut novel, IN UNIVERSES, is forthcoming with Harper Books in 2024. Find them at emznorth.com.

féi hernandez is a trans, Inglewood-raised, formerly undocumented immigrant author of the full-length poetry collection Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications 2020), which was on NPR’s Best Books of 2020. They are a Define American Fellow for 2021 and are currently the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles. They have been published in POETRY, Autostraddle, Immigrant Report, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Somewhere We are Human, and more.

Gisselle Yepes is a 23-year-old Puerto Rican and Colombian storyteller from the Bronx. They are currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University, where they have received the Bertolt Clever Poetry Prize and the Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing. Gisselle’s “Not an Ode to April 22, 2019” won Missouri Review’s 2021 Poem of the Year. Their work has also appeared in Gulf Coast, The Academy of American Poets, and voicemail poems. Gisselle holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University, where they earned the Winchester Fellowship, the Sophie and Anne Reed Prize, and the award for Connecticut Poetry Laureate.

Helen Armstrong (she/her) is a queer woman who lives and writes at the base of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She's graduating in September with her MFA from Brown University, and has been published in Black Warrior Review, Jellyfish Review, and others. She lives with her wife, two cats, and several dying houseplants. Find her at helenkarmstrong.com or, in bite-sized pieces on Twitter @hkawrites.


Laura Cresté is the author of You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2021-2022 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review's "Poem of the Week" series, Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, Cero Magazine and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from New York University.

Lindsay Ferguson is a writer and visual artist based in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse and Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize, the 2021 anthology for winners of the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. When she's not writing, Lindsay can be found exploring other artistic pursuits and helping nonprofits wrangle their communications. Find her on social media as @lindsrferg across platforms.

Manuel is a writer and translator from Monterrey, México. He has been a fellow or scholar at the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Community of Writers. His work appears in Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cutthroat Magazine, and has been anthologized in Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. Currently, he is the translator for the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts and for A Leer Más Cuentos. He has completed his first novel, School of Artistas Inmigrantes, and is studying a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver. Find him: @manucalvi & manucalvillo.com.

Riley MacLeod is a trans writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently he was editor-at-large at gaming news site Kotaku. He was co-founder of Topside Press, an independent press dedicated to transgender fiction, and he won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in transgender fiction as co-editor of Topside's The Collection: Short Fiction From The Transgender Vanguard. You can find him on Twitter at @rcmacleod, where he is probably talking about unions.


Uche Okonkwo is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and has an MFA in Fiction from Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Lagos Noir, Ellipsis, Saraba, and others. Okonkwo has received residencies and scholarships from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Writers Omi, the Anderson Center, and Bread Loaf. She was the 2020-2021 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy and is a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow
2022 Scholars


Amanda J. Floresca (she/her) is a YA writer from Walterboro, South Carolina. She’s a biracial Filipina-American who enjoys writing about diverse and edgy characters in small town settings. Her short fiction has appeared in Short Story America and Owl Hollow Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College and is currently a graduate student at the University of South Carolina, completing a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. When she’s not doing homework or spending time with her children, she’s working on her debut novel. Find her on Instagram @ajflorescawrites

aureleo sans is a flamingo. She is also a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused poet and writer with a disability, who resides in San Antonio, Texas. She is a VONA alumnus, a Periplus fellow, and a creative nonfiction associate editor at jmww. She was named the second-place winner of Fractured Lit's 2021 Micro Fiction Contest, a longlister for the 2021 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize longlist and a semi-finalist for the 2021 American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize. Her work has been published in Passages North, HAD, Shenandoah, Electric Literature and elsewhere. She is a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2022 Best Microfiction nominee. Find aureleo on Twitter @aureleos.

Crystal K. is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their flash stories have appeared in Gertrude, Passages North, Peach Mag, [PANK], Hobart, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Lev has attended the Tin House Workshop and been nominated for Best of the Net. They write RPGs at Feverdream Games.

erin rachel is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. Her early love of science fiction and fantasy led to her fascination with the power we have to refashion our lives through expansive thinking and creativity. She is the founder of a social impact design studio that uses decolonized design practices to bring to life not-too-distant futures. She is currently working on a young adult speculative fiction novel. When she is not writing fiction, you can find her writing musicals, practicing design, or teaching at local colleges and through her studio. Learn more at byerinrachel.com or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @by_erinrachel

Endria Isa Richardson is a black, malaysian, and gay american writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. Endria writes about ghosts, monsters (including the monster of white supremacy), and the catastrophic failure of systems that are supposed to keep us safe. Her essays have appeared most recently in Black Warrior Review, Alpinist, and Backpacker, and her speculative fiction is in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, FIYAH, Nightmare, and other fantastic/al magazines. Her work has received notable mentions in the Best American Essays and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, and a runner-up award from the Black Warrior Review nonfiction contest. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise and VONA workshops. In her past life, Endria was a prison abolitionist lawyer. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories, and a novel. You can see more of her work at www.endriarichardson.com.

After completing her BA in English at Tuskegee University, Dr. Fredrika Atkins wanted to find a career that would allow her the leverage to make a difference while still pursuing her passion for writing. Starting out in marketing while pursuing her Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications in Chicago, Illinois at Roosevelt University in 2006 gave her the opportunity to do just that.
Fredrika has worked for non-profit and for-profit organizations before moving into Medicare Sales ten years ago. While working full-time at WellCare, she also studied at Capella University in their Doctor of Business Administration, Strategy, and Innovation program, graduating in (2015).
Recently, Fredrika relocated to Oakland, California for a new position and opportunities that will afford her the space and platform to pursue her writing. Fredrika’s experiences have allowed her to create innovative and fresh ways of writing about uncomfortable topics for young adults.
Dr. Atkins is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and authored her first book, A Comparative Analysis of Factors Related to the Performance of Ethnic Majorities and Minority-Owned Small Businesses in Alabama, it was published in (2015 ) by ProQuest-CSA, LLC ).
Social Media Handles
Facebook: Fredrika Atkins
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/

Heather Quinn (they/them) is an essayist and photographer living in Saint Paul with their husband and two children. A Minnesota native, they spent most of their childhood and early adulthood in Southern California, and their work frequently features the desert landscape around the Salton Sea in the southeastern corner of the state. They earned their MFA from Portland State University, and they were a 2019–2020 Loft Mentor Series fellow and a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow. They are working on a memoir, This is How You Disappear, about the California desert and their father’s suicide. Find them on Instagram @heatherfquinn and at heatherfquinn.com.

Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey. He co-founded LEGACY, a production collective by and for Black queer artists, and is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books contest. His recent publications include Prolit, Best New Poets 2021, Poem-a-Day, and The Cincinnati Review. He holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Find him at kylecarrerolopez.com and on Twitter @kycarrerolopez.

Maggie Nye is a writer and editor living in Bloomington, Indiana, and a forthcoming MacDowell fellow. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. Her first, yet unpublished novel was a finalist in Red Hen Press, Autumn House Press, and Steel Toe Books contests. She is presently working on her second novel: a strange, radical re-writing of the Medusa myth.


Marta Balcewicz lives in Toronto. Her fiction appears in Catapult, Tin House online, Washington Square Review, and other places. Her debut novel, Big Shadow, is forthcoming from Book*hug Press in spring 2023. You can find her at martabalcewicz.com and on Instagram @wiczcraft. (Photo by Angela Lewis.)

Miriam Ho Nga Wai (she/her) is a writer, editor and architect from Hong Kong. She has lived across southeast Asia and western Europe, and now lives in a multi-generational household in Toronto. She is a co-editor of The Site Magazine (www.thesitemagazine.com), an award-winning journal of architecture, place-making and cultural criticism, and a fiction reader at Guernica. She is hard at work on a short story collection and a novel in the stolen hours before her child wakes up.

Rory Gilhoul (they/he) is a speculative fiction writer currently based in Texas. Born in Brooklyn to a Scottish and Egyptian family, Rory spent their early childhood in Edinburgh before moving back to the United States. In 2021 they completed a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. Their academic research focuses on the nexus of folklore and public memory. Rory is a co-founder of Wayward Warren Collective, a forthcoming online literary publication specializing in creative nonfiction about the politics and aesthetics of “the weird.” You can find Rory on Twitter @gilhouligan.

Sam Heaps is a genderqueer writer, visual artist, and organizer, currently living in Philadelphia where they teach writing. They have published in Communion Arts Journal, Entropy, Taco Bell Quarterly, and many other brave journals and anthologies. They are a 2022 VCCA Fellow. Heaps' debut PROXIMITY is forthcoming from CLASH Books January 2023.

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, MQR, Four Way Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, among others. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

2019-2021 Scholars
2021
A. Meinen
Alex Brown
Angelique Stevens
Angela Flores
Arriel Vinson
Channler Twyman
Chelsea B. DesAutels
Christopher James Llego
Deborah Taffa
Elliot Thomas
Gail Upchurch
Jean Ferruzola
Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham
July Thomas
K Chiucarello
Kamden Hilliard
Kimberly Reyes
Krys Malcolm Belc
Laurie Thomas
Lisa Ryan
Liz Iversen
Luke Dani Blue
Lydia Abedeen
Marissa Davis
Marlanda Dekine-Sapient Soul
Mark Kyungsoo Bias
Michelle Ruiz Keil
Michaeljulius Y. Idani
Naphisa Senanarong
Nic Anstett
Nicole Homer
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
Puloma Ghosh
Reena Shah
Roman Johnson
Sarah Matsui
Sabrina Imbler
Scott Broker
Scott H. Hoshida
Sofia Barrett-Ibarria
Tatiana Johnson-Boria
Vanessa Chan
Vincent Chavez
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
2020
A. Andrews
Delali Ayivor
Colwill Brown
Nina Li Coomes
Asa Drake
Yalitza Ferreras
Destiny Hemphill
Zahir Janmohamed
Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
Sabrina Helen Li
Devyn Mañibo
Joshua Max
Serena Morales
Josha Jay Nathan
Danielle Batalion Ola
Eliana Ramage
Nay Saysourinho
Anthony Veasna So
Kenechi Uzor
Sarah Wang
El Williams III
2019
Nicole Acheampong
Alverne Ball
Coryn Brown
Stacia Brown
Joshua Burton
K-Ming Chang
Jean Chen Ho
David M. de León
Devin Dyer
Rickey Fayne
Cristina Fríes
Moeko Fujii
Amanda Hawkins
Jay Haynes
E.E. Hussey
Francisco Márquez
Isle McElroy
Gothataone Moeng
Katie Moulton
Fajr Muhammad
Dyan Neary
Rachel Purdy
Julian Randall
Serena Simpson
April Sopkin
Jeneé Skinner
Joseph Earl Thomas
Nami Thompson
David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Joni Renee Whitworth
2010- 2018 Scholars
2018
Allison Albino
Jabari Jawan Allen
Threa Almontaser
Ginger Gaffney
Nathan Go
Nancy Huang
Sacha Idell
Tsering Lama
Antonio López
Casandra Lopez
Manuel (Manny) Martinez
Margaret Meehan
Dantiel W. Moniz
Luke Muyskens
Destiny O. Birdsong
Maegan Poland
Monterica Sade Neil
David Sanchez
Eva Warrick
Jesús I. Valles
Keith S. Wilson
Jenna Wortham
Joaquín Zihuatanejo
2017
Emma Copley Eisenberg
Ethan Feuer
Aidan Forster
Sarah Fuchs
Jessica Guzman Alderman
Caoilinn Hughes
Taylor Johnson
Hannah King
Ben Kingsley
Joyce Li
Ana Owusu-Tyo
Regina Porter
Charlie Schneider
Rajat Singh
Cab Tran
Dawnie Walton
Hannah Withers
C Pam Zhang
2016
Danielle Bainbridge
Carson Beker
Leila Chatti
Jennifer Croft
Maria Lioutaia
Sarah Gerard
Gabriel Houck
Diana Khoi Nguyen
Denne Michele Norris
Olaniyi Omiwale
Tommy Pico
Allie Rowbottom
Cam Terwilliger
2015
Olivia Clare
Drew Johnson
Ruth Madievsky
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Shelly Oria
Kate Petersen
Jenn Shapland
Aurvi Sharma
Randall Tyrone
2014
Valerie Brelinski
Jaquira Diaz
Jon Lewis-Katz
Caroline O’Connor Thomas
Nick Greer
Casey Fleming
Cody Carvel
Angela Penaredondo
Zana Previti
Zack Strait
2013
David Bersell
Jesse Donaldson
Tracey Knapp
Mo McFeely
David Poissant
Kathryn Scanlan
Laura Walter
2012
Jaime Shearn Coan
Vishwas Gaitonde
Allison Hutchcraf
Will Mackin
Ben Shattuck
Gabriel Tallent
Christie Van Laningham
2011
Jae Choi
Bryan Hurt
Laura Musselman
James Scott
Elisabeth Pfister
Kelly Luce
Kate Milliken
Rosie Moffett
2010
Ramona Ausubel
Melissa Barrett
Lucy Biederman
Alan Heathcock
Sophie Klahr
Marni Ludwig
Shuchi Saraswat
Stephanie Soileau
Olga Zilberbourg