This is a list of current graduate students in the English Department, including students studying at master’s and doctoral levels, and across the disciplines of creative writing (poetry or fiction); literature; and rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy.

Maha Abdelwahab (PhD, Poetry)

Maha Abdelwahab is an Egyptian poet and aspiring translator. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. 

Adeniyi Ademoroti

Adeniyi Ademoroti is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. He received his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was most recently a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared in the Southern Review and AGNI.

Ona Akinde

Ona Akinde is a Nigerian writer, born and raised in Lagos. Her work appears in Oyster River Pages, Kalahari Review, Arts and Africa, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and is a recipient of the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship.

Layla Al-Bedawi (MFA, Fiction)

Layla Al-Bedawi is a writer of fiction, prose poetry, lyric essays, and hybrid strangelings. English is her third language, but she's been dreaming in it for years. Born in Germany to Kurdish and Ukrainian parents, she moved to the US in her twenties. Here in Houston, she has loved building and supporting writing communities by working with several literary organizations, including one she co-founded. Her work has been selected for the 2021 Best Small Fictions anthology; has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, IGNYTE Award, and Rhysling Award; and is published in Wigleaf, Bayou Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Juked, and elsewhere. 

Nick Almeida (PhD, Fiction)

Nick Almeida’s writing has appeared in Pleiades, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Masterplans, a chapbook of stories, is available now from The Masters Review.

Ibrahim Badshah (PhD, Literature)

Ibrahim Badshah hails from the Indian state of Kerala. He earned his B.A in English Literature from the University of Calicut and M.A from the University of Delhi. Ibrahim’s academic interests include Translation theory, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, World Literatures, and Arab and Islamic Studies. Being a translator of texts from Arabic and English to his mother tongue Malayalam, Ibrahim’s research focuses primarily on postcolonial translation theory, in which he tries to go beyond the Eurocentric translation theories in an attempt to formulate a theory that concerns the East. Outside of academia, he loves photography, cooking, playing badminton and hiking.

Anna Barr (MFA, Fiction)

Anna Barr is a fiction writer from Michigan. She got her bachelors from the University of Michigan in 2021. Since then, she's been writing and teaching in Spain. This is her first year in the MFA.

Charlotte Bellomy (MFA, Fiction)

Charlotte Bellomy grew up first in California and then in the Carolinas, where she still lives, works, and climbs (North Carolina, these days). She graduated from Wake Forest in 2017 and now does the marketing for an environmental study abroad school, helping students find their way to far-flung field stations like the one where she was a student herself. She has three sisters and just enough time in the day to FaceTime them all.

Caleb Berg (MFA, Fiction)

Caleb Berg was born and raised in Berkeley, California. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, he discovered a passion for writing, dropped his ENVS major, and received his BA in Literature with a Creative Writing Focus. Despite their abusive, one-sided relationship, he is tragically in love with the Oakland A’s—the day he sees them win the World Series will be the greatest of his life. He is currently the Blog Editor and Production Manager for Stone Soup, a children’s literary magazine.
 

Ryan Bollenbach (PhD, Poetry)

Ryan Bollenbach is a writer and musician living in Houston, Texas. He formerly served as the poetry editor for Black Warrior Review in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is currently an assistant editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts and Heavy Feather Review. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, poets.org, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, and elsewhere. Reach out on twitter @SilentAsIAm or visit his website.

Godhuly Bose (PhD, Literature)

Godhuly Bose completed her B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Jadavpur University, India. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in literature, she has worked in journalism and baking. Her academic interests lie in resistance, social movements, food and postcolonial literature. 

Anthony Box (PhD, RCP)

Anthony Box grew up in Bakersfield, California where he earned both his B.A. and M.A. in English from CSU Bakersfield. While there, he was a member of CSUB’s NCAA Division I wrestling team. His research interests include style, composition pedagogy, digital rhetoric and experimental writing.

Jari Bradley (PhD, Poetry)

Jari Bradley (they/them) is a Black genderqueer poet and scholar from San Francisco, California. They have received fellowships and support from Callaloo, Cave Canem, Tin House, The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments. Jari’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has work published/forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Blood Orange Review (selected by judge Nikky Finney), The Offing, Academy of American Poets (Poem-A-Day) , Callaloo, Columbia Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Jari Bradley (MFA, University of Pittsburgh) was the 2020–2021 First Wave Poetry Fellow at UW–Madison.

Brittany Bronson (PhD, Fiction)

Brittany Bronson earned her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2014. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitch, and others. From 2015-2020, she was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, where she wrote about class, the service-industry, and income inequality. Her fiction has appeared in F(r)iction, BULL, Paper Darts, and others. For the past two years, Bronson has worked as a Senior Content Strategist for a software startup doing SEO and thought leadership marketing. Prior to the role, she worked as both an adjunct instructor and a cocktail waitress on the Las Vegas strip. She is a former collegiate golfer and recently ran her first marathon on behalf of the Parkinson’s Foundation, where she volunteers.

Julia Brown (PhD, Fiction)

Julia Brown is an editor-at-large at AGNI, and has been a member of the magazine’s editorial team since 2019. Originally from Richmond, Virginia, she earned her MFA from the University of Houston and is a former fiction editor at Gulf Coast. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, Mosaic, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She's always happy to talk about horror movies, and the short story.

Kartika Budhwar (PhD, Fiction)

Kartika Budhwar is a Senior Editor for ​the ​South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG)​ ​Anthology​ and the forthcoming literary journal, Ripe Fiction​. ​She​ h​olds a​n​ MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment from Iowa State University and a​n​ MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. She has received the Albert L. Walker Excellence in Literature Award (2020), ​ the Research Excellence Award (2020), the Hogrefe ​Excellence ​Grant for Creative Writers (2018, 2019) and a Teaching Excellence Award (2018). ​​She was awarded Second place in the Arts and Letters Fiction Prize (2019), the Blue Mesa Nonfiction Prize (2019), and the Indiana Review Fiction Prize (2018); her writing appears in the same journals. She was also a Finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize (2019). ​

Kimberly Cervantes (MFA, Poetry)

Kimberly Cervantes is from Brownsville, Texas and received their BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. They have previously been a part of the visual arts committee and staff of Gallery—a literary and arts magazine, and look forward to the arts of Houston.

Alissa Christopherson (PhD, Literature)

Alissa Nicole Christopherson hails from central California and has received a B.A. and M.A. in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Houston, respectively. Her research is focused on gender and sexuality in new media, with emphases on adaptation studies, Romanticism and modern gaming. Her scholarly interests are a natural extension of a decades-long investment in fandom culture, which continues to occupy a notable chunk of her free time. When not reading, writing or gaming, she also enjoys hiking.

Lea Colchado (PhD, RCP)

Lea Colchado is a mestiza rhetorician from the borderlands of South Texas. Her areas of interest focus on the rhetoric of trauma, Chicanas, shadow work and healing. She has a passion for teaching decolonial and Anzaldúan modes of writing and Chicana feminist literature. As a Tejana, she inscribes her culture and amor for sangronas and poderosas into her work and her research. When Lea is not vigorously studying and writing, presenting her research at conferences, or dismantling machismo, she enjoys chilling at home with her little black cat, KiKi, and tending to her plants.  

Justin Dykes (PhD, RCP)

Justin Dykes was born and raised in San Diego, CA. There at SDSU, he earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and master’s degrees in both homeland security and rhetoric and writing studies. Justin’s research interests include composition pedagogy, marginalized rhetorics, and cultural, digital, (geo)political and religious rhetoric. 

Eileen Ellis

Eileen Ellis is a poet, Kitchen Manager dropout, (not-evil) step-mother to two frogs, Greg and Willow, and new mother to Loki, a retired street-cat (who also goes by Mr. Stinky, Mr. Crazy, Mr. Scoopy, Mr. Sleepy, Mr. Scratchy, Mr. Baby Man, and of course, Mr. Goober Boob). Eileen received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, where she was highly involved in their Literary and Arts Magazine, Opus, as a section editor and Co-Editor. Eileen works part time as a Magpie, so if a trinket of yours goes missing, she may have snatched it.

Leah Fretwell (PhD, Fiction)

Leah Fretwell is originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia and has an MFA from Brigham Young University.

Sylvia Garcia (PhD, Literature)

Sylvia Garcia specializes in Latin American literature and diaspora studies. Her research includes studying the intersections between language and the body in post-diaspora experiences and has been influenced by her experiences growing up in an immigrant family in the United States. When she is not pursuing her studies, Sylvia enjoys biking, jogging and discovering new places in Houston.

Rosa Boshier González (PhD, Fiction)

Rosa Boshier González is a writer and editor from Los Angeles. Her fiction, essays, and art criticism appear in Guernica, Catapult, Joyland, Literary Hub, The New York Times, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, The Guardian, LARB, and The Washington Post, among others. She has taught writing, Latinx cultural studies, and art history at The California Institute of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast Journal.  

Jacob Harris (MFA, Poetry)

Jacob Harris is from Kentucky. He holds a BA from Centre College, where he studied English, Spanish, and Creative Writing; he has been initiated into the Omicron Delta Kappa and Sigma Delta Pi honors societies. Jacob was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and his work has been featured in Good River Review and in the Voice & Vision Reading Series. He writes about love, erotics, interactions between the poet & reader, and his mother’s prophetic dreams.

KT Herr (PhD, Poetry)

KT Herr is a queer writer, musician, and curious person from Lancaster, PA. They hold a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where they were the recipient of a Jane Cooper Fellowship and the Thomas Lux Scholarship Award. Their writing has appeared in Barrow Street 4x2, Frontier, The Rupture, as winner of the 2020 Sweet Lit Poetry Contest, and elsewhere. KT has been the grateful beneficiary of creative support from the Atlantic Center for the Arts and from Great Lakes Experimental Arts. In a past life, they served beer to Midwesterners. More recently, they have found joyous employment as an educator, ghostwriter, podcast producer, and mentor. 

Christopher Hewitt

Christopher Hewitt was raised in Dallas and lived for many years in California and New York State before coming to Houston. His first book The Summer After, winner of the 2024 New Criterion Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in February 2025. His poems have appeared in Able Muse, The Adroit Journal, Ecotone, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.

Conor Hogan

Conor Hogan grew up in Portland, Oregon, and studied Creative Writing at the University of Montana. He has worked as a firefighter for the US Forest Service for the past nine years, and he is currently employed by the North Cascades Smokejumper Base in Washington state. He enjoys skiing, paragliding, and concise author bios.

Rob Howell (PhD, Fiction)

Rob Howell earned his MFA from Louisiana State University. His fiction has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. 

Katerina Ivanov Prado (PhD, Fiction)

Katerina Ivanov Prado is a Mexican-Russian writer whose work has been published in Brevity, Passages North, The Rumpus, The Florida Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Pinch, Joyland and others. She has won the John Weston Award for Fiction, the 2019 AWP Intro Journals Award, The Pinch Nonfiction Literary Award, and the Florida Review’s Editor’s Award. She is a recipient of a 2022 Reese’s Book Club LitUp fellowship. She received her MFA from University of Arizona and is a prose editor for The Adroit Journal. 

Jennifer Julian (PhD, Literature)

Jennifer L. Julian, a native Houstonian, received her B.A. and M.A. in English from Texas Southern University. Her interests of research include the African American gothic, African diaspora literature, speculative fiction & fantasy, and the voice of writers in literary works. She can be found listening to music when not reading. An avid graphic novel and comic book fan, she also spends her free time crafting novels.

Rund Khalil (PhD, Literature)

Rund Khalil is a Fulbright alumna and a first-year Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Houston. She received her M.A. in English Literature at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research interests include Anglophone Arab Literature, Post-Colonial Theory and the politics of hyphenated Arab identities. Her M.A. thesis was titled, "Hybridity, Border-Crossings and the Homeland in Contemporary Literature by Women" and supervised by Julie Husband, Ph.D. 

Ariel Katz (PhD, Fiction)

Ariel Katz is a writer from North Carolina. Her stories have appeared in Colorado Review and Copper Nickel. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently at work on a novel.

Marisa Koulen (PhD, RCP)

Marisa Koulen was born in New Jersey and raised along the eastern shores of Maryland. Marisa received her B.A. in English-Writing Studies with a minor in journalism from Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Her studies continued at Millersville where she obtained her M.A. in English.

Ann G. Kroger (PhD, RCP)

Ann Kroger is a native Houstonian who earned her undergraduate degrees in English literature and secondary education. Fifteen years sober, Ann’s research explores the public vs. private natures of addiction and recovery and how the dialogue surrounding addiction manifests in mainstream culture and public policy. In addition to studying both fiction and nonfiction accounts of addiction, Ann's research looks at historical representations of addiction, public and counter-public spheres and activist pedagogy.

Karen Lagana (PhD, RCP)

Born in NYC, Karen Lagana most recently lived in Buffalo, NY. While there, she earned her Ed.M. in English education, tutored students in writing and the LSAT and learned to regard any snowfall under three feet as a mere dusting. Her undergraduate degrees are in English and philosophy. Her primary interests are student-centered pedagogy, the socially situated nature of knowledge and how that impacts Rhet/Comp and how an education in rhetoric can help build a just democracy where citizens engage in authentic dialogue across difference.

Amy Lipke (PhD, RCP)

Amy Lipke received a BS in technical and professional writing from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.A. in rhetoric and composition from the University of Houston-Downtown. Her doctoral research investigates the use of language acquisition theory in composition pedagogy.

Leisa Loan (PhD, Poetry)

Leisa Loan is from Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Marymount Manhattan College and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. At UNLV she was co-managing editor of Interim Poetics. Her work has recently been published in Hobart and WAS Quarterly. She is currently the Digital Editor of Gulf Coast.

Reese Lopez (MFA, Fiction)

Reese Lopez is a writer and musician originally from Houston, Texas. He received his BA in English from the Evergreen State College. Before enrolling in the UH creative writing program, he spent a decade as a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

Will Lowder (MFA, Fiction)

Will Lowder is from Albemarle, North Carolina. He earned his BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his final year he worked as an editorial intern at Algonquin Books. Since graduation he has completed seasonal contracts in the hospitality industry across the country.

Catherine Lu (MFA, Poetry)

Catherine Lu is an arts writer, Emmy-nominated producer, radio/TV announcer, and creative. She works for Houston Public Media and has contributed to NPR. In 2021, she founded the independent arts blog, Houston Arts Journal, where she covers local arts news. Her poetry has been published in Mom Egg Review. In her free time, she loves drawing, painting, making stuff, thrifting, learning to skateboard, and spending time with her husband, daughter, and cat Cheeto.  

Jo McIntosh (PhD, Literature)

Jo McIntosh is a Ph.D. in literature student and non-tenured faculty at Concordia University Texas. Jo's literary and critical work is in early modern and Renaissance studies, Mary Wroth's corpus and digital humanities. In each area, Jo prioritizes feminist praxis, which includes racial equity and fair labor. Jo hopes to complete a WGSS certificate and DH project while at the University of Houston. She presents a paper at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in October and is the 2021-2023 graduate representative for the International Sidney Society. Jo is equally committed to spending time at the beach, with family and writing. 

Malcolm Mitchell

Malcolm Mitchell is an American writer, raised in Thailand. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and in Computer Science from Carleton College, and is now an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston.

Bo Hee Moon

Bo Hee Moon is a South Korean adoptee. Born in South Korea, she was adopted at three-months-old. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry, swamp pink, The Margins, and others. Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, published by Tinderbox Editions, is her debut collection of poems. She previously published under a different name. You can find her at boheemoon.com.

Vinay Nair

Vinay Nair is a first-year PhD student in Creative Writing and Literature (fiction). He holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in Human Ecology. He is working on his first novel, which is set in a semi-fictional village in Gujarat, India, under the shadows of the tallest (and possibly ugliest) statue in the world. Like much of his writing, it brings together his interests in people and nature.

Keelan Nee (PhD, Poetry)

Kelan Nee is a first-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Originally from Arlington, MA, he has worked as a boat builder and carpenter. His poems have been published in Poetry, the Yale Review, the Missouri Review and elsewhere.

Zarlasht Niaz (MFA, Poetry)

Zarlasht Niaz is a writer and organizer from Minneapolis, Minnesota whose work focuses on immigration and women's rights. 

Stacy R. Nigliazzo (MFA, Poetry)

Stacy R. Nigliazzo is the author of three poetry books: Scissored Moon, Sky the Oar, and My Borrowed Face. Her poems have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is also a nurse who has served the Houston community as a frontline caregiver over the course of five pandemic surges.

Ann O’Bryan (PhD, RCP)

Ann O’Bryan is a first year Ph.D. student with a concentration in rhetoric, composition and pedagogy. Her research focus is service learning in the composition classroom and prison pedagogy. She earned her M.A. in English, rhetoric and composition from California State University, Northridge. She earned her B.A. in English, creative writing from Colorado State University. She presented her research on video games in the composition classroom at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She has won various awards for research and teaching excellence. A lifelong nature lover, Ann can be found on hiking and nature trails, when her nose isn’t buried in books.

Bevin O’Connor (PhD, Poetry)

Bevin O’Connor grew up in Southern California and received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California. A 2022 finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology, her work can be found in Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.

Benjamin Ou

Ben is an escaped lab rat from Oakland, CA. Though it took him longer than the other rats to gain sentience, there isn’t much of clinical significance to report — other than an enhanced affinity for the en dash and a predilection for getting lost in the (figurative) sauce. He writes short, psychically intimate prose when he eventually does bumble into the story at the center of the maze, after hitting every wall. He spends his newfound freedom cooking without the aide of a human intermediary and offering elaborate sacrifices to a semi-benevolent cat guardian.

Adrian Pachuca (MFA, Poetry)

Adrian Pachuca is a native Houstonian with a stereotypical passion for Whataburger and hate for I-45 traffic. He is a clumsy person who identifies as a love poet since he’s a little obsessed with understanding what we really mean when we say “I love you.”

Kim Philley (PhD, Fiction)

Kim Philley was born in Singapore and grew up in Indonesia, Thailand, and Virginia. She is a multi-genre writer currently focusing on fiction. Among other publications, her essays have appeared in The New York Times and The Caravan; fiction in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 (ed. Dave Eggers) and Epiphany; poetry in AGNI and The Indiana Review. She has reported on the Cambodian-Thai border war at Preah Vihear temple for The Caravan, and on Burmese spirit possession ceremonies from Mandalay for the BBC’s “From Our Own Correspondent.” A former Henry Hoyns Fellow in poetry at the University of Virginia, she has taught at the University of Virginia, Boise State University, and the University of Houston. 

Stephanie Pushaw (PhD, Fiction)

Stephanie Pushaw is from Los Angeles. A teacher, editor and multi-genre writer, she has also lived in Scotland, Australia, Montana, and New Orleans. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her nonfiction has been longlisted for the Berlin Writers Prize and the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writers Fellowship, and she was one of ten fiction writers shortlisted for the 2021 First Pages Prize. Her award-winning short fiction appears in Narrative, Joyland, Sundog Lit and The Master's Review Anthology IX, and her essays can be found in DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Formerly an assistant essays and interviews editor for The Believer, Stephanie has also worked as a business writer, screenplay doctor and SAT tutor. Her literary fixations include technology, animals, natural disasters, addiction and solipsism. She can generally be found by the nearest large body of water with her dog, Phoebe.

Biz Rasich (MFA, Fiction)

Biz Rasich was born in Texas but grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She returned to Texas for her BA in Mathematical Economic Analysis at Rice University, and comes to the MFA program after working at the University of Chicago doing press strategy and research for a book about gun violence. Her fiction explores oddities of all kinds, including conspiracies, corporate culture, reality TV, and human-animal relationships. 

Coleman Riggins

Coleman Riggins is a queer poet born and raised in North Platte, Nebraska. He earned both a BAEd in English Education 7-12 and a BA in English Writing and pursued multiple outlets concerning writing in editorialship and publishing. Generally, he enjoys exploring the psyche and the mind in his writing and plans to pursue his writing extensively in the future.

Camilo Roldan

Camilo Roldan is a bilingual Colombian-American translator and poet. He is the author of the English language poetry collection Dropout (Ornithopter Press, 2019) and the Spanish collection El último soneto y nos vamos (HAO, 2021). His translation of María Paz Guerrero’s book Dios también es una perra was published by the UDP Señal Series in 2020 as God is a Bitch Too. His poems and translations have appeared in various magazines and he is an Inprint Fondren Foundation Fellowship recipient.

Aishwarya Sahi (MFA, Poetry)

Aishwarya Sahi is a writer and editor from Patna, Bihar. She writes about the body and its small graces and indignities, imagined homes and true homes, and the bright but false promise of return. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Poetry Project’s The Recluse, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

Chaitali Sen

Chaitali Sen is a first-year PhD student in Creative Writing and Literature/Fiction. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky and the story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven, chosen by Danielle Evans as the winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. She holds an MFA from Hunter College - City University of New York.

Dalel Serda (PhD, RCP)

Dalel Serda grew up on the Texas-Mexico border and spent her childhood summers in metropolitan Mexico City. The back and forth between countries and her access to their respective socio-economic spectra influenced her decision to travel more widely. She eventually taught English as an additional language in Tokyo and South Korea; then, more recently, and for a decade now, she has embraced community college composition and literature instruction. Her experience traveling, teaching and mothering two daughters serve to energize her studies of privilege and marginalization. She enters the RCP program hoping to examine academic discourse literacies and intersectionality. Furthermore, she is interested in how composition classrooms can demystify and de-/re-construct notions of quality.  

Katherine Smith (MFA, Fiction)

Katherine Smith joins the UHCWP eighteen years after graduating with a degree in Creative Writing from the University of South Alabama. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Houston ISD Foundation.

Patrick Stockwell (PhD, Fiction)

Patrick Stockwell is the author of The Light Here Changes Everything, winner of the 2018 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. A native of Houston, he holds an MFA from New Mexico State University. 

Anthony Sutton (PhD, Poetry)

Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokiksas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX), holds an MFA from the currently under threat program in Creative Writing at Purdue University, and has had poems appear or forthcoming in guesthouse, Gulf Coast, Grist, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Oversound, Quarter After Eight, Southern Indiana Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. 

Ashley Warner (MFA, Poetry)

Ashley Warner earned her BA and M.A. in English at the University of West Georgia. She has received scholarships to attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Terminus Magazine, The Journal, and the Birmingham Poetry Review. 

Mathew Weitman (PhD, Poetry)

Mathew Weitman is the winner of the 2021 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (The Georgia Review) and was a writer in residence at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, WA. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The Evergreen Review, New South, Bennington Review, The Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the New School where he was a student poetry editor for Lit Magazine.

Marshall Woodward (MFA, Poetry)

Marshall Woodward is a writer born & raised on the Gulf Coast. His poetry has recently been featured in Wrongdoing Mag (2021) and Dirt Child (2022) and is forthcoming from b l u s h (summer 2022) and FENCE (summer 2022). His chapbook ‘Clown Star’ was published by Gutslut Press in February 2022. He is a prose contributor to Gossamer and Runner’s World. He was previously EIC of the satire publication, Cultural Fan Fiction, and assisted in the book-to-series adaptations of Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible and James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. 

Adele Elise Williams (PhD, Poetry)

Adele Elise Williams is a writer, editor and educator. She is the winner of the 2019 Emily Morrison Poetry Prize and 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize for Poetry as well as the recipient of fellowships from UCROSS, Inprint, and Hindman Settlement School. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Air/Light, The Florida Review, Guernica, Cream City Review, Split Lip, The Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Adele’s current goings-on can be found at adeleelisewilliams.com. 

J. Preston Witt

J. Preston Witt writes for the stage, page, and screen and has been awarded fellowships for literary fiction by The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2018 - 2019), the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2020 - 2023). He has taught writing at various institutions, including The Ohio State University, Romanian-American University in Bucharest, Medgar Evers College (CUNY), and the University of Tulsa. Though primarily a writer, he is most visible as an artist of social practice who uses sculpture, text, and performance to provide art support at protests. He is at work on a novel about the dangers of innocence.

Alix Zachow (PhD, Literature)

A native of Mississippi, Alix Zachow received her B.A. from Middlebury College in Vermont and her M.A. from Teachers College-Columbia University in New York. Her research interests include medical/health humanities, contemporary poetry and poetics, globalization and the Anthropocene.

Karen Zheng

Karen Zheng is a queer, Chinese-American poet. Her poetry has been featured in Sine Theta Magazine, Honey Literary, Benningham Review, Harbor Review and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Roots. Wounds. Words, Chicago Storystudio, The Poetry Lab, and Inprint MD Anderson Foundation. She has been a finalist for Harbor Review’s Washburn Chapbook Prize. In her free time, she hosts the Mx. Asian American podcast. Find out more about her at https://www.karenzheng.com.