UNLV Creative Writing

Please join us for a reading with Maryam Ala Amjadi, city of Asylum Fellow and author of "Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems)," presented by @blackmtninst. Following the reading, she will be in conversation with novelist and UNLV professor Doug Unger.

Meet the Incoming Class

PhD/ Black Mountain Institute Fellows

Krista Diamond (Nonfiction)

Krista Diamond's essays and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Slate, Hazlitt, Longreads, Catapult, Joyland, TriQuarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Nevada Arts Council. In 2022, she was writer-in-residence for Desert Companion Magazine for whom she wrote a series of essays about Las Vegas lore. Her essay 'That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed' was recorded by Oscar-nominated actress Naomie Harris for Curio. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, she worked in the national parks. She has an MFA in fiction from UNLV and is looking forward to continuing her journey at UNLV where she will be happy to offer personalized recommendations about desert hiking and Las Vegas tiki bars.

Arpita Roy (Poetry)

Arpita received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she was the Thesis Poetry Fellow for 2023-24. She has been awarded Cheuse Center Travel Fellowship and Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her work can be found in Thrush, Psaltery & Lyre, Couplet Poetry and X-Ray. Arpita is from Kolkata, India.

Fiction MFA

Gustavo Alvarenga

Gustavo Alvarenga is a Salvadoran born writer whose cultural background and strong family bonds play heavily into his fiction. He was raised in the suburbs of Northern Virginia but moved to Las Vegas during his sophomore year of high school when his parents relocated for work. He worked as a technician in the telecom industry for over a decade before deciding to switch careers and commit fully to the art of writing. He enjoys board games, hikes with his dog, rainy days, snowboarding, rock climbing, and meeting new people.

Jade Bailey

Jade Bailey grew up in Kansas. After completing a BSc in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and an MSc in Applied Social Research at Trinity College Dublin, she worked as a social researcher in Dublin, Ireland. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at UNLV.

Shayla Felix

Shayla Felix (She/her) is a disabled writer born and raised in Seattle Washington. She originally attended Eastern Washington University but later transferred, completing her BA in English with a Creative writing Emphasis at Western Washington University. Most of her writing focuses on hybridity with topics orbiting around Magical realism, feminism, nature, and self-identity. Some of her favorite pieces that she’s written appear in Voidspace_, Quarter After Eight, and Cold Mountain Review. She also hopes to travel to all 50 states one day.

Julia Lu

Julia is a fiction writer currently living in Houston, Texas, where she was born and raised. She studied film production in college. Julia enjoys cooking and baking, taking walks, and picture books. Her favorite season is summer.

Izuchukwu Udokwu

Izuchukwu Onyedibiemma Udokwu is a Nigerian storyteller. His work has appeared on LOLWE, Kalahari Review, AFREADA and others. He was shortlisted for the 2020 K & L Prize. His shortlisted story was published in an anthology of speculative fiction on Africanfuturism, Black Skin No Mask. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where he is a fashion designer and an interior designer, and still makes time to read and write stories.

Poetry MFA

Hüseyin Arıkan

Hüseyin Serhat Arıkan is an immigrant and poet from Ankara, Turkey. He earned his BS in Political Science from METU. He's excited to have his second collection, "Firar Folkloru" (The Folklore of Escape) published in Turkey this year. He is a progressive rock enthusiast and he can't manage to maintain a streak in Duolingo.

JM Huck

JM Huck is coming to creative writing with a background in visual art. She studied photography, printmaking and textiles at many schools in New York City, where she lived for eight years. JM spent three years teaching English in Japan, and she grew up a "third culture kid," graduating from an American High School in Italy. She has been placemaking her whole life and is happy to call Nevada her current home. Huck's undergraduate degree is in Economics from Agnes Scott College.

Seth Kleinschmidt

Seth Kleinschmidt is a poet from rural Wisconsin. Hailing from Lorine Niedecker's hometown, he proudly champions the Midwest in his poetry and is currently at work on a collection of sonnets about the Black Hawk War. He graduated with a degree in literary arts from Brown and has worked in the radio industry, both on and off the air, for fifteen years. Seth arrives in Las Vegas from Washington, DC, and in free moments plays soccer, bakes pies, and browses adoptable cats.

Lindsay Loughin

Lindsay Loughin is a nonbinary bipolar poet and essayist born in California and raised everywhere else. At one point a US Marine, and at another a high school marching band instructor, their current boss once said their resume looks like a fake person. They live with their two cats, collect cassette tapes and N64 games, and have a complicated relationship with the Oxford comma.

Non-Fiction MFA

Anesce Dremen

(photograph is courtesy of a collaboration with Balvinder Singh)

Anesce Dremen is a U.S. writer and educator often found with a tea cup in hand, traveling between the U.S., China, and India. A first generation college student and domestic violence survivor, Anesce studied in four cities in China with the support of the Critical Language Scholarship and Gilman Scholarship. She was a 2022-23 Fulbright-Nehru ETA in India. Anesce’s work has been published in Stillhouse Press, Gordon Square Review, SPAN Magazine, Tea Journey, Persephone’s Daughters, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Tiny Spoon, and Shanghai Poetry Lab, among others. Her work can be found at AnesceDremen.com.

Taylor Wright

Meet the Incoming Class

PHD/Black Mountain Institute Fellows

Heather Peterson (Fiction)

Heather Wells Peterson earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida. Since then, she has worked as an adjunct writing instructor, a book doula, an editor, and in tech. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Rumpus, Subtropics, and Lit Hub, among others. She's looking forward to moving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with her partner, Bredt, and her dog, Nelson. You can learn more about her at https://www.heatherwellspeterson.com/. 

Fiction MFA

Sabrina Shie

Sabrina Shie is a writer from the Bay Area. Formerly a software engineer, she's given up and is having a lot more fun wrangling her internal dialogues into readable fiction. She also enjoys performing improv and stand-up, sometimes to live audiences, sometimes to her cat.

Per Loufman

Per Loufman is moving to Las Vegas from Philadelphia, PA, where he was born and raised and received a degree in Creative Writing. He has spent the last seven years working in restaurants throughout the city. His fiction often takes place in real worlds full of different things like loss, addiction, and love.

Julia Lu

Julia is a fiction writer born and raised in Houston, Texas. She studied film production in college and is currently living in Chicago. Julia enjoys cooking and baking, taking walks, and picture books. Her favorite season is summer. 

Ahmed Naji

Ahmed Naji is a writer from Egypt currently exiled in Las Vegas. In 2016 he was sentenced to two years for obscenity and disturbing public morals because of his novel “Using Life”, After a year in prison, he was able to sneak out of the country and immigrate to the USA in 2018. His literature fiction works include the novels “The happy ends” (2023) , “and tigers to my room” (2020),  “Rogers” (2007), and a collection of short stories, “The Mystery of the missing liver” (2016). His work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Italian and more.  His coming book “Rotten Evidence”, which chronicles his time in prison, is due out in September (2023) by McSweeney's. In addition to being a writer, Ahmed Naji is also a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and official criminal. Throughout his career, he has received several awards, including Best Short Documentary Film at the Washington DC Film Festival for his documentary "For Vegas" (2023), a Dubai Press Club Award for the Best Culture Article (2011), and a PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award (2016).

Brandon Cunningham

Branden Cunningham was born, raised and educated in the silver state. He went into activist work around environmental issues and spent close to eight years in that arena before changing gears to work two years on criminal justice reform. He brings his decade of activist work to his writing.

Poetry MFA

Jenna Farhat

Jenna Taha Farhat is a poet, journalist, and Arabic interpreter from Wichita, Kansas. Her journalism has appeared in the Miami New Times, ArtBurst Miami, The Sun News, the Wichita Eagle, and other publications. She earned a BA in creative writing from Wichita State University.

Ezra Moore

Ezra is a Vegas native with restless legs and always-full hands. Among other things, they currently work in marketing for non-profits. Despite the long hours, it's the most fulfilling job they've had. They're fresh out of UNLV with their Bachelor's in English, but they love the writing community enough to stay for another three years. 

Alex Farhat

Alexander Farhat is originally from Dallas, Texas, but has lived in places across the U.S. from bustling metropolitan cities to rural towns. He earned his BA in English from WFU and now finds himself relocating to Las Vegas to pursue an MFA in poetry.

Lauren Gleave

Lauren Gleave is a poet from Utah, where she earned her B.S. in health, society, and policy from the University of Utah.  Her work often explores identity as it interfaces with religion, mythology, and folklore.  Other than writing, her great loves in life are vintage clothing, old houses, and new people.

Polly Llewellan

Polly Llewellyn is from rural Utah and lives in Salt Lake City. She likes pretty music and spiders. She spent the last five years working at the city library but is now at the front desk of a fertility clinic, where she steals free time to research the first world war. Polly is excited to move past the heat exhaustion she suffered in years past while selling lemonade at the Las Vegas San Gennaro festivals and discover a new side to the city.

Non-Fiction MFA

Tracie Williams

Tracie Chavonne, a Chicago Native, made her way to Las Vegas in 2020 to escape California.  With her career as a flight attendant in jeopardy, she decided to complete her undergraduate degree after a fifteen-year hiatus from academia.  Having received her Bachelors of Arts in English with a Summa Cum Laude distinction in the Spring of 2023 from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, she has set her sights on continuing her education, pursing college professorship, deepening her relationship with writing, and creating a successful and lucrative career as an author by enrolling in the MFA Creative Writing Program in UNLV. 

Sada Malumfashi

PHD/Black Mountain Institute Fellows 

Domonique Conway (Nonfiction)

Dominque Demetrea Conway is a Baltimore-based activist and author who writes non-fiction that embodies her lived experience as a person of African descent in the United States, and a resident of West Baltimore. Born in Evanston, Illinois and raised in the nation’s rustbelt, she is the mother of four adult children. As an activist, Dominque has engaged in work addressing mass incarceration and political imprisonment in the United States. Her work with men in prisons resulted in the creation of Friend of a Friend, a prison-based mentoring program designed to teach critical thinking skills to young prisoners. Dominque has a BA from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and received an MFA from Goucher College in Baltimore in May 2021; she will pursue a Ph.D. in English at University of Nevada at Las Vegas beginning in the Fall of 2022. She is the co-author of Marshall Law The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, the memoir of Black Panther political prisoner, Eddie Conway. Her current project, Far From The Tree is a genealogical memoir examining the impact of racism and trauma on consecutive generations of her family spanning three centuries in America.

Tanya Shirazi (Fiction) 

Shirazi Galvez is from Lynwood, California. She completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA, and received an MS in Counseling Psychology from Mount St. Mary's University and an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. She is Senior Editor at Aster(ix) Journal and is working on her first novel. L.A. based, Las Vegas bound Fall 2022.

Fiction MFA

Alex Schechter

Alex Schechter is a writer and plant lover based in Los Angeles. For the last decade, he has been a professional wanderer, and he has written about his travels in National Geographic, Monocle, The New York Times, and Lonely Planet. His fiction weaves together themes of alienation, fame, the paranormal, and queer desire. He doesn't consider himself a desert person, and yet the desert keeps finding him.

Gurmehar Kaur

Gurmehar Kaur (aka Nupur Sharma) is a Radio and Online Video Broadcaster who has worked in India, the UK, Dubai and more recently the US.Her mantra in life is: Dare to Dream, Dare to Trust and on a happy day even Dare to Sing. Gurmehar’s areas of creative inquiry and work include: Indian / South Asian Literature and Cinema, New Media and Connectivity, Inter Faith Solidarity etc. Friends call her Mehar which is Persian for Affection. 

Delight Ejiaka

Delight Ejiaka is a graduate of Lee University from Cleveland, TN where she studied film production and English Writing. She loves stories and reviews new releases on her Instagram page to the delight of her bookish audience. 

Arel Wiederholt-Kassar 

Arel is from San Francisco. After studying literature at UC Santa Cruz, he worked at 826 Valencia in SF before moving to Barcelona to write and teach. His favorite fiction has long sentences and invented words. He’s excited to move to Las Vegas and get to work.

Kailee Wingo 

Kailee Wingo is a biracial fiction writer born and raised in Shanghai, China. I moved to California after high school to study English, Art, and Chemical Physics. Kailee’s stories are surreal, and they explore repressed personal identity and memory in a dream-like landscape. In his free time, Kailee enjoys playing indie games, painting, wheel throwing, and lampworking marbles and beads.

Poetry MFA

Jo Wallace

Jo Wallace is a poet from Indiana, fresh off earning their B.A. in Creative Writing, Sociology, and Communications from Purdue University. As a first-generation scholar, Jo’s work orbits topics such as poverty, addiction, mental illness, family, and intergenerational trauma, as well as reconciling the experience of these struggles while also existing in a world that somehow still leaves you in a state of constant wonder. 

Leah Mell-Carrington

Leah (she/they) is a genderqueer lesbian poet and translator from Charlotte, NC. She graduated from Davidson College with a BA in English and Russian Language & Literature. At present, she works as a freelance poetry critic for Lunate Journal, an admin at a local community college, and moonlights as her drag alter ego Tallulah Van Dank after sundown. Her artistic obsessions lie in noir, persona, morbidity, and the queer body. Leah is fond of ghosts and the sea.

Madina Tuhbatullina

Madina Tuhbatullina is from Dashoguz, Turkmenistan. She came to the United States to study English and Creative Writing in 2017. Much of her work is about bi-cultural identity and how it affects her relationship with herself and other people. Madina is excited to join UNLV’s creative community and will be glad to teach how to pronounce her last name to anyone interested.

Benjamin Favero 

Benjamin Favero was born in Ogden, Utah where he earned his BA from Weber State University in English—Creative Writing with minors in French and Literary Editing. As new parents, Ben and his wife, Jenae, look forward to warm winters and sweltering summers in Las Vegas with their daughter Halle. On top of writing poetry, fiction and reading whatever he can get his hands on, Ben loves hiking, swimming, and playing basketball.

Non-Fiction MFA 

Meg Bernhard

Meg Bernhard is a freelance writer and reporter from California. Between 2017 and 2020, she lived in Spain and Belgium, where she worked on vineyards and as a stringer for The Los Angeles Times. Her other work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Guernica, Harper’s, and elsewhere. Her Hazlitt essay “Water or Sky?” about a friend’s drowning and finding meaning through shared grief, was  anthologized in the 2021 Best American Travel Writing edition. She loves desert pavement.

Destiny Pinder-Buckley

Destiny Pinder-Buckley was born and raised (mostly) in South Dakota. She used to hate the place, but after traveling to 34 countries, she’s come to appreciate what the Midwest has to offer. She graduated with a B.A. in English and French and often wonders if she can speak either language correctly. This fall, her personal essay “Pandemic: You Are Here” will be published in an anthology about Sioux Falls, SD by Belt Publishing.

Billy Lezra 

Billy Lezra (they/them) was born and raised in Spain. They earned degrees in creative writing and global humanities from Mills College and are the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Rough Cut Press, a monthly literary journal that publishes emerging and established voices from the LGBTQIA community. Their nonfiction has appeared in The Independent, Huff Post, and elsewhere. They are intrigued and excited to move from the coast to the desert.

Chris Falite

It is our pleasure to announce the fabulous new writers who will be joining our UNLV community this fall. Congratulations to all these talented individuals - welcome to Vegas!

BMI FELLOWS

Xiaoqiu Qiu (Poetry)

Xiaoqiu is a Chinese poet. He is dedicated to preserving his mother tongue, Wu Chinese, and the environment around us. He never thought he would get a second chance at the Tumblr page bio—this time he learned to keep it short.

Jumoke Bello (Literary Nonfiction)

Jumi Bello is a Washington DC native who is not your traditional writer. She is a writer of consciousness. Through formal experimental narrative structure, her fiction wanders in the realm of mental illness, race, social institutions, and memory. She published two poetry chapbooks while studying history at Grinnell College. Jumi spent the majority of her twenties teaching high school in East Asia. She did a lot of things not involving creative writing: studying Mandarin Chinese, riding motorcycles, and becoming an advanced scuba diver. At the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she wrote her debut novel, THE LEAVING, which will be published by Riverhead Books in 2023. IWW awarded her fiction manuscript the Michener Copernicus Award in Fiction. Her work has been supported by Catapult, Corporeal Writing Center, and Tin House Summer Workshop. At UNLV, she wants to write about the history of psychiatry, race, homelessness, the War on Drugs, and the police.

FICTION MFA

Charlie Bartlett

Born and raised in London, Charlie is a queer, nonbinary first-generation, Afro-Jamaican Brit, who moved to California in 2016. Their fiction explores relationships to self, others, and the effects trauma has on the mind, body, and soul. They also write poetry and essays, one of which has been published in Gertrude Press. They received their undergraduate degree from the University of Roehampton in London and started their MFA in Fiction at San Francisco State and excited to continue at UNLV. Charlie’s pronouns are They/Them. 

Shani Boianjiu 

Shani Boianjiu is an Israeli writer and translator. Her debut novel The People of Forever are Not Afraid has been published in 23 countries. She is a National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 award recipient. Her writing appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Zoetrope, Vice, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, the Guardian, Guernica, and elsewhere. She likes reading, the beach, and TV.

Xueyi Zhou

Xueyi Zhou was born and raised in Foshan. She earned a BA in Translation and Interpreting from Shanghai International Studies University before she returned to her home, a manufacturing city to work in a stainless-steel company. Writing in English pulled her out of Foshan again and dropped her into the American desert, where she will be pursuing her MFA at UNLV. She’s been published or has work forthcoming in  X-R-A-Y,  Waxwing,  Passages North,  Chestnut Review, Pithead Chapel, and AAWW.

Michael Rudolph

Michael is a Portland, Oregon native who is currently working on a novel about spirituality and family life. He is looking forward to honing his craft, as well as going abroad to try his hand at Spanish to English translation.

Krista Diamond

Krista Diamond is a Las Vegas-based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Narratively, HuffPost, Joyland, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Nevada Arts Council. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, she worked in the national parks. She does not recommend spending a summer in Death Valley. 

POETRY MFA

Jeb Haley

Jeb Whitney Haley was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and attended the University of Virginia, where he majored in English. He joins the MFA program after many years of independent and professional learning in architecture: a background he shares with several of his favorite writers. His post-MFA aspirations include teaching and small-scale ranching.

Karyn Stacey Panem

Karyn is a poet born and raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i. An avid slipper wearer and long hair enthusiast, her poetry is rooted in exploring the nature and chaos in the connection of all things. She lives in Las Vegas. 

Abby Musgrove

Abby Gayle Musgrove was born in Prescott, AZ. She holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Neuroscience from Weber State University. In her free time, she enjoys reading non-fiction and poetry, practicing watercolor, and spending time outdoors. 

Rachel Walker

Rachel Walker graduated from the University of Maryland with a double degree in English and French literature. She has been working in nonprofits for the last few years. In her free time, Rachel loves hiking, reading historical fiction, and trying new vegetarian recipes. She is looking forward to joining the MFA program at UNLV and exploring the desert.

Ruth Traynelis

Ruth was born and raised in Metro Atlanta, and will be trading the lushest GA greenery for those red rocks in Vegas. Ruth couldn't be more thrilled about what's to come.

LITERARY NONFICTION MFA

Emma Hardy

Emma Hardy is form Melbourne, Australia. Her nonfiction has been published in Voiceworks, The Lifted Brow, The Monthly, and Dumbofeather. She’s interested in animals, the environment and nonfiction that lends itself towards speculative and fabulative She’s also obsesses with comedy and performs improv, clown, sketch, and occasionally stand-up.

Ucheoma Onwutuebe

Ucheoma Onwutuebe's works have been published in Prairie Schooner, LipMag, Kalahari Review. In 2019, she was the recipient of The Eli Cantor Residency at Yaddo. She studied Microbiology at Abia State University in Uturu, Nigeria where she was actively involved in the literary society. She is also a graduate of film at the Royal Arts Academy.

Meg Bernhard

Meg Bernhard is a freelance writer and reporter from Southern California’s Inland Empire. Between 2017 and 2020, she lived in Spain and Belgium, where she worked on vineyards and as a stringer for The Los Angeles Times. Her other work has been published in The New Yorker, Guernica, Harper’s, and elsewhere. Her Hazlitt essay “Water or Sky?” about a friend’s drowning and finding meaning through shared grief, will be anthologized in the 2021 Best American Travel Writing edition. Last year, she put 22,000 miles on her car before it started sputtering in central Arkansas and finally gave out 20 miles from her house.

Clement Gelly

Clement Gelly is a writer and artist from London, England. He writes narrative nonfiction, and his artwork combines photography, sculpture, and performance. He grew up in New Jersey, Arizona, Wisconsin, and London. He has a B.A. in Religion and has studied extensively in Mongolia. He loves dogs, rock climbing, cooking, and chess. He is looking forward to moving to Las Vegas!

Oona Robertson 

Oona Robertson (pronouns: she/her) was born in San Francisco a decade before the tech boom, and has lived in New York City and Western Massachusetts. She works as a furniture maker and prince of odd jobs and is very excited to put down her tools and get paid to write. That said, she is always taking orders for bookshelves. Her recent writing has been published in Witness Magazine, Post Journal, and The VOMIT ZINE, which she co-created. Her work explores pain, perception, and power. She is excited to expand in all directions when her feet hit desert ground. 

Jordan Forest

Neon Lit Thesis Reading Live and in Living Color

This Friday, May 14 at 6pm PDT

Register here

It is our pleasure to introduce you to the 17 writers who will join our UNLV community this coming Fall 2020 semester! Congratulations to everyone, and welcome to UNLV!

PHD/BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE FELLOWS

Dorothy Allred Solomon (nonfiction) was born into a polygamous household to the father of forty-eight children and his fourth wife, but married a Vietnam veteran who said, “One wife is more than enough.” She took her bachelor’s degree in literature, theater and communication and her master’s degree in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. Her writing has received several awards, including the 2004 WILLA, the Utah State Publishing Prize, three first prizes from the Utah Arts Council,  Distinguished Journalism Awards from Sigma Delta Chi and the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a Governor's Media Award for Excellence. Her books include the groundbreaking In My Father’s House (1984, Franklin Watts and 2008, Texas Tech University Press) Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy, (W.W. Norton, 2003) Daughter of the Saints, (W. W. Norton, 2004) The Sisterhood: Inside the Lives of Mormon Women, (2007, Palgrave Macmillan) and coming in 2020 from Texas Tech University Press, Finding Karen: An Ancestral Mystery.

Areej Quraishi (fiction) was born in Dubai, UAE. Her fiction explores familial relationships, cultural identity, memory, and their effects on the psyche. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington-Seattle and an MA and BA in English from Rutgers University. Outside of writing, she enjoys food, trying out new recipes, teaching, graphic design, language, and dabbles in drawing and singing. Her stories appear or have been awarded Finalist spots in Entropy, Glimmer Train Press, and New Millennium Writings. She's super excited to attend UNLV and hopes that being raised in a desert has prepared her for the heat.

MFA Fiction

Mark Ranchez discovered the power of stories and storytelling at an early age. Moved from the Philippines to Hawaii in 2013, he finds himself in a constant journey into the unexpected and unknown, from which many of his stories he’s excited to write about were gleaned. By furthering his education and expertise of the craft, he aspires to someday bring these stories into life. His main writing interests involve the Filipinx experience both in the US and the Philippines. Currently he writes for The Hawaii Filipino Chronicle, an ethnic news publication based on Oahu. Hawaii.

 Shani Boianjiu (not pictured)

Marlan K. Smith joins the MFA program as a fiction writer after completing his MA in English at the University of Idaho. A veteran of the video game industry, his academic interests include contemporary and Victorian literature, speculative fiction, and horror. His short stories (written pseudonymously) have appeared in Dark Moon Harvest magazine as well as Space and Time Magazine. As someone moving to Las Vegas during a global pandemic, he accepts that he has basically become a character in a Stephen King novel.

Alycia Calvert was born in Palo Alto California, and has been trying be be close to the ocean ever since. She graduated from UNLV in 2016 with a degree in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Alycia mostly writes flash fiction and is interested in the processes of mothering and childhood in memory. She is the wife to one wildlife biologist, and mother to four curious children. In her “spare time” she can be found running, biking, kayaking, nursing a forest of house plants, tearing through audio books, and half-finishing house projects. She loves learning, and is thrilled to begin her MFA at UNLV.  

MFA Poetry

Ben Socolofsky is a poet currently celebrating the mundane in Las Vegas, Nevada. He received a bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College, where he became a founding member of the Departure Collective, which organizes readings and produces chapbooks. His work has appeared in The Hampshire College Reader, WORKSHOP and Departure Anthology.

Sara Brown grew up in rural, middle-of-nowhere South Jersey on her grandparents’ two farms and on the coast. She started working at age 9 on her grandparents’ blueberry farm and then at a flower nursery while completing her Bachelors in Literature. Due to a very bad/good habit of being interested in everything, she enjoys reading and writing poetry and creative nonfiction, painting, growing plants, experimenting with film and digital photography, running and biking, and making music. She also has a chocolate problem and will ugly-cry when she has to leave her dog in NJ. Sara has spent many hours exploring the Mojave Desert while staying with her family and friends in Las Vegas and is beyond thrilled to start the MFA program at UNLV.

Benjamin Stallings is an American poet and musician who grew up in Beijing, China. He moved to America to attend Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he graduated with a B.A. in Literature and a B.A. in Writing. He performs as Dagger, playing guitar and writing songs in El Bandito Forever.

John Blake Oldenborg recently graduated from Florida State University with an M.A. in English Literature, Media, and Culture. His favorite pizza toppings are pepperoni and black olives. In his spare time, John enjoys visiting art museums and playing rogue-likes. He is scared of the screaming guy from the band Death Grips

Alice Letowt is convincing her endocrine system to behave. She is interested in light, spent two seasons working on a farm, and hopes to continue farming in the future. While practicing social distancing, she is discovering a fondness for azalea bushes. She can’t wait to stop in Kansas on her drive from Virginia to Nevada.

Harrison Bernard Nuzzo

“i stand outside me and watch myself"

- d.a. levy

 MFA Nonfiction

Michael Hanson, a Minnesota native, has chased warm weather in Hawaii, California, Hong Kong, Australia, and now Las Vegas. When he isn’t winning sailboat races, he can be found camping, reading, or carousing with the local riff-raff.

Emma Hardy is from Melbourne, Australia. Her nonfiction has been published in Voiceworks, The Lifted Brow, the Monthly and Dumbofeather. She's interested in animals, the environment and nonfiction that lends itself towards the speculative and fabulative. She's also obsessed with comedy, and performs improv, clown, sketch and occasionally stand-up.

Journalist Travis Dunn was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey and rural Pennsylvania. He holds a B.A. from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. His reporting has been published by the Center for Public Integrity, WhoWhoWhy, Alternet, Belt Magazine, and the now-defunct Baltimore City Paper.

Claire Mullen is a freelance writer, critic, audio producer, and translator based in Mexico City. Her work has appeared in outlets such as The Nation, Lithub, The Believer, and Ploughshares, and she is currently a National Book Critics Circle fellow.

It is our pleasure to announce the 17 writers who will join our UNLV community this coming Fall 2019 semester! Congratulations to everyone, and welcome to Vegas!

PHD/BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE FELLOWS

Robert Ren is a writer and teacher in New York. He has a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University. Having escaped a corporate career, he currently tutors kids in standardized test prep. He managed to avoid the whole college admissions scandal, but that's only because his photoshop skills are terrible.

Dorothy Solomon (not pictured)

MFA Fiction

Bronwyn Scott-McCharen was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi and graduated from Hendrix College in 2014 with a degree in Sociology and Anthropology. She then lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina for three years, where she immersed herself in the country's vibrant political culture under the guise of academic research. Her interests outside of writing fiction include travel, photography, international politics and history (especially Cold War history). She is currently hard at work on two novels in distinct stages of development--one completed manuscript in need of polish and another in the earliest phase of drafting and intensive research. She speaks Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese and hopes to soon add Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian to her budding repertoire of languages.

Mir Arif developed the idea of storytelling at an early age from strangers—astrologers, street magicians, herbal medicine sellers and other con-artists—frequenting the quiet alleys of his childhood neighborhood in Comilla, a small town in southern Bangladesh. He graduated from University of Dhaka with a degree in International Relations and worked as a staff writer for Arts & Letters. His short stories have appeared in various magazines and e-zines in the US, Singapore, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. One of his short stories was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2019. He likes to hike and spend time with parakeets.

Karen Gu's fiction has appeared in Paper Darts and The Margins and is forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly. She has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, and the Loft Literary Center. After five years in Chicago and four years in Minneapolis, she is looking forward to the desert.

Mohammed Jahama often introduces himself as Mo. He likes to write about those kinds of borderland identities and to talk about words. And is excited and grateful for the opportunity to do such things at UNLV.

Sylvia Fox has too many interests and a wandering soul, which is why she writes fiction. Most recently, she spent the last two years in Baltimore, MD, surrounded and inspired by artists. So many aspects of her identity have led her to believe in the subversive power of showing up, taking up space, and creating space for others. She looks forward to continuing to explore this in writing and in community with others.

MFA Poetry

Nick Barnette, an Alabama native, attended Texas Christian University where he received a BA in English and BS in Film-Television-and-Digital Media. Upon graduation, Nick received a Fulbright Fellowship to Greece where he taught ESL in an elementary school in Athens.

Sarah Spaulding is a Tennessee native and a lover of the mountains that raised her. She graduated summa cum laude with her BA in psychology and English with an emphasis in creative writing from Carson-Newman University. There she discovered her penchant for digging around in people’s heads. She often writes poems to dig herself out of her own head. Her work appears in Tennessee’s Best Emerging Poets, Aletheia, Ampersand, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, and soon-to-be a guide to Southwestern Iceland. When she’s not busy exploring the mire of humanity, Sarah enjoys dancing in the sunshine, petting other people’s dogs, and helping her father type his memoir.

Jo O’Lone-Hahn is from rural Pennsylvania, and is now on her way to Las Vegas, continuing on her lifelong mission to see the world. She has a B.A. in poetry, studio art, and religious studies from Hampshire College. She writes poems that focus on misunderstood people, naiveté, and the imagination inherent in remembering. Jo has held jobs such as: social worker, tattoo-shop-front-desk-chick, archivist, and tarot-reader-on-the-streets. She is also a member of the Departure Collective, a literary group which conducts workshops, organizes poetry readings, and creates chapbooks. When she’s not writing, she makes mixed-media artworks, wanders around, and befriends grumpy old men.

Nicholas Gruber is a native of Wisconsin, where he earned a BA in Economics from UW-Milwaukee. He is an emerging poet, and--hand to God--a human.

Kathryn McKenzie is a Las Vegas native with a BA in English. She drinks enough tea to match the annual consumption of the entire country of Ireland, and prefers snuggling up in her reading chair with a book, toast, and tea to almost anything in the world. Beyond her deep love of poetry and literature, her passions include: asking to pet every dog she sees, cracking her back after standing up in the movie theater, planning Halloween costumes years in advance, and talking about all the parties she is going to throw, but never actually throwing them. Her poetry has appeared in Neon Dreams and Unincorporated, and her interest in publishing has led her to work with Interim, Witness, and Helen: a literary magazine.

MFA Nonfiction

Christina Berke is a Libra and a teacher from Los Angeles.

Jordon Smith, raised among the Tetons in Wyoming, is a nonfiction writer who enjoys the pleasures and curiosities of the natural world. She completed her undergraduate degree at Utah State University where she met her husband. After graduating, she and her husband moved to Oklahoma where they welcomed a baby boy. Jordon discovered a love of distance running during her time in Oklahoma and is currently training for a marathon in July. When she is not running, she is working in the public library, taking long car rides, or watching children's television shows.

At first look, Soni Brown's life is a series of parodies. She is an immigrant who planned and spent her first vacation in Dubuque, Iowa in January; a former flight attendant afraid of heights and a classically trained chef who prefers Stouffer's frozen meals. As a nonfiction writer, Soni uses her journalism training to write about women, immigrants, and the vagaries of life. A wife and mom since 2016, she is constantly trying to have it all especially a partner who picks up after himself. At the end of the world, you will find Soni nursing a tumbler of herby gin while recounting the year she spent in Brooklyn with Jay-Z. So what if he doesn't know her.

It is our pleasure to announce the 16 fabulous new writers who will join our UNLV community this fall, including our inaugural Creative Nonfiction cohort! Congratulations to all of these talented folks - welcome to Vegas!

PHD/BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE FELLOWS

Susana Ferreira is a Portuguese-Canadian freelance reporter, producer, and longform writer for magazines and film. As a correspondent and stringer, she has filed from throughout the world for major dailies, wires, television news networks and radio. She speaks five languages — six, if you count "Toronto English."

Sreshtha Sen is a writer from Delhi, India and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review an online journal for and by South Asian poets, She studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in Bitch Media, Breakwater Review, Meridian, The Margins and elsewhere.  She currently lives and teaches in New York where she's the 2017-18 McCrindle Foundation Fellow for Readings/Workshops at Poets & Writers.

MFA FICTION

Vera Miranda (not pictured)

Chantelle Mitchell is a Las Vegas native. She received a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where she served as associate editor for Jackalope Magazine and editor for Glyph Literary Magazine. She loves making a character out of the environment, so travel is an essential part of both her personal and professional identities. Though she has interned in Hong Kong and trekked horseback through Costa Rican rainforests, she finds there is a quiet magic in the desert made especially for the writer. Chantelle loves gothic literature, anime, and eSports. 

Erin Piasecki (not pictured)

Flavia Stefani Resende was born and raised in Goiânia, Brazil. She has lived in São Paulo, New York, London, San Francisco and will soon be headed to the red, unforgiving heat of Las Vegas, NV. At various points in her life, Flavia has been a copywriter, a freelance writer, an editor-at-large and a translator. She’s attended several writing conferences and workshops over the years but still considers herself a beginner. A huge fan of the San Francisco Public Library, Flavia spends most of her time reading. She writes fiction and sometimes non-fiction. She’s at work on a collection of short stories. She also needs to finish her novel.

Jordan Sutlive graduated from The College of William and Mary in 2014, and afterwards taught English in northeast Japan for a couple of years. He lives now in his hometown of San Antonio, where he writes and teaches and oversleeps. He's overjoyed by the prospect of returning to school, if only to stave off adulthood for a few more years.

 MFA NONFICTION

Elena Brokaw was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, where she spent the first six years of her life playing Gallina Siegawith her sister and cousins, eating all the Canitas de Leche she could find and being afraid of the dark.  She made her way to Las Vegas by way of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Utah. Her BA is in English with a creative emphasis.  After spending her twenties in the business world and most of her thirties as a mom, she has returned to her first passion—writing. Her interests include hybrid storytelling, graphic design, and hand-lettering.  She is still afraid of the dark. 

Spencer Darr is a nonfiction writer focusing on people and places with a Texas connection. His most recent work has appeared in Atlas Obscura, The Nervous Breakdown, and his travel blog whyareyallhere.com. Born in Waco, TX, he currently lives in Austin, spent a few years abroad in Colorado and Minnesota, and lived the longest in Pecan Hill, TX. A first generation college grad, he has a B.A. in English from Southwestern University and an M.A. in Technical Communication from the English Department of Texas State University. He currently works as a Content Moderation Associate for Accenture on contract with a big social media company. When not writing and working, he enjoys squirrel watching, traveling Texas Farm to Market roads in his rusty, purple 97 Ford Ranger stick shift pickup truck named Barney, playing with technology, and those precious moments in the middle of nowhere without cell reception.

Cody Gambino (not pictured)

Therin Showalter is a nonfiction writer, filmmaker, and video editor from Kansas City, Missouri. In 2018, he received his B.A in Media Studies from Indiana University and was published by the IU Journal of Undergraduate Research. Later this year, he will begin an MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at UNLV, launch an online business, get married (not in Vegas), and send his most recent short film to festivals around the country. He lives with with his fiancee Destiny, their cat Ollie, and dog Kempir.

MFA POETRY

Anthony Farris (not pictured)

Ruth Larmore is a Vegas native with a BA in Fine Arts and an interdisciplinary background in mathematics and philosophy. Her practice in poetry examines the complex processes of human consciousness. Ruth intends to use the skills she will gain from the MFA program to communicate new perspectives on language through an integration of poetry and visual arts. When alone, she teaches herself coding and clowning, the latter of which seems to come naturally. When in public, Ruth is often seen crouching behind corners. Ignore this, she is just taking notes.

Chelsi Sayti (not pictured)

It is our pleasure to announce the writers who will join our UNLV community this coming Fall 2017 semester! Congratulations to all of them, and welcome to Vegas!

PHD/BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE FELLOWS

Sam Gilpin is a poet from Portland, OR. He received a BA in English from the University of Utah and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is a voracious reader interested in 21st century poetry, critical theory, and the avant-garde. His work has appeared in Prism Review, Prime Number, and Ruminate, among others.  He is an avid people watcher, jazz aficionado, and a devoted cat dad.

Wendy Wimmer Schuchart is a Green Bay writer and editor. She is currently managing webinar and editorial projects at an online tech publication. Wendy is a graduate of the UW – Green Bay English program and received her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from UW – Milwaukee. She has spearheaded a small indie digital writer conference held in Green Bay annually for the last thirteen years that has raised over $30,000 for local charities and most recently co-founded a book and author festival called UntitledTown which in its first year attracted more than 2000 festival participants and hosted over 80 authors Margaret Atwood, Sherman Alexie, Dan Chaon, Ben Percy, Nickolas Butler, Kate Harding and Michael Perry. Her passion is in community building and connecting with writers and readers. Her work has been published recently in Per Contra, Barrelhouse, Drunken Boat, Paper Darts, Blackbird, and more. She is currently a fiction editor for Barrelhouse literary journal. Her short fiction has won numerous awards and been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. She is also active in organizing area writing workshops and other writing events.

MFA Fiction

Daynee (die-nay) Rosales is a journalist and award-winning radio producer from Cochabamba, Bolivia.  She received her BA in English from George Mason University in 2011, after which she moved to Alaska to pursue her dream of becoming a radio DJ/ambulance driver. Part serious and part whimsy, Daynee is passionate about using her creative abilities to make a positive impact in her community— wherever that may be (she has moved too many times to count). Her latest radio project, CHISPA, features the stories of latinx and LGBTQ youth speaking about their personal experiences with immigration, exile, and loss. Her next project could easily be a one-act play about a missing sock crisis. With Daynee, you just never know.

Roy Johnson grew up in Seattle, Washington, where he attended high school on Mercer Island.  He received his BA in philosophy from Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, and later studied history at Dixie State University in Saint George, Utah. Roy loves to read and to hike with his daughter, the Z.  

Karli Tokala Rouse was born in the Sandhills of western Nebraska but grew up in Las Vegas. She inherited the love of storytelling from her father, a citizen of the Ihanktonwan Dakota Oyate, who would take their family on annual road trips back east, passing down traditions and the history of places they passed along the way. Her writing results from following threads, seeking to reflect multiplicities rather than absolutes. When not swimming in the sea of written word, she spends her time hiking, practicing Tai Chi, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and discovering unconventional uses for the plethora of spices in her kitchen. She will be graduating from UNLV with her BA in English this spring.

Dylan Fisher is from the California suburbs, not any suburb, but a California one, a San Francisco one, one he promptly left behind to attend Grinnell College, there receiving a B.A. in Anthropology, after which he remained in the Midwest, first moving to Duluth, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior, the greatest of the Great Lakes, but then back to California, and then on to Austin, Texas, where, at the time of this writing, he works as a grant writer for a perpetually underfunded nonprofit, the latest in a long string of jobs that have taken him -- always by means of his 2003 Ford Taurus, which, bless our hearts, is still running to this day -- from one American city to the next.

Lindsay Olson grew up in Salt Lake City but has spent the last five years in Pontiac Michigan, just outside Detroit where she dabbled in oil painting, floral design and completing her BA in Creative Writing. She is the founding editor of The Oakland Arts Review and her work has appeared in Quarterly West, The Oakland Journal, and Inscape among others, with publication forthcoming in Prison Pedagogy. She considers herself a nonfiction writer, but has a tendency to make stuff up. She owns 127 ceramic mugs.

MFA Poetry

Maxwell Gontarek moved to Baltimore from Philadelphia to earn a BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in Apiary, Blazevox, Vector, Zeniada, and Jenkem Magazine. Poetry is everything to him and music is everything else. He enjoys making up various pseudonyms almost as much as he enjoys making music under various pseudonyms such as Percy Sludge, Pace Fortune, Beast Install, and D.S. Burner.

Leisa Loan is from Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Marymount Manhattan College with a degree in Musical Theatre and Creative Writing. In recent years she has found herself on many Greyhound buses living between New York City, Boston, and Nashville. Her passions aside from the obvious reading and writing are singing and seeing live music...the louder and messier the better. She is very concerned her East Coast blood may cause her to melt in the desert heat, but also considers it to be the work of fate that the year she moves to Vegas they will be getting their own NHL team. So at the very least she can see her beloved Boston Bruins from the comfort of an ice cold arena and feel at home. She feels very odd but also a bit regal writing about herself in the third person like this.

Antonie Frankie Aquino’s native roots web between the holographic computerized colosseum and the barren Mohave’s infamous playground, Las Vegas, where he competed for his modern medal in Bachelor’s of English. A 2016 Winter graduate of the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, Antonie gracefully was supported by troops of Pepsi cans and nuclear family. Besides his academic checklists, his other lists come by as suits: a photographer, visualizer, and speculator of the stellar sector. He enjoys smoked out books and boots which spur his quantum wheels. With his map still rolling and dice loaded, Antonie thinks that deserts deserve two s’s.

Claire Morgan received her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, where she was a member of the rowing team. Since graduation, she has spent time in central Italy teaching English to children, as well as interning at The Georgia Review in Athens, GA. Claire's interests include micropoetry, medieval literature, horror anime, and Troll 2.