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. 

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.

Pritha Bhattacharyya (PhD, Fiction)

Pritha Bhattacharyya is a Bengali-American writer. She is a fiction PhD candidate and Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She received her MFA from Boston University, where she was awarded a Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship to travel to Osaka, Japan. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tagore Society of Houston, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She received the 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for Glimmer Train‘s 2019 Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Nashville Review, Bodega, and elsewhere.

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.

Rohan Chhetri (PhD, Poetry)

Rohan Chhetri is a Nepali-Indian poet from the Dooars region of Bengal that borders Bhutan. He completed his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University where he was a University Fellow. His first book of poems, Slow Startle (Emerging Poets Prize 2015) was published by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. A chapbook of poems, Jurassic Desire (Per Diem Poetry Prize 2017) is slated to be published later this year from Per Diem Press. His poems have appeared in Prelude, Wildness, Rattle, Vinyl, EVENT, Literary Hub and was recently translated into French for Europe Revue. A former editor of fiction and poetry at the Indian arm of Hachette Book Publishing in New Delhi, he was a 2016 Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow and recently won the Joyce Carol Oates Award and The Leonard Brown Prize in Poetry. 

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

Iris Cronin (MFA, Fiction)

Iris Cronin is a writer, translator, and Houston native, although she has spent the last several years living and working in Massachusetts. She holds degrees in Playwriting and Comparative Literature from Brown University, the latter with a specialization in literary translation between French and English. Her favorite non-literary pastimes include dog-walking, journaling, and abandoning half-drunk cups of coffee all around her house. She is currently working on a novel, and her English translation of Sarah Berthiaume’s play Antioche is entering production at Montreal’s Talisman Theater Company.

Brittny Ray Crowell (PhD, Poetry)

Brittny Ray Crowell, a native of Texarkana, TX, received her BA in English from Spelman College followed by an MA in English from Texas A&M-Texarkana. Her work focuses on the hidden mythologies, dreams, traumas, and sensualities of the black contemporary south. In addition to poetry and creative writing, her interests also include studying the intersections between religion and hip hop.

Sara Kaplan-Cunningham (MFA, Poetry)

Sara Kaplan-Cunningham’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Redivider, Oxidant | Engine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, and serves as an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

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. 

Josh English (PhD, Poetry)

Josh English originally hails from northwest New Jersey.  He received his MFA from the University of South Carolina and has taught writing and literature at U of SC and at the South Carolina Department for Juvenile Justice.  His work has appeared in Cutbank, Denver Quarterly, Prelude, Sixth Finch, Third Coast and elsewhere.  He is the co-founding editor of the poetry outfit Oxidant|Engine.

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.

Madeleine Gaudin (MFA, Fiction)

Madeleine Gaudin is a writer, editor and educator from Austin, Texas. She has a BA in English and Film Studies from the University of Michigan, and currently serves as an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast.

Vanessa Beatriz Golenia (MFA, Fiction)

Vanessa Beatriz Golenia grew up straddling the Tijuana-San Diego border in a home with no common language. Prior to moving to Houston, she bounced between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, writing capitalist poetry for corporate beauty brands. Her work has appeared in Longreads, the Rumpus, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and elsewhere. In 2020, an essay she wrote was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. These days you can find her slowly chiseling away at her first book. 

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 (PhD, 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. 

Maria Hiers (MFA, Poetry)

Maria Hiers is from Tampa, Florida. She holds a BA in English from Florida State University. She served as an editorial intern at The Tallahassee Democrat, and is now a licensed yoga teacher. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hare’s Paw Literary Journal and Harpur Palette.

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.

Rand Khalil (PhD, Literature)

Rand 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.

Hannah Kelly (MFA, Fiction)

Hannah Kelly grew up in Charleston, SC and received her BFA in fiction writing from Emerson College, where she  ran two literary magazines, The Kindling Zine and Stork. She attended an arts high school for creative writing and previously self-published a book of short plays. In 2019, she had a book of short stories published, As Most Things Are.  

Daniel Kennedy (PhD, Fiction)

Daniel Kennedy grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He graduated from Boston University with a BA in English and was a member of BU’s Division 1 wrestling team. He holds an MFA from Virginia Tech, where he won the Emily Morrison Prize in Fiction. His writing has appeared in New England Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Arts & Letters, The Madison Review, and elsewhere. He previously served as an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast and managing editor for the minnesota review. He is the recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Nonfiction and the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship. Daniel is working on his first 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. 

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.

Aaron Neptune (MFA, Fiction)

Aaron Neptune is from Aurora, Colorado. He has a BA in English and Drama from the University of Virginia. Before moving to Houston, he worked for the state of Colorado as an attorney.

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, Fiction)

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.

Colby Ornell (PhD, Fiction)

Colby Ornell is from a small town in Massachusetts. She holds a BA from Wheaton College and an MFA from Butler University. Her fiction has been published in The Cobalt Review and Curbside Splendor. She is a fiction editor for Gulf Coast. 

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.”

Weijia Pan (MFA, Poetry)

Weijia Pan is a poet, writer, and translator originally from Shanghai, China. Prior to entering the MFA program in poetry at the University of Houston, he read comparative literature at UCLA, then worked as an education consultant for highschoolers in China. He writes in both English and Chinese.

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.

Blaine Prescott (PhD, Fiction)

Blaine Prescott received a BA from Western Kentucky University, an MA from Auburn University, and an MFA from the University of Oregon. He has worked in both retail and agriculture, as well as in the oil and gas industry, and his fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter and Shenandoah. He is from Kentucky.

Joy Priest (PhD, Poetry)

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and The Atlantic, among others and her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, and ESPN. Joy is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets, which will be published by Sarabande Books.

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.

Nick Rattner (PhD, Poetry)

Nick is a former Editor of Gulf Coast. Before moving to Houston, he was a basketball journalist and an Editor for Ugly Duckling Presse. Recent work has appeared in / will soon appear in Fence, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Sixth Finch, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, and Asymptote. At present, he is translating Mexican author Salvador Elizondo and Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román.

Scott Repass (MFA, Fiction)

Scott Repass has a Master of Liberal Studies from City University of New York and wrote his master’s thesis about body-switching movies.  His writing has appeared in Vox, Fort Necessity, Film Quarterly, and Houston and Nomadic Voices.  His novel, Last Call Lounge, won the Houston Writers Guild 2012 Novel Contest.  Scott owns bars and coffee houses in Houston. 

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.

Will Seelen (MFA, Fiction)

Will Seelen was born in Vermont and grew up back and forth between New Hampshire and Boston. He's never sure how to answer when asked where he's from. After barely graduating high school, he spent his adolescence wreaking havoc and perpetrating various delinquencies. He discovered blacksmithing in his early twenties which settled him down and drew him westward, eventually leading him to Illinois. After deciding to pursue higher education, he first attended community college, followed by Southern Illinois University, and he finished his BA in creative writing after transferring to the University of Illinois. At University of Illinois he was the recipient of the Quinn Creative Writing Award both years he attended and worked as a tutor in the Writers Workshop. He staves off existential dread by finding the beauty, absurdity, and dark humor in the contradictory and dissonant American wallow and—if the spirit takes him—writing about it.

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.

Jaxson Spencer (MFA, Poetry)

Jaxson Spencer is a maker of poems from southern Indiana. He holds a BS in Biology from Purdue University. Generally, his work deals in love, loss, etc., in the verbiage of the biological, colloquial, etc. Most of his downtime is given to something musical, and he can’t find enough of either. 

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 Suttom (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. 

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.