Eric Baker is a mixed Korean American writer from New York City, currently living in the Washington D.C. area, where he studies and teaches writing at the University of Maryland, College Park. His writing explores themes of generational trauma and diasporic longing, and can be read in Tupelo Quarterly, Red Ogre Review and elsewhere.
Divya Benezette is a professional writing graduate student at Towson University. She earned her Bachelor of Science in English from TU last May. She is an avid reader, writer, and a poet. Divya has published four poems in various literary magazines and currently reads for ONLY POEMS magazine. She is passionate about diversifying the literature field and hopes both her research and creative writing can inspire change.
Abhinav Bhardwaj (he/him) is a first year doctoral student at the University of Maryland who works on South-South comparison, queer theory and affect. He was trained in literary studies at Hindu College and taught at St. Stephen’s College, both at the University of Delhi. His work has appeared in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, SEXTANT: Sexualities, Masculinities and Decolonialities and English Studies in Latin America among other publications. He has previously received the Junior Research Fellowship by the Government of India, University of Hong Kong’s Postgraduate Scholarship and the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities grants.
Alice Bi (she/they) is a first-year PhD student in the English Department and a Flagship Fellow at the University of Maryland. She researches how language forms difference. Through creative coding, natural language processing, and translation work, she analyzes how textual strategies elicit intersubjectivity and generates questions about post/decoloniality. Her research merges technical expertise with critical theory to imagine how we might interpret, remediate, and create contemporary texts.
Tunahan Çakmakçı is a Turkish scholar from Istanbul, who is interested in researching the intersections of affect and prosody and tracing the history of emotions through 18th- and 19th-century poetics. His undergraduate thesis inquired into the nature of lyric intimacy through an examination of Victorian lyric theories by noticing metaphor’s role in adjusting the mode of intimacy as rather sensual or intellectual. His graduate project expands on the historicization of affect and investigations of poetic form as an interpersonal outlet.
Kivel Carson is a storyteller, daydreamer, and organizer whose fiction centers the experiences of Black working class people across time and interrogates the family as a site of joy, trauma, comfort, grief, erasure, and ultimately love. When she’s not writing, she can be found cheating on her to-be-read pile, curating top notch Spotify playlists, spending time with her dogs, and exploring new restaurants with friends. Her fiction has appeared in Augur, Nightmare, Moko, and the anthology Black From the Future. She is a Kimbillio fellow, Periplus Collective fellow, alum of Tin House Summer Workshop, alum of VONA/ Voices, and currently in the MFA Fiction program at the University of Maryland.
Arielle Cole is a second year MFA student. She is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and her fiction has appeared in Corvid Queen and Fusion Fragment. She writes historical fiction with speculative elements, and occasionally speculative fiction with historical elements.
Yohely Comprés is a doctoral student in the combined program in African American Studies and Spanish & Portuguese at Yale University. She received her BA from Wesleyan University in 2024 with departmental honors in African American Studies and Latin American Studies, with support from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Her honors thesis examined allegorical and discursive representations of the ocean in Afro-Dominican literature and Black critical theory. Her current work engages with the oceanic (im)possibilities of Black life-world-making in the Hispanophone Caribbean.
Charlie Hope D'Anieri (he/they) is an MA student in English literature at University of Maryland, College Park, studying the contemporary novel in the United States and Mexico. He has contributed journalism and essays to The Guardian, The Baffler, Cleveland Review of Books, The New Republic, and other outlets.
Emilee Denslow is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force in her first year of pursuing her Master's degree. She is most interested in gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, and the intersectionality of queer experiences.
Ben Desmond (he/him) is a second-year student in the English PhD program at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship focuses on Post-45 and contemporary fiction with a particular interest in literary sociology and the reflexive relationship between the novel and culture. His current research is specifically interested in post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels as cultural artifacts that reflect shifting anxieties related to human temporality and various forms of existential risk. In addition, he is interested in the novel’s potential to serve as a stimulus for socio-political and cultural change.
Eran Eads is a PhD candidate in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. E's research explores the performativity of privacy and the ways social groups construct and negotiate privacy/secrecy. E teaches courses in Writing, Communication, and Performance. Eran is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and the author of cran and the chapbook fat.
With half a decade as a professional writer for software companies, Funmilola Fadairo has authored content for diverse audiences across the blockchain, B2B, eCommerce, and AI industry. She has mentored over 800 high school students in Nigeria on digital literacy and participated in outreach programs in partnership with Meta, Google, and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Funmilola graduated top of her class with a bachelor's degree in English and completed a mini-MBA from Lagos Business School. She aims to research the intersection between language, business, and technology.
Matthew Herskovitz is a Jewish writer from Baltimore, Maryland, and a first-year MA student at the University of Maryland, College Park. His main academic interests include exploring speculative fiction's revolutionary potential, situating deep image poetry as a colonial phenomenon, and gushing over the works of W.G. Sebald. His past work examined how Woody Guthrie's music developed across his life, from hootenannys to private notebooks, investigating how and why his music became more politically revolutionary over time.
Alexander J. Hess (he/him) is a second-year English Master's student at the University of Maryland, College Park. His academic work spans across subjects including pop culture, the afterlives of religious iconography, and queer fashion studies. In his developing MA Capstone he explores what he calls "materiality as/of transition" in Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Sally Potter's 1992 film adaptation. Zooming in on the representation of clothing in both of these texts, he posits that the materiality of Orlando's garments fold flesh, fabric, and time, providing the basis for Orlando's radical queerness. His current obsessions include Yellowjackets and Lady Gaga's "Abracadabra."
Somto Ihezue is an Igbo writer. He is a first year MFA student in Creative Writing. His writing interrogates identity, familial structures, and disruption in Igbo societies, focusing on the body as both archive and battleground.
Estella Jiang is a first-year PhD student at the University of Maryland's Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research explores transnational political economy, knowledge production, and technology, critically examining the dialectics of power and resistance. With a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, her work engages with feminist, decolonial, and critical race theories to interrogate contemporary global structures.
David Kelly, Jr. is a capricorn, a dog dad, and a lover of nature! He gets excited when talking about writing and all of the thinking that goes into it. As a writing studies grad student at Towson University, his focus is on the exploration of the internal and external dimensions of writing, as a conflict ever in transformation. His goal is to help students-writers and tutors transform their relationships with writing through a critically-informed, culturally-responsive praxis; a praxis that affirms lived experiences, advocates writer agency and autonomy; and engages the rhetorical and technical skills needed in writing as a process.
Rachael Nebraska Lynch is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at George Washington University. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Secondary Education from Saint Michael’s College and a Master of Arts in English from George Washington University. Her research examines race/ethnicity, cripqueerness, and eugenics in Britain during the long nineteenth century. Her dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century racial Anglo-Saxonism and eugenics using Black sexuality studies and crip/queer theory. She has published reviews in Papeles del CEIC, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and Volupté. She currently serves as the assistant editor of Disability Studies Quarterly.
Rashi Maheshwari is currently a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's in Literature in India. Her areas of interest include Postcolonial Literature, Global Anglophone Literature, Ecocriticism, and Autobiography Studies.
A native of the Hampton Roads region of SE Virginia, Cairo A. Maxwell studied to become an English teacher at Old Dominion University. After teaching English Language Arts in local middle schools for two years, Cairo returned to the university setting to pursue a graduate degree. He is currently a first year Master of Arts student enrolled in the Teaching Literature and Writing program of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Cairo broadly defines his research interests as being centered in American literature, African American literature, literatures of the African Diaspora, and Black studies.
Nina Mouawad نينا معوض (she/elle/هي) is a PhD student of literature in the English department at Northeastern University. She studies modern Arab literature, comics & visual studies, gender & sexuality studies, postcolonialism, and critical race theory. Her research examines the intersections of memory, trauma and war in Arab and Middle Eastern comics as well as exploring the postcolonial influence of racial capitalism in the Global South. She currently teaches Advanced Writing in the Disciplines in the Writing Program.
Harley Nguyen (he/him) is a Vietnamese American writer from the Maryland-Washington D.C. area. His research work is interested in contemporary poetry and ethnic literature, particularly with how writers use their multi-faceted identities---specifically Asian American and/or queer bodies--- to interrogate the world around them in the act of community building and care, while his creative work is interested in the mutability of memories, particularly with how they can be used for reflections on interpersonal relationships. He has a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and University of Maryland, College Park, respectively, and his poetry can be found in The Incognito Press, The 20 Something Files, and Ink & Marrow.
Cameron Orefice (she/her) is a second year language, writing, and rhetoric doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also pursuing a museum studies and material culture certificate. Her research focuses on feminist rhetorical readings of museums, specifically house museums. She is specifically interested in how house museums create narratives about the people who lived there based on visual display and museum labeling.
Lisa Abena Osei focuses on Postcolonial Studies and African Literature, and specifically on Black Speculative Fiction. She has published peer-reviewed articles on Black speculative fiction, specifically Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, in The Journal of African Literature Association (JALA), Critical Studies in Media and Communication journal and the Global Africa Sciences. She is also the winner of the Best Graduate Student Essay Award at the 2022 African Literature Association Conference. She is also an MLA Edward Giuliano Global Fellow 2024 awardee. Overall, she is interested in the ways Postcolonial African literatures can be used in transformative ways to explore and challenge the complexities of race, identity, and power.
Kurt Parsons is a multimedia content creator with experience in audio, video, and illustration who has worked professionally in broadcasting for over two decades. He holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Central Missouri, where he currently pursues an MA in English. His comics projects have been published in the international Might, Magic & Monster-in-Laws anthology, The Florida Review, Backwards City Review, and online. Parsons' research interests include culture and pop culture, comics and storytelling, and the screenplay as a literary form.
Taína Rodriguez Patmore She/Her (MFA, Fiction) is a proud Higuayagua Taíno writer whose mission is to write her people back into history. She earned her BA in English Literature from Montclair State University. Inspired by giving voice to stories from the margins, her play “Sisters Fight” was selected by the Colors of Community to be directed by Susan Aston and produced at the Harlem School of the Arts. Her writing can be found in the Yellow Arrow Journal, and the Forward to Hiwatahia: Hekexi Taíno Language Dictionary, currently part of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service’s touring exhibit on “Caribbean Indigenous Resistance”.
James Perla is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, focusing on contemporary literature with a concentration in Digital Studies. Perla's research project, "Culture, Commodity, Content: Literature in the Age of Streaming" investigates the changing role of the artist and art object through a comparative study of the music and publishing industries, considering the politics of labor, the affordances of formats, and ideologies that inform narratives of artistry in the 20th and 21st century.
Chase Redd is a first year master’s student at the University of Maryland in the Language, Writing, and Rhetoric track. His primary research interests are in the history and theory of rhetoric, religious rhetorics—particularly Latter Day Saint rhetorics, Byzantine rhetorics, and Design Thinking. He holds bachelors degrees from Southern Utah University in Economics and English with an emphasis in rhetoric and writing.
Grace Reeb is a candidate for the M.A. in Texts, Technologies, and Literature at UMBC, where she is also a Graduate Assistant in the English department teaching her first section of composition this semester. Her presentation draws from her thesis, which she will defend soon in order to graduate in May. Grace’s academic interests include Asian American literature, critical disability studies, and writing pedagogy. She hopes to continue to teach college writing for years to come. Grace would like to thank her friend, Harley Nguyen, for his camaraderie and support throughout the graduate school journey.
Matthew L. Riemer (he/him) is a queer public historian pursuing an American Studies PhD at George Washington University, where his work focuses on the production and (mis)uses of queer historical meaning. The co-creator of Instagram’s @lgbt_history and co-author of the 2019 book, We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, Matthew is currently writing his dissertation, “Stop Being Comfortable: An Anti-Biography of Sylvia Rivera,” which aims to expand the archival record of a uniquely consequential trans radical of color by deconstructing the legends that have subsumed her.
Jessica A. Rucker (she/her/youngin') is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park where she is studying Black radicalisms. She is also interested in Black feminisms, Black rhetorics, Black women’s social and political thought and activism, cultures of everyday life, and local urban histories. Jessica is also a former high school social studies teacher who resides in her home city, the U.S. colony of Washington, D.C., on the unceded ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank, with her loving partner.
Shakiba Sharifpour is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. Her research explores the intersections of Translation Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of marginalized communities. She has worked as an editor, translator, teacher, and researcher, and her academic interests include the politics of translation, women's writings, queer languages in translation, and feminist textual practices. Shakiba’s current project examines how Sepideh Gholian has enhanced the prison writing genre with her creativity and feminist sensitivity to make the experience of reading prison memoirs a long-lasting, lively memory for the reader—one that continues to live in the future in the form of bakery items.