Meet our 2024 Conference Teaching Fellows

Stephanie Austin is the author of the memoir SOMETHING I MIGHT SAY from WTAW Press. Her essays and short stories have been published in more than 25 literary journals. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska – Omaha and has attended the Community of Writers and Bread Loaf writing conferences. She currently teaches at South Mountain Community College.

Brandon Blue is a black, queer poet, translator, educator and MFA candidate at Arizona State University from the D(M)V. He is an assistant editor for Storm Cellar Magazine and his work has or will appear in Poet Lore, Action, Spectacle, Metro Weekly, and more. Their work is also featured in the Capital Pride Poem-a-Day event and has received the support from the Virginia G Piper for Creative Writing. His chapbook, Snap.Shot, has been published by Finishing Line Press and was named in Poetry Mutual’s Best Books of 2023. Keep up with their work at brandonbluepoet.com

Amy E. Casey is the author of the novel The Sturgeon’s Heart. Her short fiction and poetry have been featured in HAD, Fish Gather to Listen from Horns & Rattles Press, Marrow Magazine, Club Plum, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Learn more at amyecasey.com or @amy_e_casey 

Larry Chavis is a father, husband, and member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. He describes a civilizing mission attempted by Duke (BA anthropology), Cornell (MA Asian studies, MS applied economics), and Stanford (PhD economics). He is currently an untenured teaching professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s business school, who lives among colleagues who pine for American greatness yet again. He feels unable to quietly witness racism and injustice. The Creative Writing program at the Institute for American Indian Arts has offered refuge. He is currently crafting a memoir to help others who also chase deferred dreams that have nearly dried up, and is celebrating community, healing, and affirmation as a first-year MFA student. 

Aaliyah C. Daniels, a Black Queer writer hailing from Hunts Point, The Bronx, explores themes of coming-of-age, family, politics, and monsters. Winner of the No Tokens Young Poets Prize and the 2023 Academy Poets Prize, her work graces prestigious publications like the Columbia Journal and No Tokens Journal. Her debut chapbook, Hooligans Shit, emerged in May 2023. As New York Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador, she's performed at iconic venues including the Brooklyn Museum and Joe’s Pub. Daniels, an English major from Kenyon College, now pursues Poetry at Arizona State University.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and arts educator with roots in Puebla, México (Nahua) and República Dominicana. Grounded in anticolonial poetics, their writing asks who we are at our most free, exploring the subversions and imaginings needed in order to arrive there. Ancestral veneration, Indigenous Futurisms, and communing with the archive are major themes in Ayling’s writing. Ayling is a 2024-25 Artistic Development and Teaching Assistant with The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Select poems of theirs have been published in The Poetry Project, The Seventh Wave, The Texas Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.

CD Eskilson is a trans poet, editor, and translator living in Arkansas. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright/Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen, is forthcoming from Acre Books.

Laura holds an MFA from Miami University (in Ohio). She has a forthcoming memoir Mosaic (Unsolicited Press, March 2025). Other publications include essays and poems in various literary journals and websites (full list on lauragadds.com). Laura can be found at lauragaddis.com where you’ll also find her social media contacts.

Inbal Gilboa is a Phoenix-based writer, a Jewish immigrant, and one of JAKE’s editors. She is an ASU alum and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NAU. Her short stories have been published in The Fabulist Words & Art, Passengers Journal, Punt Volat, RIZE, and others.

Estella González is the author of the award-winning short story collection, Chola Salvation (Arte Público Press 2021) and the novel, Huizache Women (Arte Público Press 2023). Her stories have garnered distinctions and awards including Cornell University's Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing, gold medals at the International Latino Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention” and a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading. Visit her website at www.eastloswriter.com.

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, and futurist. He is the author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, as well as many stories and essays appearing in publications such as Slate, Jacobin, Vice, Lightspeed, Analog, and more. He is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at ASU. Find his work at www.andrewdanahudson.com, and follow his speculative thinking via his newsletter, www.solarshades.club.

Chloe L. Jensen is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer living in Mesa, Arizona. She is a student in the MFA in Creative Writing program at ASU, where she also teaches writing. She is also a writing tutor at Mesa Community College, a freelance copyeditor, and an event bartender. Originally from Salem, Massachusetts, she has lived in Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. Her work has been produced for the streaming audio platform femtasy and her writing on investing and finance has appeared in numerous outlets.

Tarah Knaresboro (she/they) is a graduate student and teacher in ASU's Creative Writing program. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives with her pit mix Leona and is working on a memoir about women's mixed martial arts.

Rebecca Loggia received a degree in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her work can be found in the Santa Clara Review, Allegory Ridge, Dogwood, and elsewhere. Her essay, "How to Rewrite a Medical Record," placed second in the 2023 Doro Böehme Nonfiction Editor's Contest, and her poem "Infirmary" placed third in the Phoenix Sister Cities 2017 Writers with Disabilities Competition. She is a reader for CRAFT and a Teaching Artist for the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. She lives in Arizona with her dog, where they cherish each sunset and dream of other worlds.

Dr. Tamara MC is a Muslim/Jewish artist who creates art about her juxtaposed hybrid identities. As a cult, child marriage, and human trafficking Lived Experience Expert, she advocates for girls, women, and female-identifying/non-binary individuals to live free from gender-based violence and coercive control worldwide. Her Ph.D. is in Applied Linguistics, and she researches how language manipulates vulnerable populations. Dr. MC attended Columbia University for an M.F.A. and has been honored with residencies/fellowships at Bread Loaf, Iowa Writers' Workshop, Sewanee, Ragdale, Cave Canem, VONA, and VCCA. She's published in 60+ prestigious outlets including The New York Times, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Salon, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s revising her debut memoir, CHILD BRIDE: ESCAPING MY SUFI CULT IN TEXAS.

Daniel Mills is a writer living in Phoenix, AZ. He works as a wine professional and sommelier by trade and frequently writes about food and wine. He has received recognitions from and worked in collaboration with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. In addition, he is a poetry reader for the literary and arts journal Passengers (passengersjournal.com).

Kristine Morgan is a fiction writer and filmmaker from Indianapolis. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA in Film and Media Production from Arizona State University. She has also studied acting at HB Studio NYC and improv comedy at Upright Citizens Brigade Los Angeles.

Ames O'Neill is a writer and artist from Maryland. They are an MFA Candidate in Fiction at ASU where their queer, body-centric eco-writing won the 2023 Swarthout Award in Fiction. Their work has been published in The Susquehanna Review and Halfway Down the Stairs, been selected as a finalist for the Tennessee Williams SASFEST Fiction Prize and received support from the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

Karen Odden is a bestselling USA Today author. She earned her PhD in English from New York University, writing her dissertation on how the medical, legal and fictional literature about Victorian railway disasters laid our foundations for understanding PTSD. After a career in teaching and editing, she wrote five mysteries set in seedy 1870s London. Her novels have won several awards and been nominated for others, including the Lefty and Agatha Awards for Best Historical Mystery. She serves on the national board for Sisters in Crime. A transplant from New York, she has lived in Arizona with her family since 2003.

Shawnte Orion is the author of The Existentialist Cookbook (NYQBooks) and Gravity & Spectacle (a collaboration with photographer Jia Oak Baker from Tolsun Books). He is an editor for rinky dink press, and his poems have been published in Threepenny Review, Barrelhouse, New York Quarterly, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He recorded several poems for the flipside of a split 7inch vinyl record with SF band Sweat Lodge.

Brooke Sahni is the author of Before I Had the Word (Texas Review Press, 2021), which won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize selected by Maggie Smith, and was a finalist for the Arizona and New Mexico Book Awards. She is also the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review and elsewhere.

Cecilia Savala is a Shrek-obsessed Latinx poet, teacher, and mom who writes about fatphobia, body image, and gender 1200 miles from home. She is a morning person, a cat person, an Assistant Director to ASU Writing Programs, and the poetry editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has been anthologized in Curating Home and Lift Every Voice: An Anthology of Poetry, and her work can be found in Red Ogre Review, the Boiler, and Poetry South, among others. Follow her at @cecsav on Instagram.

Ben Shahon is the author of A Collection for No One to Read (Bottlecap Features, 2024). His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Taco Bell Quarterly, Bullshit Lit, and The Daily Drunk. He is the founding EIC of JAKE and holds degrees from Emerson College and ASU. 

Christian Teresi is the author of What Monsters You Make of Them (forthcoming from Red Hen Press in September). He is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work has been published in many journals, including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, and Narrative. He holds degrees from Binghamton University and George Mason University. Born in Albany, New York, he currently lives in Washington, DC where he is the Director of Advancement and Communications for American Councils for International Education and works to advance language acquisition and public diplomacy initiatives.

Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pamela Uschuk has howled out seven books of poems. The release of her most recent collection, Refugee, coincides with a reprinting of three of her previous collections: Crazy Love (winner of American Book Award), Wild in the Plaza of Memory and Blood Flower. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, and others. Among her awards are the 2022 Storyknife Women Writers Residency in Homer, Alaska, Black Earth Institute Fellowship 2018-2021, War Poetry Prize from winningwriters.com, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and Amnesty International. Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona.

Joni Wallace’s third full-length poetry collection is Landscape with Missing River (Barrow Street Press, 2023), recipient of the AZ-NM Book Award. Other honors include Four Way Books’ Levis Prize for her second collection, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Baltic Writing Residency. Work from her documentary poetry collection, Kingdom Come Radio Show, is anthologized in Privacy Policy, The Poetry of Surveillance (ed. Andrew Ridker) and has been featured by the Scottish Poetry Library and the Poetry Society of America.

Sarah (Butchin) Yaron is an author and creative writing professor. Her pieces have been published by The Smart Set, Across the Margin, Grey Sparrow Journal, From Whispers to Roars, The Big Windows Review, and Flora Fiction. Sarah holds a BS from University of Pittsburgh in Applied Developmental Psychology and an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. She teaches Introduction to Fiction Writing, Intermediate Fiction Writing, Basic Manuscript Writing, Introduction to Poetry, Intermediate Poetry Writing, and Introduction to Creative Writing at Scottsdale College and Glendale Community College. Sarah lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband and eight-year-old twins.

Zoe Flavin (she/her) is a queer fiction writer, sex educator and MFA candidate at New York University. Before attending NYU, she ran Planned Parenthood’s sex education programs for the state of Utah. She is currently at work on her first novel about a girl who seeks revenge in unexpected ways. You can find her on Substack and Instagram @zoebflavin.