Meet our 2026 Conference Teaching Fellows

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Genevieve Arlie (they/she) is a genderfluid mestize Californian and swimmer with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. A graduate of Stanford and Columbia, they also hold an MFA in translation from Iowa, where they were an Arts Fellow, and a PhD in English–creative writing from the University of Georgia, where they were a Presidential Fellow. They have been nominated for Best of the Net and The Best Small Fictions and made alternate for a US Student Fulbright arts grant to France. Their work appears in Annulet, Hidden Compass, Tupelo Quarterly, Zoeglossia’s poem of the week, the Poetry Foundation archive, and elsewhere.

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Jenny Browne is a poet and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas as well as an Honorary Professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems, Volume 17 in the Texas Poet Laureate Series and I Am Trying to Love the Whole World forthcoming from BOA Editions in Sept 2026. Her poems and essays have appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Oxford America, The academy of American poets Poem a Day, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and The Slowdown. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two Fulbright Fellowships to Northern Ireland from the US/UK Fulbright Foundation. She served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

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Cameron Carter is a fiction writer and educator from Atlanta, Georgia. He holds an MA from Ball State University and an MFA from Georgia State University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Missouri. He received the 2024 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright College Award and the Paul Bowles Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Jesmyn Ward Prize for Fiction. He has received support from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Kimbilio for Black Fiction, and Tin House. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in StorySouth, Cutleaf, and elsewhere.

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Dominique Daye Hunter is the author of Seeds: Stories of Afro-Indigenous Resilience and Hasi Čhigǫ:yǫ (Sweet Berry). Her work engages oral storytelling traditions alongside lunar and land-based cycles to activate ancestral memory and healing. Her writing has appeared in Beyond the Glittering World and Another Chicago Magazine, and is forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle (August 2026) and Inclusive Nature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2027). She is a recipient of the AWP 2026 TCU Fellowship and is pursuing a dual MFA in poetry and nonfiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Dominique is Afro-Yesáh and lives in Šaunhuntakot (Durham, NC).

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Cymelle Leah Edwards (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Casa Grande, AZ, and the author of Coordinates [chapbook]. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University, where she focused on scholars of Black Performance Theory who challenge the boundaries of genre and form. Her work appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Contra Viento, and elsewhere. 

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Nicole Arocho Hernández is the author of I Have No Ocean (Sundress Publications, 2021) and You say my country is a tax incentive (Veliz Books, 2027). Their poetry and criticism can be found or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, Poets.org, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Their work has been supported by the Hambidge Center, Ragdale, the McCormack Writing Center (previously Tin House), and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, among others. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, they currently live in Gambier, OH, where they are a Kenyon Review Fellow.

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Chris Hoshnic is a Diné poet from Sweetwater, Arizona. Born to kinlichii'nii and born for tachinii, his work explores migratory poetics, a method that examines how movement, both literal and metaphorical, reshapes language, identity, and belonging. By foregrounding translation and cultural exchange, his writing reimagines language as a space for dialogue, memory, and collective transformation. Recipient of the Poetry Northwest 2025 James Welch Prize, Hoshnic’s work appears in Poetry, Kenyon Review, and beyond. He is Editor-in-Chief of Chapter House Journal, directs Diné Kids Film Club, and has an MFA from IAIA.

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Liz Kay holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she was the recipient of both an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Wendy Fort Foundation Prize for exemplary work in poetry. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Nimrod, Willow Springs, The New York Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Redactions, and Sugar House Review. She is the author of Something to Help Me Sleep {dancing girl press}, The Witch Tells The Story And Makes It True (Quarter Press), Monsters: A Love Story (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and Fallout: a Novel (forthcoming from Red Hen Press). Liz lives in Omaha, NE with her husband and 3 sons.

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Amiel Katz (she/her) is a queer poet from Houston, Texas, currently living in Urbana, Illinois. Her work is rooted in lived experience, oral histories, and archival research to (re)imagine just futures. Amiel’s writing can be found in Bat City Review, Horizon Review, and elsewhere. You can connect with her on instagram @amiel.katz.

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Jeff Kronenfeld writes stories, articles, scripts, and comics. He is a UX writer for Turo and former assistant editor for the Arizona Capitol Times. His articles are published in Discover, Vice, and The Phoenix New Times. His fiction features in So It Goes: The Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, The Amber Waves of Autumn anthology by Kelp Press, and others. His scripts were produced by WatchMojo and placed in the Austin Film Fest and others. The Arizona Commission on the Arts funded his graphic novella and The Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture is supporting an expansion.

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Kelly Lydick has a Masters degree in Writing & Consciousness, and 20 years of experience in publishing with companies such as Hachette Book Group, Gibbs Smith Publisher, Cengage, Western Art Collector magazine, and Northern Arizona University's literary journal Thin Air. She’s the author of Mastering the Dream and Dream Incubation for Greater Self-Awareness: A Handbook, and is a contributing author to the anthology Dreams That Change Our Lives. Her articles and reviews have been published in Guernica, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, Drunken Boat, Mission at Tenth, Thema, Switched-On Gutenberg, Natural Awakenings, Co Yoga + Life, True Blue Spirit, and many others. Her writing has also been featured on NPR’s The Writers’ Block, KJZZ’s Word podcast and iHeart radio. Her writing workshops have appeared at Burlington College, ASU’s Piper Center for Creative Writing, the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and others. Her consulting firm, The Story Laboratory, offers complete author services including book editing and design. She’s also the founder of Pure Carbon Publishing a nonfiction trade publisher focusing on psychology, self-help, business, and health and wellness titles.

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Lisa Nikolidakis is the author of No One Crosses the Wolf, named a Top 10 True Crime Book of 2022 by Audible. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at TCU, she teaches across genres with a focus on hybridity, memory, and risk in form. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, Orion, LitHub, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on multiple projects, including an Iceland-based essay collection and a hybrid manuscript exploring mental illness and creativity.

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Chelsea Sutton is a Voices Fellow, a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, a Humanitas Play LA award-winner, and she co-wrote the Emmy-nominated Welcome to the Blumhouse Live, an interactive film event for Blumhouse/Amazon. Her play Wood Boy Dog Fish appeared in the inaugural season at the Garry Marshall Theatre. She’s the author of the novella Krackle’s Last Movie and her short work has appeared in many journals and podcasts, including It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton. She’s the Artistic Director of Rogue Artists Ensemble and holds an MFA in Creative Writing UC Riverside. 

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Holly M. Wendt is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College and the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). A former Peter Taylor Fellow in Fiction at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Wendt has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Jentel Foundation, and Hambidge Center. Their work has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.