Carolena Fernandez Brazfield

Graduate Student

• cibrazfi@iu.edu

Carolena Fernandez Brazfield is a queer Latina poet who calls many places home, though she admittedly feels most homesick for Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2023, she received her BA in Professional and Creative Writing from Goucher College, where she was a Kratz Fellowship Recipient, studied as a Visiting Student at the University of Oxford, and served as Poetry Editor for Preface Literary Magazine. She writes mostly about about chronic illness, spiders killing their mates, the women she loves, and gossip.

Sean Bugg

Graduate Student

• sbugg@iu.edu

Carlos Contreras

Graduate Student

• cafacont@iu.edu

Carlos Contreras is non-binary, Guatemalan, and an MFA candidate in fiction from Texas. They are the lead fiction editor of Alien Magazine and read prose for Chestnut Review. Their writing explores ideas of identity, helplessness, and how people and places transform over time. Their work lives at the intersection between the ordinary human condition and surreal, imaginative circumstances, heightening reality to show how absurd our lives already are. Their work can be found in The Lumiere Review, Complete Sentence, Passages North, and elsewhere. When not writing, Carlos is almost certainly in a movie theater. 

Genevieve De Gange

Graduate Student

• gdegange@iu.edu

Genevieve De Gange is an MFA fiction writer from Temecula, California. She earned her BA degree in Creative Writing and French Literature from The University of Chicago and won UChicago's 2021 Les Rivers Fellowship. Her work currently explores fragmentation, placelessness, and unfeminine, pre-feminine, and reimagined female realities. 

Diego Díaz

Graduate Student

• dndiaz@iu.edu

Diego Díazis a fiction writer from San Antonio, Texas. He received a B.A. In English with a certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023, where he was a recipient of the Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Literary Arts in 2021 and served as the fiction editor for the literary journal Hothouse. Díaz's stories center the places he has called home in South Texas, along with the families and individuals that comprise them.

Alex Dodt

Graduate Student

• alexdodt@iu.edu

Alex Dodt is working on a book of poems about siblinghood, punk rock, God, and grief. His poems, stories, and essays can be found in Florida Review, Emerson Review, Ghost City Review (he loves a good Review), and others, which he begrudgingly logs on to social media to share @alexisapoet. He founded Grief Commune, a magazine about the politics of collective grief, which published its first issue in 2025.

Joel Kemegue

Graduate Student

• jkemegue@iu.edu

Joel Kemegue is a writer from Bellevue, Washington with a B.A. in English from Washington State University. He is a former WSU Campus Civic Poet and a Cave Canem Fellow. His work explores masculinity, race, religion, generational trauma, and community. He loves reading, cinnamon rolls, watching bad movies, and complaining about nonsense. 

Yean Kim

Graduate Student

• yk123@iu.edu

Yean Kim is a fiction writer from Seoul, Korea. She earned her Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at Purchase College. A big fan of dialogue, she loves to write about messy family dramas and the ways minorities navigate solidarity and tension in America’s ethnoracial landscape. When not writing, she’s either cuddling with her cat Gamja or transcribing Toni Morrison’s work. She is currently on a quest to create the cutest writing room in Bloomington.

William D. Landau

Graduate Student

• rebeland@iu.edu

William D. Landau is an MFA student in poetry from Berkeley, California. They received their BA in Gender Studies from Columbia University. Their work has appeared in Diabolical Plots, Sinister Wisdom, and Hanging Loose Press. Their work touches on topics including gender, magic, the Anthropocene, Judaism, and bacon. In their free time they enjoy baking, swimming, reading, and attending to their cats' every whim. 

Roey Leonardi

Graduate Student

• roeyleon@iu.edu

Roey Leonardi is a poet and writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her BA in English from Harvard College, and her work has appeared in Pleiades, Bat City Review, online in The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She enjoys writing about motherhood, the American South, and origin — the people and places from which we come and to which we inevitably return.

Angela Lim

Graduate Student

• limang@iu.edu

Angela Lim is an MFA candidate in poetry. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2019 with degrees in English and Neuroscience & Behavior. Originally from Columbia, Missouri, she worked in publishing in the Twin Cities area as an editor and writer for juvenile nonfiction books. Her recent poems have played with the flow of time or focused on the transitional space between voice and being. 

John Lyons

Graduate Student

• johnlyon@iu.edu

John Lyons is a prose writer from New Berlin, Wisconsin. After completing his B.A. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, John received an Ed.M. from Harvard's Graduate School of Education. His writing explores uncertainty, doubt, the unknown, and mystery—among other things! 

Miranda McCoy

Graduate Student

• mirmccoy@iu.edu

Miranda McCoy is a Poetry M.F.A. candidate from western Pennsylvania. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She also earned a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Prior to coming to Indiana University, she worked as an engineer in the fields of aerospace, food science, and nuclear safety. Her work explores the intersections of industry, gender, family, Northern Appalachia and the Rust Belt, landscape, and ecological damage.

Monica McDonough

Graduate Student

• monimcdo@iu.edu

Monica McDonough is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction from Rocky River, Ohio. She earned her B.A. in English and a Certificate in Journalism from Yale University. Her writing explores topics including the Midwest, belonging, religion, childhood, and what it means to grow up. Monica’s humor writing appears in The New Yorker. In her free time, she devours pop culture, calls her mom, and tells her what the kids are listening to.

Cheyenne McGuire

Graduate Student

• cheymcgu@iu.edu

Cheyenne McGuire is a poet from rural Colorado. She received two Bachelor of Arts degrees in English Creative Writing and English Secondary Education from the University of Iowa. Her work focuses on transformations and has been featured in The Atlantic and Body Odyssey: An Anthology.

Kenny Mitchell

Graduate Student

• kemitc@iu.edu

Kenny Mitchell is a fiction writer and poet from Nebraska. He holds a B.A. in Language Arts Education from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. In his work, he seeks to challenge his childhood norms through his characters' development, often using absurdist and magical realist lenses to generate questions that don't necessarily need answers.Kenny is the first to admit he is often confusing, unapologetically so. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Do Geese See God? His work appears in HAD, The Good Life Review, The Airgonaut, JAKE, and The Gorko Gazette. In his free time, he's still trying to figure out where Waldo is.

Al Neal

Graduate Student

Al Neal is a fiction writer from Bloomington, Indiana. They earned their B.A. in English and Media at Indiana University. Their writing explores queer coming of age, fandom & pop culture, mental illness, and repressed Midwestern families. They are a collage artist, DIY publications enthusiast, and 1970s/80s sitcoms and cult cinema fan. 

Chandra K. Panjiyar

Graduate Student

• cpanjiya@iu.edu

Chandra K. Panjiyar is a writer from Nepal. He did his undergraduate from Middlebury College with a major in Physics and a minor in English language. He was awarded fellowship to attend Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2023. His short stories have appeared in several papers in Nepal, including The Kathmandu Post and the Republica. His writing explores the ineffable beauty of human existence, especially through humbling portrayal of the life of the people living in the Himalayas.

Danielle Richardson

Graduate Student

• dansrich@iu.edu

Danielle Richardson is an MFA candidate in Fiction at IU Bloomington. She was born and raised in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin and earned her BA in English (Creative Writing) with a minor in Film Studies from Florida State University. Her writing typically uses magical realism to explore matriarchy and Black girlhood.

Mollika Jai Singh

Graduate Student

• mjsingh@iu.edu

Mollika Jai Singh is an MFA candidate in poetry from San Diego, California and Montgomery County, Maryland. They write prose poetry, slam poetry, and formal poetry, with an inclination toward golden shovels, abecedarians, and sestinas, with a desire to commit to a few words and write between the lines. Mollika completed her Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies at Princeton University, where she wrote for The Nassau Weekly, served as managing editor for The Nassau Literary Review, and co-founded Positions, an Asian/American zine. She also received the Outstanding Work by a Junior in Creative Writing award. Mollika's undergraduate thesis was a poetic and critical exploration of family abolition and critical auntie studies. They study the (self-)representation of people of color in popular culture, gendered and racial performance, beauty standards, care work, and love and desire across differences.

William E. Smith III

Graduate Student

• wsmithii@iu.edu

William E. Smith III is a M.F.A. candidate in poetry. Will was born in Honolulu, but spent much of his childhood in New England (after stints in Scotland and California). He holds a B.A. in History from Albright College, a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University, and a PhD in Religious Studies with a doctoral minor in English from IU Bloomington. In his writing, he explores, among other things, how the body can go awry in interesting ways, forms of relationality, and the uses of myth and religion to think through experience. He enjoys spending time with his dog Buddy, hiking, seeing wildlife, and the occasional good game of cribbage.

Santiago Valencia

Graduate Student

• svalenc@iu.edu

Santiago Valencia is a Mexican poet, editor, and spiritual worker. They received a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Reed College, where their poetry was recognized by the Academy of American Poets. Their work develops a poetics of ritual and gnosis to explore queer embodiment, fractured ancestries, faith and mysticism, soul loss and retrieval, dreams, and death. They believe language is an alchemical tool for connecting with the sacred all around and within us, and for recovering lost enchantment. A Tin House Workshop and SAFTA alum, Santi is an Editor-at-Large for Nightboat Books.