University of North Texas 
For news and events follow us on Twitter: Tweets by UNTCreativeWrit & Instagram @untcreativewriting
Caitlyn Alario
Caitlyn Alario is a queer poet from Southern California. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in Classics and Humanities from Valparaiso University. A Ph.D. candidate in English with a concentration in creative writing at the University of North Texas, she teaches literature, poetry, and First-Year Writing and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for American Literary Review. Outside of academia, she works as a ghostwriter, book coach, editor, and beta reader for both bestselling and beginning authors.
_________________________________________________
Cicily Bennion
Cicily Bennion is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. Her academic and writing specializations include the essay and bibliomemoir as well as crime and spiritual writing. Her essay, "About Boredom," was recognized in Best American Essays 2020, and her work has been published in Hotel Amerika, The Journal, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. Read more at cicilybennion.com.
_________________________________________________
Anna Chotlos
Anna Chotlos's writing has most recently appeared in Sweet Lit, Hobart, Complete Sentence, and Hippocampus Magazine. She is a Ph.D. student focusing on creative nonfiction at UNT.
_________________________________________________
Brian Czyzyk
Brian Czyzyk is a Voertman-Ardoin Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in Poetry at UNT. He is originally from Traverse City, Michigan and received his MFA at Purdue University. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and recognized by Best American Essays 2020 and the 2019 AWP Intro Journal Awards. His work most recently appears in The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, and Colorado Review.
_________________________________________________
James Davis
James Davis is a Voertman-Ardoin Fellow at the University of North Texas, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing (poetry.) His debut poetry collection, Club Q, was selected by Edward Hirsch for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and published by The Waywiser Press in Fall 2020. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as American Literary Review, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and two installments of Best New Poets (2011 & 2019). He writes a bi-monthly column on videogame music for Cartridge Lit, where his poetry has also been featured. Originally from Colorado Springs, he has lived in Houston, where he received his BA at the University of Houston; Gainesville, Florida, where he received his MFA at the University of Florida; and Denver, Colorado, where he worked as a Content Strategist for Chipotle Mexican Grill. He is ranked among the top 100 Scrabble players in North America.
________________________________________________
Danny Daw
Danny Daw is a Ph.D. student and Voertman-Ardoin fellow at UNT specializing in poetry. He received both his BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Brigham Young University. His poems, including haiku and senryu, have appeared or are forthcoming in Inscape, tsuri-dōrō, Trash Panda, Prune Juice, and others. Besides poetry and prose, secondary scholarly interests include film and television, music, and video games. Danny is married to the poet and writer, Alexandra Malouf.
________________________________________________
Daniel DeVaughn
Daniel DeVaughn is a writer and teacher from Birmingham, Alabama. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Texas University Press's Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, Southern Humanities Review, The Nashville Review, and Poets.org. He has received fellowships from the University of Oregon and the Vermont Studio Center, scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. He is currently a Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing.
________________________________________________
Michelle Eshbaugh-Soha
Michelle Eshbaugh-Soha is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing (Fiction) at UNT. She and her husband raised two boys before Michelle returned to school. She loves reading Shakespeare, teaching others about traditionally healing foods, and writing fiction that toys with reality but is grounded in the all-too-human experience. Her first accepted short story is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review.
_________________________________________________
Meg McManama
Meg McManama is a Ph.D. candidate in Poetry and a Voertman-Ardoin fellow at UNT. She has an MFA from Brigham Young University where she taught writing. Her work is published and forthcoming in The Pinch, Citron Review, Cimarron Review, and Western Humanities Review and she was editor-in-chief at Inscape: a Journal of Art and Literature. She loves her road bike, garden, the beach, and being with her husband and daughters. https://www.megmcmanama.com/home
________________________________________
Anthony Gabriel
Anthony Gabriel received his MFA at New Mexico State University, where he was the poetry editor of the lit magazine, Puerto Del Sol. He lives in the Southwest with his wife and two sons. He is originally from the Midwest, which influences and appears often in his poetry. You can find his work in or upcoming in: The Shore, Red Rock Review, Swamp Ape Review, and Beaver Mag.
_________________________________________________
Madison Garber
Madison Garber is a doctoral candidate with a concentration in fiction writing at the University of North Texas. She received her MFA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University, where she was the managing editor of Swamp Ape Review. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the creative writing Artist in Residence at A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts. She currently teaches in Calhoun Middle School's Writers in the Schools program. Her work was selected for FOLIO's Editor's Prize in Fiction and has appeared in Still Point Arts Quarterly and Watershed Review.
_________________________________________________
Vince Granata
Vince Granata is a writer from New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of the memoir, Everything Is Fine. His writing has recently appeared in Rolling Stone, Fourth Genre, The Massachusetts Review, Creative Nonfiction, and LitHub, and has been recognized in Best American Essays 2018 and Best American Essays 2020. He holds an MFA in creative writing from American University and is currently a third year Ph.D. student in creative writing at the University of North Texas.
_________________________________________________
Jasmyn Huff
Jasmyn Huff (she/her) studies Creative Nonfiction at the Ph.D. level while also working as an IT specialist and coparenting her son. Her essays can be found in X-R-A-Y, Sweet Literary, Defunct Magazine, and SugarSugarSalt. Door = Jar most recently published her poetry, but also Stone of Madness, Just Femme and Dandy, and En*gendered. In addition to one day publishing her books, she dreams of creating a safe space for queer and trans people like her.
_________________________________________________
Marcella Hunyadi
Marcella Hunyadi is an English Creative Writing Ph.D. Teaching Fellow at UNT where she was the Fiction Editor for the North Texas Review in 2020/2021. She received an MFA in fiction from Hollins University and a Stonecoast MFA in fiction/popular fiction from the University of Southern Maine, mentored by Karen Bender, Rick Bass, and Elizabeth Hand. Marcella was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary where she wrote for the country's first online literary magazine, the INteRNeTTo; in the States, she studied screenwriting and filmmaking with Oscar nominee Sam Green and finished directing Death of a Salesman seven months pregnant. Marcella is the second-place winner of Narrative's 2019 Fall Short Story Contest and The Woven Tale Press 2019 Literary Contest, and her novel-in-progress was nominated for the Kirkwood Prize. When she is not writing or teaching, you'll find Marcella traveling with her two daughters or practicing ballroom dancing with her pro partner, Lachezar Todorov.
________________________________________________
Tiffany Isaacs
Tiffany Isaacs teaches writing at the University of North Texas where she is a doctoral student. She is the fiction editor at American Literary Review. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Environmental Writers' Conference. Her fiction and essays appear in River Teeth, the Santa Monica Review, and World Literature Today. She received her MFA from Florida State University where she served as the assistant fiction editor at the South East Review and holds a BA in philosophy from Brown University.
________________________________________________
Parul Kaushik
Parul Kaushik is a Ph.D. Candidate in Creative Writing (Fiction). She holds an MFA from Pacific University in Oregon and was the recipient of 2021 Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholarship in Fiction. One of her stories has been accepted for publication in The Georgia Review. Parul grew up in India and has been living in the US for two decades. Currently, she resides in Frisco with her husband and three children.
________________________________________________
Colleen Mayo
Colleen Mayo's writing appears in The Sun, Crazyhorse, The Rumpus, Hobart, The Chattahoochee Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received special mention for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, the Jerome Stern Series Spotlight Award for nonfiction, and an AWP Intro Journals Award for fiction. She holds an MFA in fiction from Florida State University and is a Ph.D student and Voertman-Ardoin fellow at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. She's currently at work on a novel set in her hometown of Austin, TX.
_________________________________________________
Andrew McConnell
John William McConnell lives and writes, sometimes in that order, in Texas. His work has appeared in various publications, including the Cincinnati Review, the New Orleans Review, the Mid-American Review, [PANK], and American Chordata. You can learn more at his website johnsnotreal.com. He was once a cheese monger.
_________________________________________________
Kat Moore
Kat Moore is a Ph.D. Candidate in Creative Nonfiction at UNT. Her essays have been featured in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Image, Hotel America, Passages North, Diagram, The Rumpus, Entropy, Hippocampus, Whiskey Island, Salt Hill, and others. Her fiction has appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Hobart, and Craft. An essay of hers was included in the anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. She was a 2021 Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Scholar in Creative Nonfiction.
______________________________________________________
Kaili Mora-Duarte
Kaili Mora-Duarte is a grad student at UNT and poet from the outskirts of Houston, Texas. He received his undergraduate from University of Houston-Downtown. He enjoys spending time outdoors, writing, listening and playing music, and finding new places to eat.
______________________________________________________
Erik Moyer
Erik Moyer is from Hillsborough, New Jersey. He holds a BS from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He is currently a creative writing Ph.D. student and Voertman-Ardoin fellow at the University of North Texas. His work has been featured in Apricity, Bluestem, Constellations, Euphony, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Little Patuxent Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Outside of school, he enjoys songwriting and chess.
______________________________________________________
Brad Murff
Brad Murff is a Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate in Creative Writing (Poetry) at UNT. His scholarly interests include early modern drama and Romantic poetry--especially the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Brad is researching Romanticism's evolution from Shakespeare to Ashbery to rock 'n' roll, hip-hop and beyond. His work has appeared in Apalachee Review.
________________________________________________
Jarred Stewart
J.W. Stewart is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing (Fiction) at UNT. He received his MA in history from Sam Houston State University. His short story "A Walk to Lafeyette" has appeared in Footnote 5 and was a semifinalist for the Oak Charter Award for best historical fiction. In addition to contributing to several books on baseball history, his research into children and baseball has appeared in Base Ball: History of the Early Game and was presented at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He is part of the staff of the Texas Academy of Math & Sciences at UNT and lives with his husband and cat in The Colony.
________________________________________________
Kendra Vanderlip
Kendra Vanderlip (she/they) is a queer writer from in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She received her MFA from the University of Memphis, and her BA from Grand Valley State University. She has essays in Whiskey Island, Sidereal, and Hobart and poetry at Nimrod International Journal. When she is not teaching, Kendra can be found at home watching terrible reality television and plotting world domination with her corgi, Rodeo.
______________________________________________
Joshua Brown
Josh Brown is a writer from Katy, Texas. He is currently in the MA program for Creative Writing with a concentration in fiction. He enjoys stories that can make the fantastic relatable to ordinary circumstances or make the mundane feel fantastic, and his writing attempts to explore and blend the two. Outside of academia, he enjoys cooking, podcasting, and discovering new genres of music.
______________________________________________________
Lucas Jorgensen
Lucas Jorgensen is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio. He has an MFA from New York University and is currently a PhD student at the University of North Texas. His work has been recognized by the 92Y, where he was a 2023 Discovery Prize recipient. You can find his poems in publications such as Poetry, LitHub, Copper Nickel, The Massachusetts Review, and others.
________________________________________________
Sera Harris
Sera Harris is a Fiction PhD student at the University of North Texas. Her work focuses on queerness, disability, and worlds that just don't work the way they should. She is currently on a speculative fiction spree, finding small stories in big, fantastic worlds.