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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.
Ashley Balcazar
Ashley Balcazar is a First-year Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow. She earned her M.A. in Linguistics and her B.A. in Integrative Studies with foci in English, Linguistics, and Sociology and a minor in French at the University of North Texas. Ashley's research in the Master's program focused on the language of sexual violence, dialectical features of African-American English, and computational solutions for textual research. She has taught in the Linguistics department at UNT as an adjunct professor. Ashley has created and authored an online column, Dallas Salsa Examiner, about salsa dancing in North Texas and has written for the Dallas Morning News as a Community Voices columnist. She has also been a contributor for the CBS Digital Arts and Entertainment section. Her academic work has been published in American Speech. She looks forward to shifting from a concentration on the scientific study of language to the creativity of the written word.
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.
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Anna Chotlos
Anna Chotlos's essays and poems have recently appeared in HAD, Split Lip, Hotel Amerika, Sweet Lit, and River Teeth's Beautiful Things. She holds an MA from Ohio University and now teaches and writes in Denton, Texas where she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas and the editor-in-chief of American Literary Review.
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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 the AWP Intro Journal Awards. You can find his writing in RHINO Poetry, Tampa Review, Gulf Coast, Passages North, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere.
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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.
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Daniel DeVaughn
Daniel DeVaughn is a writer and educator from the Ridge and Valley region of Alabama. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Poets.org, The Adroit Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Texas University Press's Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the University of Oregon, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and the Academy of American Poets. He is Poetry Editor at the American Literary Review as well as a Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing.
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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.
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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
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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 Texas with his wife and two sons. You can find his work in: The Shore, Red Rock Review, Swamp Ape Review, and Beaver Mag.
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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.
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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, SugarSugarSalt, and forthcoming from Black Warrior Review. 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.
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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.
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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.
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Parul Kaushik
Parul Kaushik is a third year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing (Fiction). She holds an MFA from Pacific University in Oregon, and her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her stories have been published in The Georgia Review and The Masters Review: New Voices. Her work is forthcoming in journals such as the Missouri Review. Parul is a bilingual writer who grew up in India and has been living in the US for two decades. She hosts a radio show in Dallas and has three children.
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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.
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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.
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Erik Moyer
Erik Moyer is a third-year creative writing Ph.D. student and Voertman-Ardoin fellow at the University of North Texas. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a BS from the University of Virginia. His work has been featured in Berkeley Poetry Review, Cola Literary Review, Euphony, Literary Imagination, and Summerset Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Outside of school, he enjoys songwriting, chess, and playing with his cat Xena.
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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.
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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.
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Kendra Vanderlip
Kendra Vanderlip (they | she) is a queer educator and writer specializing in creative nonfiction and other forms of creative writing. They received their BA from Grand Valley State University and their MFA from University of Memphis. They are currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Texas, where their work focuses on the implications of violence and how pop culture influences the normalizing of violence, as well as generational trauma, mental health, and gender studies. In the classroom, they focus on creating inclusive communities and demystifying academic spaces. Their work can be found in Nimrod International Poetry, Hobart, Sidereal and Whiskey Island.
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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.
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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.
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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.