Our Students
CLASS OF 2028
Makenzie Anderson is a writer from South Carolina. She attended Clemson University, earning her B.A. in English and Departmental Honors in English with her poetry thesis, Birdlime. While at Clemson, she served as an editor for The South Carolina Review. Her poetry explores girlhood and womanhood, sapphic identity, and familial relations. She channels her southernness while simultaneously addressing coastal South Carolina’s haunting and alienating powers in her writing.
Kas Armstrong is a poet and artist from central Arkansas. Their work explores the body as a process of becoming and strives to celebrate unconventional modes of art, identity, and existence. They graduated from the University of Central Arkansas with a BFA in English and creative writing where they served as editor-in-chief of Vortex Magazine of Literature and Fine Art. They are the 2025 second-place winner of the Pat Laster Collegiate Poetry Contest, and their work can be found in Screen Door Review, Smacked Zine, and Vortex Magazine.
Yosra Bouslama was born and raised in Tunisia before moving to Texas in 2017. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of North Texas, and her poems have appeared in Decolonial Passage, SWWIM, and The Adroit.
Lexi Kessens is a writer who grew up in Kodak, TN. She received a BA in English from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she completed an undergraduate thesis and received awards for other works. Although she considers herself to be a fiction writer, she also enjoys exploring other forms such as poetry and autofiction.
Nurain Ọládèjì is a Nigerian writer and editor. His chapbook, Home is a Heart That Flees, was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for inclusion in Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set, edited by them and published by the African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books in 2024. His work has appeared in Transition, Poetry Wales, OlongoAfrica, Acumen, and elsewhere. He holds degrees in the plant sciences.
Thao Vu is a graduate of Eastern Nazarene College (USA) in Psychology and National Taiwan University (Taiwan) in Business. Thao has spent the better part of ten years working in development projects supporting children and the environment. She is writing her debut novel in memories of interesting places, times, and people.
Born and raised in Maryland, Josh Ward graduated with a degree in Wildlife Conservation from Virginia Tech in 2022, with a minor focus in creative writing. He is an avid wildlife photographer, birder, naturalist, and nature writer who has long sought a career that blends together elements of language arts, education, and natural history. His goal is to resurrect the ways of the old naturalists, the scientists who recorded their theories through eloquent verse, and the poets who inspired science with their wisdom and patience. His passions have taken him from Alaska to Costa Rica, and from Belize to Maine, his work along the way all going toward a single pursuit: the re-unification of science and art.
CLASS OF 2027
Shannan Mann is the Founding Editor of ONLY POEMS. She was selected as one of the 2024 Best New Poets. She has been awarded or placed for the Palette Love & Eros Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Auburn Witness Prize, Foster Poetry Prize, among others. Her poems appear in Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review of Canada, EPOCH, december, & elsewhere. She is the Poet Laureate’s pick for Exile. Her essays appear in Tolka Journal and Going Down Swinging; they have been awarded the Alta Lind Cook Prize and the Irene Adler Essay Prize. She also translates Sanskrit poetry.
Brit Washburn is the author of the essay collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Notwithstanding (Wet Cement Press, 2019) and What Is Given (forthcoming from Wet Cement, Spring 2025). She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan, where she was born and raised, and of the soon-to-be late, great Goddard College in Vermont. Brit has been awarded an artist’s grant by the Vermont Studio Center and works as a freelance writer, editor, indexer, a Montessori teacher, and instructor in the Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina Asheville.
Maria Psarakis is a writer from Virginia. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies and Political Science from the University of Richmond.
Ayla Elam is a fiction writer with a B.A. in history from Yale. Originally from Northern California, she enjoys good swimming spots, road trips, and promising snow forecasts in the western mountains.
Isaac Maxey is from Shawsville, VA. He has a piece upcoming in North American Review. Takes bad photos, calls them candid. Lies to your face.
William Shaw is a writer from Sheffield. His writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, The Georgia Review, and Daily Science Fiction. His first book, a critical study of the Doctor Who episode The Rings of Akhaten, was published in 2020.
Piper Fitzgerald grew up in the Meramec Area of Missouri and attended Saint Louis University to complete her undergraduate degree in English. When she isn’t reading or writing, she is hiking, practicing her photography, watching films, or spending time with her pets.
Dylan Ever spins stories out of folklore and fables, interweaving critters, creatures, and confused twenty-somethings. In her art she loves exploring combinations of music, visuals, and writing, and can often be found plucking at a guitar, building spaceship-esque synthesizers, or out writing poetry for passersby on her typewriter.
CLASS OF 2026
Karan Kapoor is the Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS and selected as a 2024 Best New Poet. Also a finalist for the Felix Pollak Prize & Charles B. Wheeler Prize book prizes and Diode, Tusculum Review and Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook prizes, their poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and elsewhere, fiction in JOYLAND and the other side of hope, and translations in The Offing and The Los Angeles Review.
Eric Yoo was born in Texas and grew up in Virginia. He likes the Spurs and also the sport of tennis. His favorite drink is cold sparkling water on a hot day.
Amanda Silva (or A.C. Silva) was born and raised in Carlisle Pennsylvania, earned her B.A. in Written Arts and Spanish Studies from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson New York, and has lived in Boston Massachusetts ever since. Her short stories have been published by Haunted Waters Press, Add To Cart Magazine, and The Bangalore Review. She likes her fiction funny, suspenseful, and/or unsettling. Her favorite person is her cat, Bowling Ball. Her favorite animal(s) are the hordes of wild turkeys that roam the streets of Boston. Her favorite mode of transportation is swimming. She dreams of someday owning a haunted house.
Grace Turner is a pack rat and an easy laugh. She takes sleeping very seriously and can often be found in the wild clad in vintage nightwear—the world is her bed/clamshell/crypt. She is interested in material culture and memory.
Kirk Reilly is a fiction writer, playwright, and former actor from Central Florida. He received a BFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. His plays have been developed and/or performed at HB Studio, Brooklyn College, The Tank NYC, and Treefort:Storyfort.
Ifreen Raveen is a writer from Indian Administered Kashmir. She has previously worked as an associate software engineer and an independent journalist. Her stories focus on the inner lives and private spaces of women living in a conflict zone, collective and generational trauma, and the many projections of everyday life under prolonged political turmoil. She believes in the power of storytelling, of words and imagination, for personal healing, and to remember, connect people, and transcend limitations.
Emelia Kamadulski is a poet and artist born in St. Louis and raised in the Pacific Northwest and the Mountain West. Her work explores mental illness, love, family, and the boundaries between art, place, and identity. She graduated from the University of Denver with a BA in creative writing and a minor in studio art. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys birdwatching, fiber crafts, and haunting her local library.
Jesus Govea is a writer from Chicago, Illinois. He received his B.A in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. He has been published in Poetry, Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, and has appeared in Slam Your Poetry by Miles Mercill and Narcisa Nozica. He enjoys reading world literature, watching Columbo, and playing badminton.
Riley O’Mearns is a poet and a Gemini. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, she holds a BA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College in Indiana and an MA in English from Kansas State University. Her work fosters a gentle curiosity about identity and nature. She has so much to love: crocheting, her cats, the Legend of Zelda series, yacht rock, and the em dash (among other things).