MFA: Upcoming Guests

Yasmine Ameli (she/her) is a queer biracial Iranian American writer, fiber artist, and educator whose work centers on the military industrial complex, disability justice, and queer joy. Her writing appears in POETRY, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among other literary magazines, and she is the author of the monthly(ish) newsletter Word Play: Your Guide to a Sustainable Writing Life. Yasmine independently offers trauma-informed workshops and creative coaching to writers and artists to help them plan projects, work through creative blocks, secure funding, and revise their work. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Tech, and she studied English and psychology at Johns Hopkins University. When she is not writing or teaching, Yasmine is crocheting, embroidering, foraging, flower-pressing, beading, collaging, papermaking, junk journaling, and jewelry making. Born and raised in Massachusetts, she is currently based in Philadelphia with her familiars Luna and Artemis.

Maggie Cooper is an agent with Aevitas Creative Management, representing adult fiction and select nonfiction projects with an emphasis on queer and trans stories and books that make our world kinder, weirder, more joyful, or all of the above. She holds a degree in English from Yale University, attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and earned her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as an editor for The Greensboro Review. Maggie is also a writer; her prose chapbook, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, was published by Bull City Press in 2024.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome, and a nomination for the Distinguished Visitor Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She has held academic appointments at Universidade do Porto, the European Law and Governance School, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the American Research Center in Sofia, and the Leysin American School in Switzerland. A prolific public speaker with the Ovation Agency, Dr. Darling has also lectured at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, Columbia University in the City of New York, and elsewhere. Additionally, Dr. Darling has served on fellowship juries for the United States Fulbright Commission, the Corporation of Yaddo, and many other awards in the United States and abroad. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Spain, and the Amalfi Coast.

Jerel Dye has been illustrating and making comics since 2005. Much of his inspiration stems from a deep interest in science and technology, though it frequently contains a healthy dose of wonder. Over the years, he has crafted dozens of mini comics, zines, and anthologies, such as Inbound, Awesome Possum, Hellbound, and the award-winning Little Nemo/Winsor McCay tribute Dream Another Dream. He has illustrated three middle grade and YA graphic novels to date. Jerel’s graphic novel Einstein (written by Jim Ottaviani) was selected by Booklist as one of the top 10 graphic novels of 2022/23. In addition to his illustration, Jerel teaches at various art centers, schools, and universities around the northeast and is currently running courses on comics and picture books at MassArt and The SMFA at Tufts. Originally from Indiana, Jerel now lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his partner and many pets.

Yessenia Funes is a journalist who covers climate and environmental issues through the lens of the oppressed. She's been writing professionally for over 10 years with bylines in The Guardian, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, Yale Climate Connections, and more. Her reporting has taken her across the world, including Nicaragua's Miskito Caribbean coast and the West Bank of Palestine. Every Thursday, she publishes an independent creative climate newsletter called Possibilities. When she's not reporting or writing, she's at home with her dear husband and cat in Queens, New York.

Lee Hope is the author of the novel Horsefever, which made its mark on the Small Press Distribution Bestseller List when it was published in 2016 and went on to be a finalist for the Midwest Book Awards. Lee is also is a fiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, which she founded. Her fiction has received grants from both the Maine and the Pennsylvania Arts Commissions. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary journals, such as Witness, The North American Review, Epiphany, and Sou’wester. Her short story “What to Take In Case of Fire” received an honorable mention in American Fiction, Vol. 13. Founder and former director of a low-residency MFA program in Maine, Lee also helped to found the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. She is currently president of the nonprofit Solstice Institute for Creative Writing and teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which brings literature to people on probation.

David Levering Lewis is professor emeritus of history at New York University. Educated at Fisk, Columbia, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, he is recipient of the National Humanities Medal. He received the Pulitzer Prize for each volume of his W.E.B. Du Bois biography. He is author of twelve books. Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the MacArthur Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Beth Cho Little has two degrees in writing: an MLitt with distinction (fiction) from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an MFA (Writing for Young People) from the Solstice MFA Program of Lasell University, where she subsequently worked as the program’s assistant director. Currently, she teaches humanities at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Beth’s work has been published in the anthology Somebody’s Child: Stories About Adoption, Eastown Fiction, the YA Review Network, and Hunger Mountain. She was awarded an SCBWI Magazine Merit Honor in 2016. Her most recent piece of short fiction “On Falling in Love at Boarding School” won the 2023 Flash Fiction Contest for Pigeon Pages, judged by Gina Chung. She attended the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop in summer 2023 and the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2024.

Kim McLarin is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, several essay collections, and the bibilomemoir James Baldwin's Another Country: Bookmarked. She is co-author of Growing Up X by Ilyasah Shabazz and This Child Shall Be Great by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, the Sewanee Review, The Sun Magazine, The Root, Slate, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many other publications. She is a former staff writer for The Associated Press, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College.

Two-time Pushcart Prize-winning poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list, and Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. She is a recipient of the 2026 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize for Poetry and Poetic Translation, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Dzvinia’s poetry and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including AGNI, Antioch Review, Field, Guernica, International Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, A Map of Hope: An International Literary Anthology, From Three Worlds, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun was published by Dialogos (2014). Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was the winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Robert Pinsky. More recently, her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize in Poetry, and the 2022 National Translation Award, and was the winner of the 2020–2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, awarded in 2022. Their co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry, Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), received a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant and was a finalist for the 2025 PEN America Literary Award in Translation. Their co-translation of filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s biographical novella The Enchanted Desna was published by Lost Horse Press in 2026 and supported by a Translate Ukraine 2026 grant from the Ukrainian Book Institute. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor to AGNI and Solstice Literary Magazine and a writer-in-residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Rebecca Podos began her career as a literary agent in 2011 and is currently managing partner at Neighborhood Literary. A graduate of the MFA Writing, Literature, and Publishing program at Emerson College, she is an award-winning author of young adult and adult fiction. She serves as a co-director of the communications and fundraising committee for Literary Agents of Change and on the board of directors for QT Library, a nonprofit, queer, and trans lending library based in Boston.

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich is the award-winning author of several books, a member of The Brown Bookshelf, and Board member of New York Nature Mobile. She is an NAACP Image Award nominee and two-time African American Literature Book Club bestseller. She edited the We Need Diverse Books anthology The Hero Next Door and contributed to several collections, including We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices and Imagine it Better: Visions of What School Might Be. She was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write the Operation Sisterhood stage adaptation and has written for various outlets, including PBS Parents. Olugbemisola is a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, was twice awarded a public service fellowship from the Echoing Green Foundation for her work with girls, and was the 2024 Writer-In-Residence at Bank Street School for Children. Olugbemisola lives with her family in New York City where she writes, makes things, and needs to get more sleep.

Dan Tremaglio is the author of three books of fiction, most recently the story collection The Hole in the Top of Your Head. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including F(r)iction, The Master’s Review, and The Collidescope, and three times been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College outside Seattle and is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist.

Claire Caldwell is an editor and writer with more than ten years’ experience in the publishing industry. She is senior editor at Annick Press, based in Canada, where she acquires books for young people, including the award-winning picture books Salma the Syrian Chef (written by Danny Ramadan, illustrated by Anna Bron) and Abuelita and Me (written by Leonarda Carranza, illustrated by Rafael Mayani). Since completing her MFA at the University of Guelph in 2012, Claire has published two poetry collections, Invasive Species (Wolsak and Wynn, 2015) and Gold Rush (Invisible Publishing, 2020), which she wrote in Dawson City, Yukon, as a writer-in-residence at the Pierre Berton House. Claire lives in Toronto, Canada, where she also teaches picture book writing through the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies.

Eileen Cleary is founder and editor of the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, based in Massachusetts. She’s author of Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate Press, 2024), long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award; 2 a.m. with Keats (NixesMate Press, 2020); and Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, West Texas Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, JAMA, Right Hand Pointing, Verse Daily, and other journals and anthologies.

Gabriel Cleveland serves as managing editor and executive director of CavanKerry Press, based in New Jersey. Along with founder Joan Cusack Handler, he co-edited Places We Return To, a 20th anniversary retrospective on publishing history of the press. An avid video gamer and music lover, he hosts The Andover Special, an internet radio program on Mixcloud. Gabriel is also a mental health advocate, often working online to raise awareness, visibility, and money for psychological and psychosocial issues. He has spent several years in the field of caregiving for people with increased physical and/or mental needs and wants you to know that you’re not alone. Gabe is a poet and fiction writer with an MFA from the Solstice Creative Writing Program.

Born in Manatí, Puerto Rico & raised in the North End of Springfield, MA, María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado has earned degrees in German, her third language, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Solstice MFA Program. She writes poetry and nonfiction prose that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German, & Farsi, the languages of her cultural experiences. Her collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (Lily Poetry Review, 2024), Destierro Means More than Exile (MultiCreative Wisdom, 2024), resistencia: Resilience (Human Error Publishing, 2023), and Gathering Words: Recogiendo palabras (Bilingual Review Press, 2008). Her honors include being named Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA (2014-2016) and being awarded an honorary doctorate from Smith College (2024) for her numerous years of facilitating community poetry workshops and multi-genre readings, many in partnership with the Springfield, MA, Public Library, as well as for her intersectional feminist approach to teaching. A Clark Fellow, she is joyfully pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. In the MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Bay Path University, María teaches “Generational Histories: Writing about Family” and “Writing about Race, Culture & Identity” online. 

Mark Haber has been director of acquisitions & marketing at Coffee House Press, which is based in Minneapolis, for more than three years; he first formed his relationship with the press as one of its authors. Previously, he worked as a bookseller as well as the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas, for ten years. Also a writer, Mark’s novels have been translated into many languages. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, was longlisted for a PEN/Hemingway Award. Mark has published numerous articles in a wide variety of publications and is an experienced teacher and academic lecturer in the field of creative writing. He holds a BA in English from the University of South Florida.

Christopher Nelson is founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher based in Iowa and dedicated to literary excellence and reforestation. He is also author of Snowlight (JackLeg Press, 2027), Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), and six chapbooks, including Blue House, for which he was awarded a fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a translation grant from the Goethe-Institute, he has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora—recipient of a Midwest Book Award—and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. His translation, with Monika Cassel, of Barbara Köhler’s visionary Niemands Frau is forthcoming in 2028.

Sara Moore Wagner has been managing poetry editor of Driftwood Press—whose staff is spread across the country—since 2023. She is author of three full-length books of poetry: Lady Wing Shot, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, 2022). She also is the author of three chapbooks, including Faery Rooted (forthcoming from Chestnut Review Press). She is a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has been featured on The Slowdown, as well as in many journals and anthologies, including Gulf Coast, Smartish Pace, The Journal, and North American Review, among others. Sara lives in Ohio.