MFA: Upcoming Guests

Amy M. Alvarez is a poet, educator, and scholar. Born to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents in New York City, her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, place, regionality, and social justice. She is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Makeshift Altar and the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Snartish Pace, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, the Virginia Creative Arts Center, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. She has taught at high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Roxbury, Massachusetts, as well as at West Virginia University. She currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College as an Associate Professor of the Practice.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; All the Agents and Saints; and Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life. She also published the best-selling guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. Widely anthologized, Elizondo Griest has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, Orion, VQR, and Oxford American, among others. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes, and has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, Lannan Foundation, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Currently professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed on five continents in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department.

Ghosh Literary is an independent literary agency founded by Anna Ghosh. Previously a partner at Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency in New York City, Anna has nearly three decades of experience in the publishing industry. The agency offers worldwide literary representation for print and digital media and all allied rights, including motion picture, theatrical, and multimedia rights. Anna’s client list includes New York Times bestsellers; winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim, and other awards; as well as still-to-be-heralded gems. Her literary interests are wide and eclectic, and she is known for discovering and developing writers. She is particularly interested in literary narratives and books that illuminate some aspect of human endeavor or the natural world. Anna does not typically represent genre fiction but is drawn to compelling storytelling in most guises. Anna studied cultural anthropology and literary journalism at Hampshire College and liberal studies at The New School for Social Research. Originally from India, Anna was based in New York City for 16 years and now lives in San Francisco.

Shane Hawk is an Indigenous horror writer, editor, and screenwriter, as well as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He is best known as the co-editor of the bestselling anthology series Never Whistle at Night, which is now in its second volume with more than twenty printings. His debut collection Anoka was released in 2020 and became part of a growing wave of Indigenous Horror reshaping the genre. Hawk has an original TV series and feature film in development. He lives in San Diego, California, with his wife and daughter.

Terrance Hayes’ most recent poetry collection is So to Speak. His previous one is American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Fiction Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. In 2010, his book Lighthead won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Hurston-Wright Award. His first book, Muscular Music, won both a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic, was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box, a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and was long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry. Terrance’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a profile on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poems have appeared in seven editions of the Best American Poetry anthology and two editions of the Pushcart Best of the Small Presses anthology. His craft book is Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry. His essay collection To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He was also guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014. He is a professor of English at New York University.

Uchechi Kalu, CFP®, is an award-winning poet and certified financial planner based in Los Angeles. She was a 2024 Poetry Fellow for the 2024 Paris Olympics and performed at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Her work has been supported by PEN America and the Nawat Fes Residency. She provides financial literacy workshops for universities and institutions, including The Authors Guild and Haymarket Books. Find her on Instagram @dearuchechi, join her financial literacy newsletter at dearuchechi.com/newsletter, or add her on LinkedIn at /uchechi-kalu.

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.

Malinda Lo is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including A Scatter of Light. Her novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Printz Honor, and was an LA Times Book Prize finalist. Her books have received 15 starred reviews and have been finalists for multiple awards, including the Andre Norton Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She has been honored by the Carnegie Corporation as a Great Immigrant. Malinda’s short fiction and nonfiction has been published by The New York Times, NPR, Autostraddle, The Horn Book, and multiple anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife and their dog.

Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who writes, lives, and loves in Boston. Porsha is a writer, performer, educator, and curator who uses Afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Porsha was Brown University's 2019 Heimark Artist-In-Residence, the 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Poet Laureate for the City of Boston, and a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Porsha earned her MFA in poetry from Emerson College and is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. Her other work can be found in or forthcoming from with TriQuarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. Porsha is also co-owner of JustBook-ish, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Hector Rodriguez III, an award-winning Chicano comic book creator, is a native of the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. Hector is the creator of the internationally recognized superhero series El Peso Hero and the Founder of Texas Latino Comic Con. He is also the publisher/editor-in-chief of the newly minted Chispa Comics, the first direct-to-market Latino comic book publishing house, in collaboration with Amp Comics. He’s also the creative director of Masked Republic.

Weslie Turner edits acclaimed commercial and literary young adult and children’s books for all ages, including 2025 Michael L. Printz Award-winning graphic novel Brownstone and 2025 National Book Award Finalist (S)Kin. She has nearly 15 years of publishing and bookselling experience, including at Scholastic, Macmillan, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Most recently the senior editor at Versify, she has worked with New York Times bestselling award-winners—including Nikki Giovanni, Tiffany Jewell, Ibi Zoboi, Daniel José Older, Raúl the Third, and Elaine Bay—and over a hundred other established and debut creators. Her books have hit the indie bestseller list (Vampires Never Get Old; The Lost Dreamer) and earned a Sydney Taylor Honor (Black Bird, Blue Road); an Orbis Pictus Honor (Call and Response: The Story of Black Lives Matter); and Eisner, Harvey, Edgar, and NAACP Image Award nominations, as well as consistent best-of-the-year selections and over 30 starred reviews. Learn more at weslieturner.com and on Bluesky (@weslieturner.bsky.social).

Arriel Vinson is a Reese's Book Club LitUp Fellow and Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. She earned her MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and others. Arriel is a Tin House YA Scholar, Highlights Foundation scholarship recipient, and 2020 Walter Grant recipient. Under the Neon Lights, a YA novel-in-verse, is her debut. Connect with her on social media at @arriwrites and find her work at arriwrites.com.