Ashby Mei-Ling Baker
Ashby was raised in montane Colorado and graduated from Northwestern University with degrees in Creative Writing and Biological Sciences. She loves dogs, homemade sweets, Pokemon, and all things nature. When not experimenting with structure and form, she enjoys reading about scientific discoveries and playing video games.
Zak Buczinsky
Zak is a fiction writer originally from the Chicago area. Before moving to California he worked as an ESL teacher in South Korea and a freelance reporter in Seattle. In California he worked in the Orange County recovery community as a speaker and a group facilitator in a drug and alcohol rehab. Although he is currently focused on writing short stories, he has aspirations to write a novel.
Ferdia Burke
Ferdia spent twenty-five years as a union concrete laborer in NYC and attended classes at night at Queens College CUNY. He is a former wannabe writer who has worked his way up to aspiring writer in the hopes he can one day be a (fingers crossed) failed writer. His attempt at delivering poignant revelatory insight into a person or a people never gets in the way of his firm belief that story is king.
Amy Cameron
Amy Cameron is a NYC writer originally from Philadelphia. She is a reader for Narrative Magazine, and her work has been published in Bellevue Literary Magazine and Mount Hope Literary Journal. An alum of Bread Loaf, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, she is currently working on a novel.
John Comerci
https://youtu.be/ulc9Vdx8-io
Gabriel Garofano
Gabriel Garofano was born and raised in Los Angeles, but he sincerely hopes you will not hold that against him. Apart from full-body wincing while writing about himself in third person, he is looking to create work that gets at what it is to be alive, even if it kills him.
Jamie Kim
Lawyer turned fiction writer. Crossword puzzle enthusiast. Proud immigrant. Dog and cat person. In the words of the great Sandra Oh, it’s an honor just to be Asian.
Hannah Liberman
Hannah Liberman is a writer from the Southwestern United States. She has a B.A. in Political Theory and History from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Programs in Writing, she worked as a legal researcher at Columbia University and as first nonfiction and then Arts Editor at Boston Review. Her essays and fiction appear in many venues in print and online. She teaches undergraduate fiction.
Flynn Mixdorf
Flynn Mixdorf is a writer from Indianapolis by way of Chicago. His essays have appeared in F Newsmagazine and Citric Acid. He is at work on a novel set in the midwest.
Ivy Olesen
Ivy Olesen is a second year fiction student at UCI. They went to NYU for undergrad where they studied in the Tisch School of the Arts and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Currently, they are working on a short story collection about gay people hanging out in LA, and a novel. They also teach the undergrads fiction writing, and formerly taught a class they designed called: “Sliding into DMs: Epistolary Literature from the 1700s to Today.” If you would like to slide into their DMs, their university email is: iolesen@uci.edu.
Jaime Sandoval
Jaime Sandoval hails from Mexicali, Baja California, a city on the border of Mexico and the United States. Through the exploration of the borderland experience, their writing aims to bridge the divide between sexuality and religion, and queerness and conservatism. As an immigrant, Jaime is particularly interested in the voices of the alienated and socially displaced. Their work can be found in Westwind and Masque and Spectacle Journal.
RJ Szuba
RJ is from Central New York, five hours northwest of New York City. He has lived in Southern California for ten years, mostly in Downtown and Northeast LA. He enjoys callbacks, multiples of five, and ordinal directions.
Kelin Sophia Tham | 譚琦蓮
Kelin Sophia Tham is a Chinese Burmese writer and artist from San Francisco and Los Angeles County. She received her Bachelor’s in English and Master’s in Education from UC Berkeley. Through a combination of realistic and fantastical works, she writes fiction, poetry, and multimedia literature exploring queer womanhood, techno-orientalism, the sounds and rhythm of Toisanese, and legacies of colonialism within and immigration from China and Myanmar. She also enjoys watercolor painting, practicing the erhu and traditional Chinese dance, foam sword combat, and foraging for flowers.
