Creative Writing Program New Student Reading

Thursday, August 29 2024, 6 - 7pm

The Globe | 199 N. Lumpkin Street Athens, GA

The Creative Writing Program is delighted to present our first event of the 2024-2025 academic year, The New Student Reading!

We will celebrate the work of ten PhD students! This event is free and open for the public. Refreshments will be served.

View Photo Gallery

About the Readers:

Rahad Abir is the author of the novel Bengal Hound. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Los Angeles Review, Himal Southasian, Courrier International, The Wire, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in fiction from Boston University. He is the recipient of the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into French and Hindi. Currently he is working on a short story collection, which was a finalist for the 2021 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship. Twitter : @rahadabir
Daniel Barnum’s poems and essays appear in The Hopkins Review, The Offing, The Massachusetts Review, Muzzle, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Their chapbook, Names for Animals, was selected for the Robin Becker Prize from Seven Kitchens Press, and won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2023, their full-length manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Daniel completed their MFA at The Ohio State University. Their work has been supported through fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. They are a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Instagram
Andy Nicole Bowers is the author of the chapbook Vulturine (Factory Hollow Press, 2019). She holds a BA (summa cum laude) from Columbia University, an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst, and an MA in the History of Art and Architecture, also from UMass. While pursuing her MA, she was awarded a Kress Fellowship to study German at the Middlebury Language Schools. As a PhD student in Creative Writing at UGA, Andy seeks to chart a course of study that examines animal presences within the English-language sonnet through the lens of literary animal studies.
Braiden Ellis (he/him) is a fiction writer who grew up in Oklahoma and moved to Georgia in 2019. He is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at UGA. As an undergraduate student, he studied Creative Writing and French at Georgia College & State University. During his time at GCSU, he was a volunteer creative writing teacher for middle schoolers in the GCSU Early College program. He spent the 2023-2024 academic year teaching English to French high school students in the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). Braiden is interested in writing about themes of religion, family, and growing up queer in the South. His poem “Surpassing Love of Women” can be found in the MSU Roadrunner Review. Instagram Twitter
Priyadarshini Oshin Gogoi is a Presidential Fellow at the University of Georgia. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio, and a BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Delhi. Her areas of interest include postcolonial, South Asian, and Northeast Indian coming of age writing, as well as children's and young adult literature. Priyadarshini is also a children's author, and many of her picture books have won acclaim across India, including the Bangalore Literature Festival Prize 2023, the FICCI Children's Book of the Year Prize 2024, a Neev Book Award 2024 shortlist, as well as features in the Parag Honor List 2022 and 2024. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Bombay Review, The Selkie UK, The Alipore Post, etc. Instagram
John Kuligowski is Ph.D. student in English specializing in creative writing, with a focus on fiction. He is a graduate teaching assistant and has served as assistant editor for volumes 392 and 394 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. His creative work purposely defies genre distinctions, but tends towards most things weird and gothic. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in Maudlin House, Misery Tourism, Foothill Poetry Journal, The Shoutflower, and The Chaffin Journal, among others. Currently, he is assistant editor in nonfiction for Prairie Schooner.
Nik Moore (they/them) is a Kentucky poet and an alum of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Montana. They serve as a co-founding editor for Many Nice Donkeys, a small literary journal formed by alumni of the English Department at Northern Kentucky University. Nik's poems have appeared or will appear in Orion, The Greensboro Review, Poetry Northwest, West Trade Review, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (UGA Press), and elsewhere. Instagram Twitter
Asna Nusrat (she/her) is a bilingual writer from Karachi, Pakistan. She mostly writes fiction, nonfiction, and translations in English and Urdu. As an immigrant writer still new to America and everything American, she sees every experience as a living specimen of translation. Her translations have been published on the Thousand Languages Project website, and in Lakeer magazine. Her nonfiction is about the immigrant experience, financial debts, family and disease. Her novel-in-progress explores the strangeness of feminine joy, the company of objects, and the private life of a woman’s mind. She has been working as an Associate Editor for Haydens Ferry Review since 2021 and is currently serving as the Genre Editor for Translations for 2023-2024. Instagram
Sristi Ray (she/her) is a poet from Odisha, India. She graduated with a Masters in English Literature from Ambedkar University, Delhi. During the pandemic, Sristi got the opportunity to teach English to students in a government school in New Delhi as a Teach for India Fellow. The two-year Fellowship with its intensive teacher-training workshops was a major turning point for Sristi where she not only honed her teaching and managing skills, but also got a chance to reconnect with her childhood dream of becoming a writer. Sristi is interested in chronicling the life and culture of her home state, Odisha. Her poems draw inspiration from Odia hymns, prayers, folk songs and the accompanying music performed in local festivals and ritualistic practices. In this age of data proliferation, Sristi’s poems want to carve a space where questions of the communal, the spiritual, and the Earth, can creatively interact with questions of global, scientific and cosmic importance. During her time at UGA, Sristi hopes to pull her work closer to the experimental potential of sound and music in poetry. As part of her research, she wants to investigate how sound and ritual ‘meet’ in a body, while oftentimes invoking energies beyond the physical. Sristi is a dedicated cloud-watcher and loves to be a walking cloud-encyclopedia. She is a big rice eater and will share food videos as a way of bonding. She writes most of her poems listening to The Jester Race by In Flames and hopes to find her growl voice soon. Instagram
Qinyue (Joann) Yu is a student, a painter, a puppeteer, a licensed art educator, and a person who finds consolation in words. Her kaleidoscopic interests and her intersectional experience of nationality and class feud infinite inspiration in creating strange narratives that readers sometimes describe as a sense of uneasiness or surprise. In addition to fiction writing, her multilingual background in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian promotes her attention to the tangible linguistic detail of writing as a form of artistic expression. She is dedicated to creating provocative reading experiences. Academically, Joann focuses on trauma studies and adjacent literary theories, such as memory studies, away from the Holocaust but more focused on the fictional narratives regarding minority populations in contemporary society. Aside from scholarly works, Joann has been the writer for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Wechat media in blogging arts and collections since 2022, worked with several film projects as a script supervisor, and continues to explore in a multi-medium fashion.

Slideshow

Creative Writing Program New Student Reading

Support English at UGA