Student News Winter 2025

Rahad Abir was named the Georgia Author of the Year, in the Literary Fiction and Short Story Collection category for his book Bengal Hound.

Colin Bishoff's article "Wonderland as a Space of Mental Illness: American McGee's Alice and Madness Returns" was published in the fall edition of Literature/Film Quarterly. His review of John Brandon's novel Penalties of June will be published by the Southern Review of Books December 2024.

Ellen Boyette’s second chapbook, Nitrous or My Velvet Knife, published by Secret Restaurant Press, is now in its second printing and will be excerpted in Poetry Daily in 2025. Writer (and Athenian) JR Barner published an interview on Nitrous called “Burning Questions with Ellen Boyette”. Ellen’s full length hybrid manuscript, BEDIEVAL, was a finalist at Inside The Castle Press. This year, Ellen published 5 five poems in River Styx, one poem in Cover Mag, has six poems forthcoming in 2025 through Antiphony, Discount Guillotine, and The Creative Writing Department. She will teach a course called Disfiguring Autobiography for writingworkshops.com in February.

Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson's article, "The Risorgimento of Christina Rossetti" was published in the 2024 special edition of The Pre-Raphaelite Society Review. Jessica's article discusses Rossetti's Italian background and analyzes some of her understudied poems to argue that the author supported the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century Italian unification movement. Additionally, Jessica's 35mm film photo, "Vestibules & Windows", was published in vol. II of Trace Fossils Review and serves as the poetry genre cover.

Holly Haworth published "Write While Lying Down," an essay about the labor and work of writing, at Literary Hub. She published “Plain Art” in the Oxford American’s Southern Art Issue, an essay about the folk artist Annie Wellborn and a meditation on art as a rich and nourishing sustenance for regular people and plain lives. She published "The Longest Shortcut" in Orion magazine’s issue Swimming Lessons: Staying Afloat in Our Flooded Future, an essay about the past, present, and future of the Panamá Canal, on the shore of which she found herself as she worked on her forthcoming book. She published "Woman in the Woods,” an essay about violence against women, at The Bitter Southerner. It was included as a Top 5 Longreads of the Week by Longreads, which wrote that, “The juxtaposition in the opening paragraph between natural beauty and a horrific, needless death stopped me short. As [Haworth] considers what it means to be a woman in the woods—a place where she sought refuge from the men and boys in her life who exerted ‘verbal, psychological, sexual, and physical violence’ against her—she knows she has less to fear from venomous snakes, bears, and mountain lions than from encountering a man, a different kind of predator altogether.” Haworth also taught a 6-week nonfiction course for Orion magazine called Writing Rhizomatically. She published her first book of poetry, The Way the Moon, at Mercer University Press and made appearances this fall at the Decatur Book Festival and the Southern Festival of Books to read from the book. 

Safeer Hussain presented a conference paper at the SAMLA 96 Annual Conference. His paper was titled "Under the Purdah: Nexus of Gender, Class, and Religion in Iqbalunnisa Hussain's Novel Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Household."

Priyadarshini Oshin Gogoi's children's book When We Are Home was shortlisted for the 2024 Neev Book Award. 

Asna Nusrat's English translation of Tehzeeb Hafi's poem called "Nazm" was published in Lakeer Magazine's Poetic Renditions Column 5. Hafi is a contemporary Pakistani poet who writes at the intersection of classical Urdu romanticism and contemporary politics and poetics. 

Abhijit Sarmah was a finalist for the prestigious Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship for the second consecutive year. He participated in a distinguished panel discussion titled "(F)unemployment: Rethinking Graduate Education in the Age of Gen Z and ChatGPT" at AWP 2024. His creative works have been featured in Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, and Meniscus. He was invited to take part in The Sundress Reading Series, an award-winning series run by Sundress Publications. In addition to that, he was awarded a Michael G. Moran English Graduate Award by the Department of English and the Ruth Pack Scholarship by the Institute of Native American Studies (INAS) at the University of Georgia. Sarmah was also featured on the MFA Writers podcast and WUGA’s Athens News Matters. Recently, he joined The Headlight Review as a Guest Editor of poetry. Moreover, he organised the Sentimental Touring Club Graduate Reading Series at UGA.

Over the summer, Christina Wood participated in the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Publishing Workshop. She will soon have an essay out in the Winter 2024 issue of their print journal. Her novel-in-progress was a finalist for the Barbra Deming Memorial Fund’s Money for Women prize and McNeese Review nominated her essay, “Craft as Contradiction” for a Pushcart Prize. This year, she is working as a graduate editor for The Georgia Review.