Creative Writing Newsletter 2025

I’m often thinking about the Roman Empire, of course, but these days I think even more frequently about How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and in particular about all the Whos down in Who-Ville, who keep singing and celebrating even though much has been taken from them. (One might wish they had more vigorously defended Who-ville against a vengeful maniac, but that’s another story.) This is just to say that in a dismal year for higher education I’ve tried to remember to be grateful for what’s good, specifically the talent and creative persistence of our students, alumni, and faculty.

In that spirit I’d like to call attention to my poetry colleagues, all three of whom published a new book within the last six months. Rebecca Lindenberg’s Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible—“exquisite,” says Ada Limón—is new from Boa; Aditi Machado’s Material Witness—“exhilaratingly intricate,” says Christopher Kondrich—is out with Nightboat; and Felicia Zamora’s Interstitial Archaeology—“impossibly good,” says Amaud Jamaul Johnson—is available from the University of Wisconsin Press. Congratulations to Felicia, Aditi, and Rebecca!

I hope you’ll make your way to these books, as I hope copies of these books will make their way to shelves of our seminar room (222 Arts and Sciences Hall). This library of UC writers, established in 2017 by Michael Griffith, contains an impressive array of books (approximately 160) by faculty, alums, and students. If you have a book to donate to this collection, please mail a copy to Michael c/o UC English, Box 210069, Cincinnati OH 45221-0069. We’re eager to celebrate your success and add your voice to the chorus.

Chris Bachelder: Dayswork, a novel written collaboratively with Jennifer Habel, was published in paperback by Norton in September. Jennifer and I are nearing completion of a draft of a companion novel called Wakefield. 

Don Bogen: My publications this past year or so seem to be mostly in the area of translation. I reviewed Seamus Heaney’s collected translations for Translation Review last fall. The Art of Shadows, my translation of a dozen poems by the contemporary Spanish poet Juan Lamillar, which won the 2021 Poetry International Tiny Chapbook Prize, was finally published in that journal. And I just finished a translation of the Spanish playwright Luis Sorolla’s The Precursors for the cultural office of the Spanish embassy. I had the pleasure of meeting both Juan and Luis in person this past April, when I delivered a paper on Theodore Roethke at the biennial conference of the Spanish Association of American Studies.

This year Michael Griffith published an essay in Swing, book reviews in Kirkus, and eight new puzzles in The Southern Review. He'll be on leave in 2025-26, working on a variety of ridiculous projects, but he looks forward to continuing work with graduate students during the sabbatical.

Kristen Iversen: This was a busy year for conferences! I did several lectures: “Nikola Tesla in New York” at the Tesla Science Foundation International Conference at Kolorac University in Belgrade, Serbia, in July; “Nikola Tesla in Colorado” at the Tesla Science Foundation Conference in New York in January; and several talks for the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, NY (the home of Tesla's experimental tower), where I serve on their History and Collections committee. I participated in the Biographer’s International Conference in New York in May and will do so again in June at their conference in Washington, D.C. Speaking of all things Tesla, I was awarded the 2024 Tesla Spirit Award by the Tesla International Science Foundation.
    I also attended the AWP conference in Los Angeles, where it was great to see colleagues and former students.
    Film news: Full Body Burden, the documentary based on my last nonfiction book, will premiere this summer and eventually be in theaters, and then streaming later this year.
    I completed edits for the forthcoming anthology, When I Knew: Essays on Craft, Identity, and Becoming a Writer (co-edited with Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes), representing writers of literary nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from around the country. The book Friend and Faithful Stranger: Nikola Tesla in the Gilded Age is nearly complete (finally – the research almost killed me!), and I am making progress on a novel and a new work of narrative nonfiction.
    As always, it was a pleasure to work with undergrad and graduate students, and I continue to serve as Literary Nonfiction Editor of the Cincinnati Review.
    This year has been a bit exhausting for a number of reasons, but I’m grateful for my great colleagues and students, and I look forward to a few weeks in Colorado over the summer to catch my breath!

In April, Felicia Zamora’s book, Interstitial Archaeology, released from University of Wisconsin Press and has received mentions in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Ms. Magazine. Her book Murmuration Archives was selected for the Akrilica Series with Noemi Press for publication in 2026. She was featured on the cover of The American Poetry Review in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue, featured in underbelly, selected for a Yaddo Residency, and included in the Writers Recommend Series from Poets & Writers. Awarded a 25-26 Taft Center Fellowship, she plans to work on her newest manuscript, El Cielo en Nuestros Ojos: An Inamorata (Poem) Pulse. This summer she returns as poetry faculty at Orion’s Environmental Writing Workshop, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and The Kenyon Review Residential Summer Workshops.

Allison Pitinii Davis (class of 2008) was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant (2025) and a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award (2024) for her hybrid manuscript Outskirts. Her novella Business is forthcoming from Baobab Press in 2025. Recent poems and scholarship have appeared in Oxford American, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and elsewhere. She served as a Managing Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. In Fall of 2025, she will join Ohio State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Poetry. 

Alida Dean: My short story "Couvade," about a man who thinks he's pregnant, will appear in the Fall 2025 issue of Chicago Quarterly Review. I've also been writing poetry lately and am thrilled to be a 2025 fellow in poetry at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. My baby can say two words now, hi and hot!

A 10th Anniversary 2nd Edition of Darrin Doyle's short story collection, The Dark Will End the Dark, will be published by Tortoise Books on October 7, 2025. Darrin serves as Graduate Studies Coordinator and Professor of English at Central Michigan University.

Laurie Filipelli works as a college admissions counselor and publishes the Mighty Writing Substack. Her third collection of poetry, My Heart is a Museum, won the Broken Sleep Books poetry competition and will be published in 2026. 

Emily Heiden has a new essay about Simone de Beauvoir and changing her name in the book Fast Famous Women, out from Wood Hall Press in March 2025.  

Sakinah Hofler: I am dancing, dancing, dancing. I was named a 2024 NYC Forge Fellow and the winner of the 2024 Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices. My C.P. Cavafy Poetry prize-winning poem, “Grieve, Goddess Sings, for the Black Sons of America” was published in Issue #29 of Poetry International and my short story, “Second Chance,” was published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact. My essay, “Defamiliarization: Against Reality to Examine Reality,” was also published on Analog Science Fiction & Fact’s online component. My monologue for Delilah Howe’s character in the collaborative play, The Ground on Which We Stand (a play that recently won the Giles R. Wright Award for Excellence in African American History and was commissioned by Luna Stage and developed in collaboration with Crossroads Theater), will have an adapted, second run in June 2025 at Luna Stage. In addition, I was a finalist for the inaugural Newark Poet Laureate. Just got an offer on my debut novel (like, seriously, just now) but I’ll wait until all is signed, inked, and dried to elaborate. Honestly, with all that’s going on, just happy to still be here, present and writing. Forever grateful for UC~~

Rochelle Hurt won the Dorset prize from Tupelo Press for her book Lightboxes, which will be published in 2027. Poems from the book appear in recent issues of The Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Poetry. 

This past fall, Gwen Kirby started a tenure-track job at Carleton College teaching creative writing and literature. She recently had a story accepted by Mid-American Review.

Claire Kortyna works as Assistant Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University, where the Visiting Author Series has benefited from a number of Cincinnati connections, including readings by Jen Fawkes and Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner for Poetry, Samyak Shertok. Her most recent publication is an essay in the Spring 2025 issue of The Georgia Review. 

Amy Lemmon (MA 92 PhD 97): I'm currently serving as Acting Assistant Chair English and Communication Studies Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY, where I’ve taught since 1996 (full-time since 2000) and was chair from 2015-2023. I was honored to receive a 2025 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to support archival research and site visits in London this July for my project, Corresponding Care: Mary Crellin Langdon Down and the Development of Residential Services for the Intellectually Disabled. This summer, I’ll also be reading in the Bryant Park Reading Room Series with Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin, and will spend a two-week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I was commissioned to write three poems inspired by the political posters of French graphic designer Alain Le Querne for Continuum, a book from ORO Editions edited by Marlena Buczek Smith with a foreword by Debbie Millman.  My poem “Evening Call” was featured in the 2024 edition of the online poetry project Queensbound; I participated in a live reading on the Queens-bound 7 train to celebrate the launch.

Lisa Low: My poetry collection Replica is coming out next year with the University of Wisconsin Press.

Kristi Maxwell: My ninth book, Wide Ass of Night, came out in March 2025, published by Saturnalia Books. I have poems forthcoming in Ninth Letter, New Orleans Review, and At Length. As of fall 2024, I am the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville, where I am also an associate professor of English.

Sarah Rose Nordgren: I have poems recently out or forthcoming from Bennington Review, EcoTheo Review, and StorySouth, and my essay "The Everlasting Universe of Things" is forthcoming in Agni. I recently signed a contract with the University of West Virginia Press for a craft book titled Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change. 

Rhonda Pettit: Been busy making signs and marching. (& writing).

Jamie Poissant: The Spanish-language feature film El Cielo de los Animales, based on four stories from Jamie Poissant's story collection The Heaven of Animals (Simon & Schuster, 2014) will premiere in Spain in May, 2025. His novel Lake Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020) was recently translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Czech, and The Heaven of Animals is forthcoming from Korean publisher Vostok Press. Argentinian publisher Edhasa will release a limited edition of the chapbook Lizard Man (RopeWalk Press, 2011) later this year. Jamie has new stories up this spring at Ghost Parachute and swamp pink.

Scott Rettberg: I’m currently the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence, which was awarded $15,000,000 in funding for ten years of operations from the Norwegian Research Council. I also host the podcast Off Center.

Stephanie Rogers’ third poetry collection, Middletown, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in October 2025. Poems from the book appear in The Adroit Journal, Boulevard, New Ohio Review, Tin House, and elsewhere.

David Lerner Schwartz was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and published fiction in Nimrod International Journal, New Orleans Review, and The Best of The Los Angeles Review. He interviewed Erik Larson for the Miami Book Fair, presented for the Postcolonial Society of the Global South, and read at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference.

Chelsea Whitton: My debut poetry collection, The Wonder Wheel, will be published by LSU Press in collaboration with Sewanee Poetry in Spring 2026. Also, I recently learned that my poem "Poseidon" was a finalist for the Southeast Review's Gearhart Poetry Prize. Matt and I had twins last June and they are doing great! Their names are Pete and Hank. 

Bess Winter attended the Stockholm Writers' Conference in Stockholm, Sweden as the 2024 winner of the Sandra Carpenter Ohio Writers' Scholarship.

This year, Nikki Barnhart has had work published in X-R-A-Y and forthcoming in Epiphany. Additionally, she received a Pushcart Prize nomination and her story collection was a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Awards. 

Holli Carrell: My debut poetry manuscript, Apostasies, was selected as the winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize and will be published this September. (More information here.) I also have work forthcoming in Gulf Coast and North American Review. 

Leila Chatti’s second full-length collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in September 2025. Along with the poets Mag Gabbert, Chen Chen, Tarfia Faizullah, and Carly Joy Miller, Leila is also publishing a book of collaborative poetry zines, Spotted Ponies: The Collected Zines, with Bridwell Press this fall. Her poems have recently appeared in The Poetry Reader: An Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2025), Finger Exercises for Poets (W. W. Norton, 2024), and journals such as Poetry Magazine, The Common, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Salt Hill. She welcomed (very joyfully!) her daughter late last summer. 

In the past year Daniel Galef published poems in the Atlanta Review, the Cumberland River Review, Think, and Scientific American. Additionally, he was the featured poet for the Spring 2024 issue of Light, with a poetry showcase and a profile by editor Melissa Balmain. His story “Birth of Venus” appeared in the 2024 Tennessee Williams Festival prize anthology, and his story “Costello Cuts Up” placed second in the 2025 Hatfield-Westheimer Short Story Prize. His academic paper “Nature Red in Thorn and Thistle: The Carnivorous Plant in Victorian Speculative Fiction” placed second for the Robin Sheets Critical Essay Prize in the same event. Current projects include a screenplay, a short story in which the hero is a photon, and a poem in the form of a cryptic crossword puzzle.

Kira Homsher: I published a short story in The End Magazine and a poem in Mississippi Review. My essay "Real Needs" was a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. I'm also grateful to have received a Taft Summer Fellowship, which will support a research trip to Ireland this May and allow me to revise and complete the final section of my novel. 

Arah Ko: I received two Pushcart nominations for poems this fall and one Best of Net nomination for fiction. My poem from Felicia Zamora's workshop this autumn was a semifinalist for the Southeast Review's Gearhart Prize. New poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Grist Online, Relief, Third Coast, and Ninth Letter. My second full-length poetry manuscript was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize this year, making it to the final 20 of 922 submissions. Finally, my debut poetry collection, BRINE ORCHID, is forthcoming this August from YesYes Books, with preorders to be released this summer.

Asher Marron: This past academic year, I worked with the Learning and Interpretation Team at the Cincinnati Art Museum on a DEI-based project. I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the youth poetry category of Books by the Banks. I presented creative work at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. 

We are delighted to welcome eight new students next year:

Mialise Carney is a writer from the east coast. Her stories and essays have appeared in swamp pink, Washington Square Review, Booth, and Barren Magazine, among other places. She received her MFA from CSU-Fresno where she was awarded the Graduate Dean’s Medal and worked as senior fiction editor for The Normal School. Currently, she reads fiction for Alien Magazine and poetry for The Best of the Net anthology. Read more of her work at mialisecarney.com.

Emma Johnson-Rivard is a queer, midwestern writer of poetry and weird fiction. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and previously held editorial positions at Water~Stone Review, rock paper scissors, The Common Tongue, Proceedings, and others. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Bag of Bones, Tales to Terrify, and others. Her poetry has recently appeared in Shadowplay, Across the Margins, the Lavender Review, Paper Dragons, and others. She and her gremlin monster masquerading as a cat originally hail from Minnesota. 

Originally from El Paso, TX, Natalia Martinez is a creative writing MFA graduate from Florida International University. Her writing has been featured in Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast. She currently resides in Miami, Florida, by way of the Great Plains. 

KeeShawn Murphy is a writer and academic from Southeast D.C. She holds a B.A. from Lafayette College. Previously an English teacher at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, she is currently in the second year of her MFA program at the University of Kentucky. Her writing focuses on the complicated intersections of black womanhood, spirituality, and familial relationships. You can find her work in A Gathering Together Journal, Red Moon Press, The Elevation Review, and others. 

Dana Rider is a writer, teacher, and editor. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Redivider, Sundog Lit, Exposition Review, and Revolute. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she currently teaches in the English department. Dana is also a volunteer fiction reader for The Southeast Review. Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, she lives in Reno with her partner Zach and their two cats, Snorkel and Dante. Find her at danarider.wordpress.com.

Jo Wallace is a poet from Indiana. Her writing can be found in journals like Conjunctions, New American Writing, Seneca Review, Image, and others. She is the Poetry Editor of Witness and creator and Editor of Bad Lineage. She has a BA from Purdue and an MFA from the University of Nevada. 

Matthew Wamser is a fiction writer and essayist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has been published in The Missouri Review and Salamander. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. His work has received additional support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and MacDowell.

Rose Zinnia is a poet, novelist, essayist, teaching artist, editor, and designer. Born in Akron, Ohio, she is the author of Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024), a chapbook of poetry & lyric essay. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Zinnia’s honors also include fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Kinsey Institute. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Poetry, CV2, Black Warrior Review, Poem-A-Day, The Journal, Gulf Coast, and West Branch, among others. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, works at the LGBTQ+ journal and press Foglifter, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.