Fatima Jamal Alharthi is pursuing her Ph.D. in Fiction. She received her master's degree from the University of Sydney in 2012, and earned her B.A. in English from Taibah University, Saudi Arabia in 2008. Her fiction can be found on Smokelong Quarterly, Every Day Fiction, Flyleaf Journal, Garfield Lake Review and Santa Ana River Review, among others.

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé is from Tede, Nigeria. He is the author of My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body, winner of the 2024 Moon City Poetry Award, forthcoming in Moon City Press at Missouri State University. His poetry has been shortlisted for the 2025 Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize for BIPOC Writers, the 2024 Acre Books Poetry series, the 2025 Glass Chapbook Series, the Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize, the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, and the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His work has been nominated for Best New Poets, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best of the Net. His recent work is published in Magma, Transition Magazine, Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and The Texas Review. He is a doctoral student at Florida State University, where he also received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing. He presently reads for the Southeast Review, and you can find him on Instagram @Ifeoluwaayandele.

Carrel Barber is a second-year M.F.A. student studying Fiction. His work has appeared in Big Bend Literary Magazine, Poetica, and The Good Life Review. 

Oliver Brooks is a second-year M.F.A. student in Poetry. A lifelong Floridian, he holds a B.A. in English-Creative Writing from Florida State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in Honey Literary, Cream City Review, 3Elements Literary Review, Full House Literary, Boudin (The McNeese Review), and elsewhere, and his nonfiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. He serves as Poetry Editor for the Southeast Review.

Helen Brower is pursuing her Ph.D. in Fiction. She graduated with a Distinction for her M.A. in Creative Writing from Queen’s University of Belfast. She has been published in the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Blackbird Literary Anthology. Her pilot script was shortlisted for BBC's 2024 Writer's Open Call, the Barnstorm Fest 2023 and a semi-finalist in TSL Free Screenplay Contest in 2023, as well as a finalist for 2025 BBC Belfast Voices. She grew up in Central California on a dairy farm. She wants to create films in genres where there isn’t a lot of female representation at the writing stage. Her stories aim to twist stereotypes of who gets to be the hero. She tries to emulate this in all her writing.

Emily Clemente is a third-year M.F.A. candidate in fiction. She graduated with Highest Distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in English & Comparative Literature and Honors in Creative Writing, earning the 2022 Max Steele Award in Fiction for her senior thesis. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her writing has been featured in december, Jellyfish Review, Every Day Fiction, and Deep South Magazine, among others. You can find more of her work at emilyclemente.com.

Kate DeLay is a poet from Tennessee. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, her work can be found or forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, Frontier Poetry, Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. Kate is the winner of the 2023 William Matthews Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss, and a 2024 Djanikian Scholars Finalist. A former Editor of Black Warrior Review, Kate is a recent graduate of University of Alabama’s MFA in Creative Writing and is a PhD Poetry student at FSU. Find her at katedelaypoet.com.

Sarah Destin is a Ph.D. candidate in Fiction. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Washington and her B.A. from Hamilton College. Her work has recently appeared in Bennington Review, Mid-American Review, The Pinch, and other journals. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gemma English is a first-year M.F.A. student in Fiction. She graduated from Columbia University in 2019 with a degree in Creative Writing. In her work, she is interested in exploring the intersect between genre and literary fiction.

Adachioma Ezeano is a writer and screenwriter who co-wrote the TV series, Agoodjie, for Canal+ and StudioCanal. She is a 2021 O. Henry Prize recipient and a 2023 Best of the Net winner. Her short story, published in Granta, was Granta’s top fiction piece of 2022. Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, The Best Short Stories, The Mcsweeney’s Anthology of Contemporary Literature, and Guernica, amongst others. Currently a reader for the O. Henry Stories, and a third-year Ph.D. candidate, her short stories have been translated into Italian and Bengali.

Camille Louise Goering is a French-American multi-genre writer and former public school teacher pursuing an M.F.A. in Non-Fiction writing. Her work has appeared in such publications as Big Easy Magazine, Sixfold, Decaf Magazine, Strange Horizons, and more.  She holds a bachelor's degree in International Relations from Pomona College and a Master of Science in Education from Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she worked as an AP Language and Composition teacher in the 9th Ward of New Orleans and as a community organizer in her hometown of Manhattan. She enjoys music, flow arts, nature, painting, and learning new things. 

Nicholas Goodly earned their M.F.A. from Columbia University. Their chapbook Black Swim won the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. They were runner-up for the 2019 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2020 Jake Adam York Prize. Goodly is writing editor of WUSSY. They live in Atlanta.

Ian Hall is pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry. He was born and reared in Eastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Maisha Hossain is from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing-Fiction. Maisha completed her M.A. in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2018. Her writing has appeared or forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, QUB’s Blackbird Anthology of 2018, Panjeree Publications, Poet’s Choice, The Offending Adam, and NPR’s Freshly Picked Prose. Her interest lies in postcolonial literature, South Asian studies, and women’s writing. As a part of her dissertation, she is working on a collection of short stories on Bangladeshi women, for which she was awarded the Adam M. Johnson Fellowship Award 2023 by FSU’s English department.

Ryan Hunke is pursuing his Ph.D. in Fiction. His background includes a decade as an Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Army, which influences his science fiction writing as an outlet to contextualize his experiences. Ryan explores themes at the intersection of technology, society, and human experience. He has multiple works published in Analog magazine. An associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), Ryan is passionate about supporting writing communities.

Alex Jaros received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago in 2015, where he was a Follett Fellowship recipient. He earned his B.A. in English from the University of Missouri in 2011. His work can be found in Narrative Magazine, Glimmer Train, Bird’s Thumb, Ghost Proposal, LDOC, Goreyesque, and Epic. He hails from Kansas City, Missouri, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing.

Jade Jemison is a Creative Writing (Nonfiction) Ph.D. student. She’s a Mcknight Doctoral Fellow and has won the KeyWest Literary Seminar - Teachers and Librarians scholarship, the Hippocampus Nonfiction Conference - Writers of Color scholarship, and more. Jade received her M.F.A. from the University of South Florida. She is originally from Missouri but has lived in Florida for 10 years. Her work examines the impact of representations of Black literary familial relationships on societal norms, expectations, and child-rearing. Her writing covers themes of motherhood and identity and has appeared in Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Mineral Literary Magazine, and Prenumbra.

Blake Johnson is a first-year M.F.A. student studying fiction. His work has appeared in Story Magazine, Moon City Review, and others.

Caroline Laganas earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts and a B.A. in Journalism from Pepperdine University. She was a finalist for the Mississippi Review Prize and an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in Five Points, Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry East, Mantis, and others. She is currently writing and illustrating her first book while pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry.

Max Lasky is a poet from New Jersey, pursuing a PhD in creative writing. His poems have been published by Frontier Poetry and are forthcoming from Painted Bride Quarterly. He is the co-founder of the literary magazine Leavings (leavingslitmag.com). He earned a B.A. from Ramapo College and an MFA from the University of Maryland.

Hikari (Soup) Leilani Miya (she/they) is a third-year Japanese Filipina Ph.D. student concentrating on animals and nonhumans in ecology and poetry. She graduated from Cornell University and University of San Francisco. She has certifications in herpetology from Amphibian Foundation, where she currently is on the board of communications, and is co-President of FSU's Association of Herpetologists and Entomologists. They are an animal care specialist working/volunteering at North Florida Wildlife Center and Tallahassee Museum and hardcore Pokémon Go trainer and retired musician and healthcare worker. Her first book of poems, Do Not Feed the Animal (2024) sold out at Kansas City AWP.

Melvin Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Fiction and Legacy Fellow at Florida State University. He earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, where his work received the David Relin Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared in AGNI. He is from Long Island, New York.  

Brandi Nicole Martin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, Redivider, and At Length, among others. She is pursuing her PhD in poetry at Florida State University.

Larissa Martins is a Brazilian-American queer writer based between Rio de Janeiro and Tallahassee. She is pursuing her M.F.A. in Poetry at FSU, where she previously earned her B.A. in English. Her poetry explores themes of cultural heritage, feminism, and religious deconstruction. Her work has been published in Poetry is Currency, Press Pause Press, and elsewhere. 

Qiang Meng is a first-year Ph.D. student from Changchun, China, and writes poetry in English as a second language. His poems have been translated into Mandarin, Portuguese and appeared in Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, Electric Literature, among others. 

Olga Mexina is a third-year Ph.D. student and Interviews Editor for Southeast Review. Her work has been chosen for the Editors' Final Round Picks for the Plentitudes Poetry Prize. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her daughter Elsa and son Huckleberry.

John Milas is a writer from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and current Ph.D. student. His debut novel, The Militia House (Henry Holt, 2023), was nominated for a 2023 Shirley Jackson Award, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and recognized by Indies Introduce, Indie Next, and The Audacious Book Club curated by Roxane Gay. He received a Walter E. Dakin fellowship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2024 and a Legacy Fellowship to attend Florida State University in 2025. Learn more at johnmilas.com.

Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag is the author of The Alphabet of Aliens (prose poems; Mawenzi House, 2025), Hands Like Trees (short fiction; Ronsdale Press, 2023), and three previous collections of poetry, including Uncharted (Mansfield Press, 2021). His work has been published in numerous journals worldwide, including Arc, The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, Diagram, Grain, Prism International, and The Windsor Review. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of British Columbia and is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently, he's a doctoral student at Florida State University. He is also the managing editor at Artisanal Writer, an online journal that explores books, lit craft, and theory.

Hera Naguib is a Ph.D. candidate in Poetry and holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Poets.org, The Common, World Literature Today, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, among others. Raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Toronto, Canada, Hera hails from Lahore, Pakistan. Find her online at heranaguib.com.

Hayden Nielander is a poet from the Florida Heartland pursuing an M.F.A. in Poetry. He earned a B.A. in English from Virginia Commonwealth University.

T. Garrison O'Donnell is a first-year M.F.A. student in poetry and recipient of the David Kirby Fellowship. His poems have been published in Red Ogre Review and are forthcoming in Allium. He's from Northern Virginia and received his B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2025.

Vince is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow (Creative Writing). He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Kansas, where he worked in the History of Black Writing (HBW) research center. He is winner of the 2024 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize (Michigan Quarterly Review) and the Margaret Walker Memorial Prize in Fiction (College Language Association). He is a Hurston/Wright Fellow, a Kimbilio Fellow, Longleaf Scholar, and co-founder of SoulClap: A Black Joy Journal. His short story “Mine Own” will appear in Virgin Islands Noir (Akashic, 2025).

Forrest Rapier is a first-year Ph.D. student in poetry. He has published poems in dozens of literary journals across the country, including Asheville Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and Greensboro Review. He has received scholarships and writing residences from Brevard College, Key West Literary Seminar, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the University of Virginia. His debut poetry collection, As the Den Burns, was published by Texas Review Press in 2022.

Renee Roberts is an M.F.A. student studying nonfiction. She received her B.A. at Hollins University in 2021. Her work transfigures fantasy, predominantly from folklore and fairy tales, into personal essays and memoir material. Her work has been published in Catfish Creek and The Closed Eye Open, among other publications.

Sarah E. Robinson is a Ph.D. student in Fiction. She has a B.A. in English and Studio Arts from the University of New Mexico and received her M.F.A. from the University of Houston. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Leavings and The Cincinnati Review.

River Selby graduated from the creative writing program at Syracuse University with an M.F.A. in Fiction. As an undergraduate, they studied English, film theory, and Hindi before graduating summa cum laude, with honors. They were the first in their family to graduate from college. Before pursuing their bachelor's degree, River worked as a wildland firefighter throughout the western United States for seven years. Currently, they are pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing-Nonfiction. River's work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The New Ohio Review, Vox, Boulevard, and Bitch (rip). Their narrative nonfiction book, Hotshot, is forthcoming in 2025, via Grove Press. 

Abigale Tabor is pursuing her M.F.A. in Poetry. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Arkansas International, Pornstar Martini Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Creation Magazine, and more. When not writing, she enjoys reading Matthias Svalina and Arthur Sze, or playing with her rescue dog, Sherlock. 

Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira is a first-year PhD candidate in the Fiction track, a writer who deals in the fantastical, the scary, and the weird. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she is a Brazilian writer exploring themes of change, transformation, the reasons we leave and the reasons we stay. She earned her M.F.A. in Fiction from University of Central Florida. Her work has been featured in Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan, and The Deadlands. You can find her at fernandacoutinhoteixeira.com and on Instagram, @fercoutinhotex.

Gabrielle Tribou is a first-year M.F.A. student in fiction. Her work has appeared in WomenArts Quarterly Journal, The Lindenwood Review, High Shelf Press, and other journals. She is the recipient of a John Mackay Shaw Undergraduate Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Literati Award in Undergraduate Fiction, and a Spotlight Award in Undergraduate Fiction, chosen by Pam Houston. 

Heather Truett holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Memphis, where she served as managing editor for The Pinch. Her first novel, Kiss and Repeat, was released by Macmillan in 2021. She has work published or forthcoming in Sweet Lit, Hunger Mountain, the Inflectionist, Grain, Utopia Science Fiction, Spoon Knife, and Salt Hill Review. Her poem in Whale Road Review was nominated for a Pushcart in 2023.

Ikechukwu Roy Udeh-Ubaka is a fiction Ph.D. candidate, with an M.F.A. from the University of Florida. His work has won both the Gerald Kraak Award and the Masters Review Award, and has appeared or been anthologized in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Wasafiri, Lolwe, Bakwa Magazine, The Gerald Kraak Anthology, 14: The Inward Gaze, and the Masters Review Anthology XI, amongst others. He is also a finalist for the Sisters in Crime Pride Award, the Globe Soup Short Story Award, and the Awele Creative Trust Award, and was profiled in Electric Literature as "One of the Most Promising New Voices of Nigerian Fiction." He has studied creative writing under the tutelage of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Leavitt, Dave Eggers, Tash Aw, Camille Bordas and Uwem Akpan. His novel-in-progress and short story collection are currently being preempted by a few publishers.

Sophia Alise Upshaw is an M.F.A. student studying Poetry. She graduated from Florida State University in 2023 with a B.S. in Media Communication Studies-Creative Writing, earning recognition as an Outstanding Student Scholar. Her poetry has been published in oddball magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Mistake House, and elsewhere. 

Isaac Vaught is currently a third-year student in the M.F.A. program. He is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana, and earned his B.A. in psychology from Stanford University. His thesis is a novel about a dying father who goes on a road trip with his estranged son.

Chris Watkins is a poet and Ph.D. candidate writing in and about the swamplands, rivers, and other watersheds of North Florida, as well as all things drag. Their poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Foundry, and Bosque among other journals.

Hugh Wilhelm is a Ph.D. student in Poetry. He earned a B.A. in English from Cornell University and an M.F.A. in poetry from Syracuse University. He recently had a poem published in The Progressive.

Miranda Wonder is a second-year Ph.D. student in Fiction. She completed her M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. 

Fahim Zaman is pursuing a M.F.A. in Fiction. His writing uncovers the stories of his home community – Bangladeshi Muslims from Bronx, New York. He earned his B.A. in English from Amherst College.

Matthew Zhao is a poet from Michigan, now a Ph.D. student at Florida State University. He was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Mississippi Review Prize, and a semifinalist in the Word Works Washington Prize, Longleaf Press Book Prize, Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. His poems appear or are forthcoming in swamp pink, Four Way Review, Frontier Poetry, Summerset Review, Indianapolis Review, Shade Journal, BoomerLitMag, PRISM International, Good River Review, Pinch, and elsewhere.

Li Zhuang is a Chinese international student pursuing her Ph.D. in Fiction. In 2019, Li graduated with an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her works have been featured and are forthcoming in The Common, Denver Quarterly, Madison Review, Worcester Review, the Collapsar etc. Li is working on a novel about gender-nonconforming performers competing in a C-pop idol-making reality show.