Participant Bios

Noh Anothai is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature, Track for International Writers. His translations range from classical Siamese poetry to contemporary Thai literature, including Thai national poet Sunthorn Phu, Poems from the Buddha’s Footprint (Singing Bone Press, 2016), the first complete translation of Phu’s work in almost thirty years.
Baba Badji is a Senegalese/American poet, novelist, scholar and translator, and is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature (International Writers) at Washington University. He researches Writing in West Africa and Black Cultures, poetic concepts of Négritude, The Francophone African Text in Translation and the Postcolonial Experience.
Joshua Brorby is a graduate student in the PhD program in English at Washington University in St. Louis. Stuck in Victoria’s novelistic nineteenth century, his research interests include book history, colonial studies and globalization, science studies, and philosophy of language/philology. In addition to writing about Charles Dickens, he is planning a dissertation that may include work on Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, the romanization of the Chinese language at Cambridge, and the fin-de-siècle Linguistic Survey of India.
Kelly Caldwell writes and works at Washington University in St. Louis. Her prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Small Po[r]tions, Entropy, PopMatters, MAKE Magazine, Slant, Pacific Standard Magazine, The Rumpus, and VICE. She is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Spectacle.
Ian Clark is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He completed his MPhil in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2014, and his research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish literature, along with posthumanist and ecocritical theory.
Aaron Coleman is the author of the poetry collection, Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) and his chapbook, St. Trigger, was selected by Adrian Matejka for the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. A Fulbright Scholar from Metro-Detroit, Aaron has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the American Literary Translators Association. His poems have appeared in journals including Boston Review, Callaloo, and New York Times Magazine. After completing his MFA in Poetry at Washington University St. Louis, Aaron is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University St. Louis, studying 20th-century poetry of the African Diaspora in the Americas.
Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. She is the only writer who has won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice, in 2001 for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (translated into English by Andrew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry ) and again in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da. She has developed cross-genre collaborative projects with artists and composers, and has translated work into both Spanish and English.
Carley Gomez is a PhD candidate in fiction and a Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri. She has an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and was a 2015 Luminarts/Union League of Chicago Writing Fellow. Her fiction is published in Passages North, Mid-American Review, and is forthcoming in Lake Effect. She was a 2016 Blue Mesa Review Fiction Contest finalist and she won a Margery McKinney Short Fiction Award in 2018. Her areas of inquiry include Object Oriented Ontology and Posthumanism, capitalism in dystopian literature, and border literature.
Sophie He is a writer from Southern California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Catapult, Lucky Peach, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in the nonfiction program at WashU, and received her BA in Communication Studies at UCLA. Before pursuing creative writing, she worked as a copywriter and content strategist for tech and entertainment brands.
Thomas W. Howard is a Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis studying nineteenth-century American literature and its engagement with pre-Freudian psychological theories. His M.A. thesis, “Jamesian Habit in Jack London’s The Iron Heel” examined how William James’s theory of habits appeared in London’s dystopian novel, particularly with character creation. His current research focuses more broadly on James’s corpus and emphasizes how his frequent apparent discipline shifts are not dead-ends, but rather zigzags—or border crossings—in a greater intellectual arc.
Deniz Gundogan İbrisim is a Fulbright scholar and a fifth-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature Program at Washington University. Her research interests include contemporary Anglo-African literatures, postcolonial theory, modern Turkish literature, trauma and memory studies, posthumanism and new materialism. She is currently co-editing a collection on feminist literary criticism in Turkish literature (with Sema Kaygusuz).
Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator of Latin American literature and professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she directs a Translation Studies doctoral program.
Olivia Lott is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Studies at WashU. Her dissertation project is focused on translational poetics and Latin American neo-avant-gardes. She is the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018) and has published translations of poetry in both Latin American and UnitedStatesean journals.
Aditi Machado is a poet and translator. Her books are Some Beheadings and a translation of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. She teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence.
Gabriella Martin is a literary translator from Spanish and Catalan, and a PhD Candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, with a graduate certificate in translation studies. Her research focuses on translational Iberian literatures from the Spanish Civil War to the present.
Bahia Munem received her PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work brings together the fields of Latin American and Middle East Studies through its examination of the gendered and racialized dynamics in the resettlement processes of Muslim war refugees in the Americas.
Halley Parry is a first year candidate in Fiction at Washington University in St Louis.
Samantha Pergadia is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation, Racism, Speciesism, and the Ends of Comparison, traces the narrative and rhetorical strategies through which numerous American authors of the post-civil rights era entangle the concept of race and species to imagine an interactive relationship between these categories. Samantha’s research and teaching areas include critical animal studies, interspecies feminism, and consent in literature. Her work is published with Feminist Studies and African American Review.
Jenny Price is a public writer, artist, and historian who asks questions about environment and public space. Author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America and “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.,” she is co-founder of the art collective LA Urban Rangers and a co-creator of the Our Malibu Beaches app. She has held visiting professorships in American Studies, arts, and environmental humanities at Princeton University, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School at Washington University-St. Louis. She is working on a new book, Stop Saving the Planet! A 21st-Century Environmentalist Manifesto.
Johaeng Rho is a PhD student in the department of English at Saint Louis University, studying early modern drama and focusing on Shakespeare. Her research centers on cultural studies and regards protagonists in early modern drama as products of history and playwrights eager to respond to changes in society. This belief naturally draws her attention to contemporary applications of Shakespeare, thus increasing her interest in performance studies and how productions use Shakespeare’s text as raw material and elaborate on it in accordance with changing social contexts.
Martin Riker is author of the novel Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return. His fiction and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, TLS, Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, and Conjunctions. He was previously the Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press and served as an editor for the Review of Contemporary Fictionand CONTEXT: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture. In 2010, he and his wife, Danielle Dutton, co-founded the feminist publishing house Dorothy, a Publishing Project, which offers internships to Washington University MFA students. His fields of interest include international and experimental fiction, literature in translation, literary criticism, and the philosophy of style.
Analeah Loschiavo Rosen is a MFA candidate in Fiction at Washington University in St Louis, where she is currently working on a collection of writing that explores irradiated landscapes and trans-national environmental justice movements. She is a Graduate Associate in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Grounding the Eco-Critical: Materializing Wastelands and Living on in the Middle East.
Red Samaniego is a writer living in incandescent time. They are the editorial intern with Dorothy, a publishing project, winner of the 2019 Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship, and founder of MFA App Review, a project supporting Trans, POC and Native writers with their applications to funded MFA programs.
Travis Scholl’s most recent poems and essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Saint Katherine Review, Sehnsucht, and Assay, and he is the author of a spiritual memoir, Walking the Labyrinth. He recently received the PhD from the creative writing program at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and is a graduate of Yale Divinity School. He writes, edits, and teaches at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.
Levi Sherman is an independent artist and scholar in Columbia, MO. He is the founder of the Artists’ Book Book Club and co-founder of experimental publishing project, Partial Press. He serves as Book Review Editor for Openings: Studies in Book Art, and was a Print Production Fellow for the Journal of Artists’ Books. Levi Received his MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Columbia College Chicago and holds a BFA in Visual Communication from University of Arizona.
Sylvia Sukop is 2018-19 Sr. Fellow in Creative Nonfiction at Washington University, where she completed her MFA in 2018. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, Creative Nonfiction, The Southeast Review, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and LitHub, in addition to several anthologies. She is working on her first book.
Laurel Taylor is a PhD student in Japanese and Comparative Literature at Washington University, St. Louis. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her primary interests are women’s relationships within and without literature, as well as translation as it relates to gender and language.
Irina Teveleva is a Moscow-born writer and poet. She is an MFA student in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jenny Wu is WashU MFA’s Senior Fiction Fellow. Her creative work can be found in The Collagist, Hobart, and wildness.
S. Yarberry is a MFA candidate in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Their poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, Indiana Review, The Offing, jubilat, Nat Brut, Queer Voices Anthology (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2019), FIVE:2:ONE‘s #thesideshow, and miscellaneous zines. Their other writings can be found in, or are forthcoming in, Bomb Magazine and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. S. is currently The Revue Editor of The Spectacle.

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