MFA Candidates

Aaron Apps

Isaac Butler in his previous life was a theatre director living in Brooklyn, NY. Now he's a writer. As a director, he focused primarily on new work in New York's indie theatre scene, eventually helming MilkMilkLemonade, which NYPress named the best Off-Off Broadway play of 2009. As a writer, he's written for Buzzine, the Theatre Development Fund, American Theatre Magazine, and several other publication. He edits the culture and politics blog Parabasis and co-founded and co-edits the website StageGrade. Isaac received Honorable Mention in Nonfiction for the 2011 AWP Intro Awards for his essay, "Gay Like Me."

Elena Carter

(Mary) Feng Sun Chen is an excellent catsitter. Her book of poetry, BUTCHER'S TREE, has been published by Black Ocean. In May 2011, Radioactive Moat published her chapbook, Ugly Fish; this year another chapbook, blud, was published by Spork.

Jesus De La Torre is a fiction writer from Dallas, Texas. He holds a BA in English with a specialty in creative writing from Southern Methodist University.

Kathryn Duffy is a Minnesota native who earned her B.A. in English from the University of Iowa in 2010. At Iowa, she served as the Poetry Editor and the Editor-in-Chief of earthwords, Iowa's original undergraduate literary magazine. As part of earthwords, she implemented a creative writing program for elementary school students in Iowa City and also celebrated earthwords' thirtieth publication. During her undergraduate career, Kathryn co-worked with a musical composition major setting one of her poems to a musical score for a vocalist and piano. Her poems appear in Endless Horizons, The Daily Palette, and The Des Moines Art Center's 2010 Annual Report.

Jonathan Escoffery is a Fiction candidate in the University of Minnesota’s MFA Program. He holds a B.A. in English from Florida International University where he was awarded three Literary Awards for his creative works. His writing has appeared in Sliver of Stone Magazine, Foundling Review, the Lip Service Stories quarterly series, and elsewhere. Additionally, his songwriting can be found in obscure places, including the indie film, Totally Baked. Jonathan hails from Miami, Florida.

Kristin Fitzsimmons is an elegant vulture. She flies between nests, was born in Missouri and came to Minneapolis via Chicago, where she taught English as a Second Language. She was a naturalist at Glen Helen Nature Preserve in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where a lifelong dream of working with turkey vultures came to fruition.

J. Fossenbell grew up in Colorado, where she earned her B.A. in English at Colorado State University in 2004. She taught high school English in central Denver for a few years and EFL abroad in Ukraine and Vietnam for a few years. She's no longer sure what all these words mean or why. Her poetry, co-translations and articles have appeared in ILK journal, Everyday Other Things, Cerise Press, Wazee Independent Journal and The Word Hanoi magazine. She co-edited the anthology Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi (The Gioi Publishers, 2011) and co-translated The Human Field, a collection of poetry by Tran Quang Quy (Vietnam Writers Association Press, 2009). She received the Gesell Award for Poetry in 2011 and the Michael Dennis Brown Fellowship in 2012. She is co-editor in chief of MFA-run dislocate magazine this year.

Sally Franson is a 2012 GRPP Fellow and the winner of the 2011 Gesell Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Witness, elimae, and Bartleby Snopes, among others. In addition to working on her MFA thesis, she is also a contributing writer to The Fiddleback, The L Magazine, and Paper Darts. Follow her on Twitter (@sallyjf) or visit her website, sallyfranson.com.

Christine Friedlander is an MFA Candidate in Poetry and Graduate Instructor of English at the University of Minnesota. She graduated from Bucknell University in 2009 with a degree in English-Creative Writing, and earned her graduate certificate in publishing at the University of Denver’s Publishing Institute that same year. Some of her favorite things include competitive swimming, learning how to play the harmonica (badly), and sexual assault survivor advocacy. She is also a nerd, serving as Web Editor for dislocate and Site Administrator for THE BUCKNELL AFTERWORD. A proud native of New Jersey, she resides in the colder but equally-lovely city of Minneapolis.

Malinda Gosvig is quirky, perky, and eats Tofurky. She likes fog bicycling, shadows cast by lace, and the white rinds of Brie.

Isabel Harding is a 2009 graduate of Agnes Scott College. She enjoys birdwatching in rural Alabama just as much as she enjoys roaming the streets of central Paris, where she spent a year teaching English and living in a glorified closet of a studio apartment. Her story "Zombie Mermaid" appears in the anthology Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light, published by Tightrope Books.

Rose Hansen is from Sitka, Alaska and is a graduate of Oregon State University. Prior to pursuing an MFA at Minnesota, she has worked as a recreation-based forester, a financial firm assistant, a whale naturalist, a commercial pilot, and on the slime-line at a salmon cannery. She is grateful to be in Minneapolis and ready to devote more serious attention to her fiction.

Kathleen Johnston

C. Joseph Jordan is a part-time cosmonaut from Oregon. His most recent story,"The Quiet", was published in One Story magazine last fall. His blog can be found at cjosephjordan.tumblr.com. Very soon he shall reach escape velocity.

Florencia Lauria left Argentina when she was twelve years old with two concerned parents, one sarcastic little sister, fifteen overweight suitcases and two confused siamese cats. She grew up in a suburb of Albany, NY where she learned about spirit fingers, school buses and library cards. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Marist College in 2010. Florencia is an unlikely nomad with sedentary aspirations. In a quest for "home" she has inhabited many places including, Delmar, Seville, Poughkeepsie and Buenos Aires. She is looking forward to trying her luck in Minneapolis, where she will be pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing

Katherine Lee is a fiction writer who loves the short form. She has volunteered with the National Park Service in the historic restoration of the gardens of Alcatraz Island, and started a handmade, printed textile business in San Francisco that was featured in Better Home and Gardens' DIY Magazine. Katherine graduated with highest honors in English from Williams College, where she studied with Jim Shepard and Andrea Barrett. Her fiction has most recently appeared in ESOPUS.

Carrie Lorig is asking that blood have a sound. She is mostly from here and over there. She is mostly by bike or by pain cattle. She holds a BA in English and History from the University of Wisconsin, and her poetry gets hives in several venues on the internet.

Julia Marley is a poetry MFA candidate from Massachusetts. She graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in English and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She never misses a dead animal on the sidewalk. For several years she and Simone Weil have carried on an extensive relationship from both sides of the grave.

Bridget Mendel

Zoë Miller grew up in Los Angeles. She graduated from The New School in New York City as a Riggio Honors Fellow. Her short stories and poems have appeared in 12th Street, pax americana, and Front Porch.

Elizabeth O’Brien writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and her work has appeared in decomP, PANK, Swink, Versal, Juked, A capella Zoo, The Emerson Review, Glide Magazine, Euphony, Flashquake, and other places.

Scott F. Parker is a nonfiction writer and the Editorial Assistant at Rain Taxi Review of Books. His writing has appeared in Oregon Quarterly, Oregon Humanities, and other publications not based in Oregon. He is grateful that his favorite writer wrote about his favorite athlete and recommends that you click here.

Carl Peaslee is a Minnesota enthusiast. He grew up in Minnetonka but headed southwest for college. There he attended Claremont McKenna College and graduated with a degree in Literature (which he is convinced is just a pretentious way of saying English). After school, he switched coasts and went to New York where he participated in an urban teaching program.

Kate Petersen, a Phoenix native and graduate of Arizona State University, has been a writer on a range of pharmaceutical, medical and health policy issues. Her fiction and non-fiction have recently appeared in New England Review, The Collagist, The Rumpus, Keyhole, The Iowa Review, Brevity and the Paris Review Daily.

Adriane Quinlan has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and various other outlets as a journalist in Washington D.C., New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing. She is happy to now have the time to focus on her fiction writing.

Nasir Sakandar was born and raised in San Diego, California. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, La Fovea, Midway Journal, L'Allure Des Mots, and other places. His interests include: lyric poetry, children's literature, literary fiction, the graphic novel, the fairytale, food writing, ekphrasis, the sublime, and fine art.

Victoria Scher was born in El Paso, Texas. Twenty-two years later she had achieved a degree in Creative Writing and surprised her family by moving to Mexico to teach English. A Fulbright grant later took her to Chihuahua where she spent a year with the Tarahumara, an indigenous group from the region. That year Victoria collected Tarahumara migration stories and wrote creative non-fiction. Her life became more complicated when her Tarahumara friends insisted she learn to sew, make tortillas by hand, and identify herbs in a forest. With hundreds of stories and these new skills in tow, Victoria next headed to Mexico City to spend one last fantastic year teaching English to third graders before moving to Minneapolis to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.

Hunter Sharpless is an essayist from Texas.

Lalinne Suon graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2000 with a BA in Classics and a minor in Political Science. She spent her junior year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and traveled extensively in Western Europe, Britain, and Ireland. She developed a passion for international travel, which led her to rediscover her birth land, Cambodia. Over the last 12 years, she has worked in non-profit or government agencies, aiding poor families. Currently, she is working in West St. Paul for Dakota County in the Office of Employment and Economic Assistance while attending the U of MN for her MFA. She is in the nonfiction genre and writes a lot about her family’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge Regime, their lives in refugee camps, and their assimilation into American society, living in poverty for many years, to achieving the “American Dream.” She enjoys traveling, reading, and writing. She and her husband, Ken, have two children, Sofia, age 3 years and Lincoln, age 5 months. They also have two cats, one really skinny, called Meow-Meow, and the other, a stray they took in ( that used to be skinny), that Sofia called Baby Meow-Meow. Baby Meow-Meow has doubled in size, so they call her Big Meow-Meow (or sometimes simply the fat cat).

Nicky Tiso received his BA from The Evergreen State College in 2010. His work has been published online in Poets for Living Waters (ed. Amy King), Tarpaulin Sky, HTML Giant, Thieves Jargon, and Wheelhouse Magazine, among other e-places. An irl chapbook is forthcoming from Manifest Press. He's a first year poet in the MFA program, and dislikes capitalism.

Kerry Voigt

Elisabeth Workman is the author of the chapbooks a city_a cloud, Opolis, Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf (Dusie 2006, 2007, 2011), and Megaprairieland (Grey Book Press, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2009 Jerome/SASE Emerging Writer Fellowship, a 2010 McKnight Artist’s Fellowship in Poetry, and honors/grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Born and raised in the pharmaceutical suburbs of Philadelphia, she’s since lived in Boston, the Netherlands, on/around the Standing Rock Reservation of the Dakotas, and most recently, in the Middle East. A member of the flarf collective, she lives in Powderhorn with the designer Erik Brandt and their daughter Beatrix.

Jason Zencka is pursuing an MFA in fiction. He has lived in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. and has paid severe library fines in each place.