2019 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows Reading

Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. For Spring 2020, Aber will be the Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College. She is at work on a second book of poems and a novel.

Chekwube Danladi is the author of Semiotics, winner of the 2019 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships and support from Callaloo, Kimbilio, Hedgebrook, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Joint winner of the 2016 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, her chapbook, Take Me Back, was included in the New Generation African Poets 2017 boxset. From Lagos by way of West Baltimore, she currently lives on Chicago’s South Side. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.e.

Natasha Oladokun is a poet and essayist. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Jackson Center for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review Online, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online, The Adroit Journal, Image, The RS 500, and elsewhere. She is Associate Poetry Editor at story South, and is the inaugural First Wave Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Emily Shetler is the 2018-2019 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches fiction and is a visiting artist in comics. She also leads comic workshops as part of the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project.

Lucy Tan is the author of What We Were Promised, which was long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by The Washington Post, Refinery 29, and Amazon. Lucy received her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the 2016 August Derleth Prize and currently serves as the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals such as McSweeney’s, Asia Literary Review and Ploughshares.

Mary Terrier is a native of Austin, Texas. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the 2018-2019 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches writing.

Kate Wisel is originally from Boston. Her fiction has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street Prize, Best Small Fictions anthology 2019, and elsewhere. Her debut linked short story collection, Driving in Cars With Homeless Men, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press as winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Award. She served as the 2018-2019 Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and now lives in Chicago where she has been a long-time research assistant to music journalist Jim DeRogatis.