Current Stegner Fellows

Poetry

Second Year:

Kai Carlson-Wee, a former professional rollerblader, holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Mario Chard’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Rattle, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He is the former poetry editor of Sycamore Review and a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University. His honors include the 2012 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as awards from the Academy of American Poets and the National Society of Arts and Letters. He lives in San Jose with his wife and two sons.

Chiyuma Elliott is a Stegner Fellow whose work has appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Collagist, MARGIE, the Notre Dame Review, and TORCH. A Cave Canem Fellow, she recently received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and two noisy dogs.

Dana Koster received her MFA from Cornell University, and is currently working on her second book of poems.  Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and More Than Soil More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, among others.  She currently lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of The Local World, which won the Wick Poetry Prize, as well as two volumes of poetry translations. Raised in Northern California, she received her M.F.A. from the University of Houston and her Ph.D. from Indiana University. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Council of Learned Societies. While on a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland, she discovered her passion for translating contemporary Polish poetry. Her poems, translations, and essays have been published in many literary journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Slate, A Public Space, Harvard Review, and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets.

First Year:

Kimberly Grey earned a bachelors degree in Literature from Richard Stockton College and an MFA in poetry from Adelphi University. Her work is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Boston Review, and Colorado Review. She is currently completing her first book of poems, The Opposite of Robot is Light and plans to start a second collection during her time as a Stegner Fellow.

Christopher Kempf is from Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He received his MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and his work has appeared in The Journal, RATTLE, Sycamore Review, New York Quarterly, and DIAGRAM, among other places.  He is currently at work on his second poetry manuscript, Historia calamitatum, about the recent economic collapse.

Hugh Martin is originally from northeastern Ohio and a graduate of Muskingum University.  He spent six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and eleven months in Iraq in 2004.  He is finishing his MFA at Arizona State. During his fellowship at Stanford he hopes to continue revising his current manuscript and start a new collection of poems.

Jacques Rancourt received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he also spent a year as the 2011-’12 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow. A founding editor of the literary journal Devil’s Lake, his poems have appeared in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Colorado Review. While at Stanford, he plans to complete his current manuscript entitled, Hand That Bears No Mercy.

Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley and New York University. A 2011 winner of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, jubilat, DIAGRAM, Boston Review and others. She studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People between 2002-2006 and is a recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. She is currently working on a poetic rewrite of the US Department of Defense’s dictionary.

Fiction

Second Year:

Juliana Xuan Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China but after age seven, did most of her growing up in Los Angeles. She graduated from University of Southern California and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Shannon Pufahl is currently pursuing a PhD in early American literature and philosophies of animality at the University of California at Davis. She is at work on a novel set in the American West, about three generations of gamblers undone by personal tragedy and national progress.  She lives in Oakland, CA.

Anthony Marra will be working on his novel, tentatively titled A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, set in modern Chechnya. He will receive his MFA from the University of Iowa in June 2011.

Helen Hooper, a former policy analyst at The Nature Conservancy, plans to use the fellowship to complete a collection of short stories. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

David Hoon Kim’s work is concerned with the notion of the visibility and invisibility of minorities. He holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Iowa.

First Year:

Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her story, “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African writing. She is currently completing a novel entitled, We Need New Names.

Nicole Cullen was raised in Salmon, Idaho. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in 2011. Currently, she holds the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches creative writing.  While at Stanford, she plans to continue working on a novel set in central Idaho.

Lydia Fitzpatrick received her MFA in 2010 from the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award for short fiction and a Colby Fellowship. Since graduating, she’s been awarded the 2010-2011 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2012 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and Mid-American Review. She lives in Wadmalaw, South Carolina.

Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He holds an MA in poetry from the University of California-Davis and an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia. As a Stegner Fellow he hopes to complete a collection of linked, multigenerational stories about a dairy farming family, called Hagiography. He also hopes to work on a memoir about growing up on a farm, called The Silo.

Monique Wentzel is a fifth generation Californian whose short stories focus on the people and landscapes of the state. She received her MFA in 2011 from Portland State University. During her fellowship at Stanford she plans to complete and strengthen a collection of short stories set in California.