Brittany Newell and Michael Shewmaker
Brittany Newell, who often writes and performs under the nom de plume Ratty St. John, will graduate from Stanford University in 2017. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the Norman Mailer Award for Fiction. In 2017, she was named one of Refinery29’s “29 Under-30 Powerhouses Poised to Change the World.” Her debut novel OOLA will be published by Henry Holt & Co in April 2017.
Michael Shewmaker is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University. His first collection of poems, Penumbra, is the recent winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize (Ohio UP, 2017). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, his poems appear or are forthcoming in Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Parnassus, Oxford American, New Criterion, Narrative, Hopkins Review, Columbia, and other literary journals and anthologies. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he earned an MFA from McNeese State University and a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Emily.
