2025-2027 Stegner Fellows
The Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the incoming 2025-2027 Stegner Fellow cohort in poetry and fiction.
Poetry
Bhion Achimba
Bhion Achimba grew up in rural southeastern Nigeria and came to the US as a Harvard University Scholar at Risk Fellow and a visiting poet in the English Department. A graduate of Brown University's MFA program, they were named the 2023 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow by the Poetry Foundation and have been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, Foreign Policy Magazine, et cetera. Bhion has been awarded fellowships and residencies by PEN International, The Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, Monson Arts, St. Botolph Foundation, and the University of Utah’s English Department, where they received the Vice-Presidential Doctoral Fellowship. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Prairie Moon Dalton
Prairie Moon Dalton is a Southern Appalachian poet born and raised in Western North Carolina. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, Cagibi, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University.
David Hutcheson
David Hutcheson is a poet from eastern Carolina. His poems can be found in A Dozen Nothing, Arrowsmith, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, No Tokens, and Ploughshares.
Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani
لادن خدام خراسانی Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani (she/they) is a poet, educator and public health practitioner. She is interested in how we will use poetry and language to take care of one another.
Dora Prieto
Born and raised between rural Nova Scotia and southern Mexico, Dora Prieto is a poet and translator based between Vancouver and Mexico City, on the move to the Bay Area for the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her debut collection Girl Tejido is forthcoming with House of Anansi in April 2027. She won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for emerging writers with her ten-page poem cycle "Loose Threads" and was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. She's currently co-translating an award-winning poetry collection titled JAWS by Mexican poet Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza. She is a member and co-founder of the El Mashup Collective, a community arts project focused on skills sharing and collaborative practice in poetry, analog film, sound art, and hybrid storytelling. Her poems can be found in Acentos Review, Catapult (RIP), Capilano Review, the Ex-Puritan, GUTS, and Maisonneuve.
Fiction
Adams Adeosun
Adams Adeosun is a writer from Nigeria, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a 2023 MacDowell fellow, and the 2024-25 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including A Long House, American Poets, Catapult, Isele, The Offing, Transition, and Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction from Cameroon and Nigeria. Their poetry chapbook, If the Golden Hour Won't Come for Us, is included in APBF's Kumi: New Generation African Poets box set.
Daniel Finkel
Daniel Finkel is a writer from Philadelphia. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with an M.A. in English and went on to co-produce Family, a feature film that premiered at SXSW 2024 and won the NextGen Award. He is currently working on his debut novel.
Kanak Kapur
Kanak Kapur is a writer originally from Mumbai. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, and more. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2027.
Daniel S.C. Sutter
Daniel S.C. Sutter holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University and an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. His fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, Carolina Quarterly, BOOTH, Fugue, and elsewhere and has won The Robert Watson Literary Prize for Fiction. His collection, Like Always Blooming, is forthcoming May of 2026 as the winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. He is from Tampa, FL.
Caroline Waring
Caroline Waring is from eastern Washington state. She received her MFA from NYU, where she was the Axinn Writer-in-Residence. Her fiction is published in The Yale Review and The Drift. She is working on a short story collection and a novel.