Stegner Fellows 2019-2021

The Creative Writing Program is pleased to welcome the incoming 2019-2021 Stegner Fellows.

POETRY

Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions). A Cave Canem fellow, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, The Nation, and Tin House. He was a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and holds an MFA from The New School.

Claire Meuschke grew up in the San Francisco Peninsula on what once was Ohlone land. Her debut poetry collection Upend is forthcoming from Noemi Press. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet from Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Hieu is also a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, and The New York Times. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019). His poems have received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he earned his MFA. Jim’s recent poems have appeared or will soon appear in journals such as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Washington Square Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he most recently has lived in Madison, Wisconsin.

FICTION

Brendan Bowles was born in London, Ontario. He holds an MA from the University of Toronto and an MFA from UMass Amherst. His work has been published and produced for stage and radio and has been generously supported by fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and The Lighthouse Works. For more information see brendanbowles.com.

Lydia Conklin has received a Creative Writing Fulbright Scholarship to Poland, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Writing Fellowship from Emory University, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and others. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, Popula Magazine, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

Matthew Denton-Edmundson earned a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He then managed a farm in south western Virginia. His work has appeared in Raritan and The Hedgehog Review.

Kate Folk was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, and has lived in San Francisco since 2008. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly, Zyzzyva, One Story, Prairie Schooner, and Granta, among others. She's received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center, and is a 2016-19 Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco, and is a fiction editor at Joyland Magazine and the quarterly journal Your Impossible Voice. Her website is www.katefolk.com.

F.T. Kola was born in South Africa and grew up in Australia. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2015 and received a Miles Morland foundation grant in 2017. Her work has been published by One Story, The Guardian and Granta. She is currently at work on her first novel.