Klarman Hall

Samantha Kathryn OBrien

Samantha Kathryn O’Brien is a fiction writer and educator based in Ithaca, NY. Her writing has been published in or received awards from Zoetrope, Indiana Review, The Washington Square Review, The Los Angeles Review, New American Fiction, The Southern Humanities Review, Rumpus, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Amherst College, The University of Edinburgh, and Cornell University, where she received her MFA in 2024. She teaches creative and critical writing to Cornell undergraduates and incarcerated adults through a Philip H. Freund fellowship, as well as through the Cornell Prison Education Program.

/samantha-kathryn-obrien
Klarman Hall

Derek Chan

Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He is an MFA graduate of Cornell University, where he was a university fellow, an editor of EPOCH journal, and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. Additionally, he holds a First-Class Honors in Literary Studies and Psychology from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where he teaches creative writing and academic composition. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Best of Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, the Forward Prize (Best Single Written Poem), and has been recognized for awards and nominations in Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, Best New Poets, and Palette Poetry. He has also received residency fellowships and support from venues such as Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

/derek-chan
Klarman Hall

Derek Chan

Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He is an MFA graduate of Cornell University, where he was a university fellow, an editor of EPOCH journal, and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. Additionally, he holds a First-Class Honors in Literary Studies and Psychology from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where he teaches creative writing and academic composition. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Best of Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, the Forward Prize (Best Single Written Poem), and has been recognized for awards and nominations in Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, Best New Poets, and Palette Poetry. He has also received residency fellowships and support from venues such as Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

/derek-chan-0
Klarman Hall

Jiachen Wang

Jiachen Wang was born in Sendai, Japan and raised in Shenyang and Shanghai, China. He graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in English (Creative Writing) and writes in two languages. His undergraduate thesis, a short story collection called Back Before Chinese New Year, won the Donald Everett Axinn ’51 Annual Prize. He is currently writing a novel.

/jiachen-wang
Klarman Hall

Natasha Ayaz

Natasha Ayaz is a Pakistani-American fiction writer and alum of Bard College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared in publications includingNarrative Magazine, where she was the winner of the 2023 Spring Story Contest, a finalist in the 2021 and 2022 Winter Story Contests, and a recipient of the Top Five Stories award for 2020-2021,Hobart,Blue Earth Review, where she was the winner of the 2020 Flash Fiction Contest, andBest Small Fictions2022. She reviews books forThe Commonin her free time.

/natasha-ayaz
Klarman Hall

Natasha Ayaz

Natasha Ayaz is a Pakistani-American fiction writer and alum of Bard College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop. Her work is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022 and has appeared in publications including Hobart, Narrative Magazine, where she was a finalist in the 2021 and 2022 Winter Story Contests and a recipient of the Top Five Stories award for 2020-2021, and Blue Earth Review, where she was the winner of the 2020 Flash Fiction Contest.

 

/natasha-ayaz-0
Klarman Hall

Hunter Phillips

Hunter is a PhD candidate working on the representation and conceptualization of nature, the environment, and non-human life in Old and Middle English literature. His dissertation focuses on the intersection of human subjectivity and non-human creatures and environments. His work studies the idea of the self in the Middle Ages from an ecosystemic point of view, examining how the regulation of the human soul and body, as well as the competing faculties of the soul such as reason and the will, mimics and even draws upon the same language, metaphors, and systems that govern how early English poets, philosophers, and theologians construct human relationships with the natural world.

/hunter-phillips
Klarman Hall

Asher Courtemanche

Asher is a third year PhD student in the department of Literatures in English. Their primary research is focused on homoeroticism, unrequited love, and pastoral poetry in the Renaissance, up to the 18th century. With a background in Classics and Latin, Asher takes great interest in classical reception during both the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, focusing on the reception and influence of authors such as Ovid, Vergil, and Catullus. In both creative and academic writing, they are guided by the question of what it means to burn—how homoerotic love is defined and developed, and if it can persist. As a secondary interest, Asher engages with 20th and 21st century American and British literature, specifically Modernism, queer poetics, and Indigenous literature. Their current projects examine the ontology of Land in 16th and 17th century pastoral literature, within the context of colonialism, labor, and property, and is directed by methodologies within Indigenous Studies.

/asher-courtemanche
Sophia Veltfort

Student Spotlight: Sophia Veltfort

Sophia Veltfort, MFA ’20, a doctoral candidate in English language and literature, studies the representations of speech and thought in 20th-century fiction.

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