Hema Surendranathan

Hema studies the environment and the psyche in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, with a focus on nonhuman animals. Her writing can be found in Spillway and the Chicago Quarterly Review.

Christopher Berardino

Christopher Seiji Berardino is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Cornell University. His dissertation, Multitude Modernism: “Democratic Epiphany” in Interwar American Literature theorizes the existence of a modern multiethnic tradition in American literature of the 1930s and 40s. Exploring the works of Richard Wright, H.T. Tsiang, Muriel Rukeyser, and John Steinbeck, Berardino’s study analyzes instants wherein an individual is depicted as “melting” and “melding” with their surrounding social environment. The dissertation categorizes these surrealistic moments as “democratic epiphanies.” This technique not only articulates a collectivist form of modernism, but creates a vibrant, inclusive, and radical literary movement hereto unrecognized. His chapter on John Steinbeck is forthcoming in the Steinbeck Review.
In addition to his scholarship, Christopher Seiji Berardino is also a creative writer of Japanese-American descent from Orange County, CA. He received an MFA in Fiction from Cornell University in 2018. He has completed his first novel, Infamy, about the oft-forgotten Japanese Internment Camps. His collection of short fiction, Internment Stories: An Inheritance in Pieces was named as a finalist for the Hudson Prize in Fiction. His work has previously appeared in Flash Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Every Writer’s Resource, Pilgrimage, Newfound, The Pinch, and others.

Lindsey Warren

Leo Ríos

Weena Pun

Weena Pun is a writer from Nepal. Her reportage and non-fiction pieces can be found in The Kathmandu Post, Himal Southasian, The Record, [wherever] magazine, and House of Snow, an anthology of the greatest writing about Nepal. Her translation works have appeared in Words without Borders and La.Lit magazine. Find the link to the pieces on her website. She is currently working on finishing her first novel.
 

Michael Prior

Michael Prior's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and anthologies across North America and the UK, including Poetry, Narrative, Ambit, The Margins, Verse Daily, Global Poetry Anthology 2015, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series. He is a past winner of Magma Poetry's Editors' Prize, The Walrus's Poetry Prize, and Matrix Magazine's Lit POP Award for Poetry. His first full-length book of poems, Model Disciple, was published by Véhicule Press in 2016. …

Carl Moon

Carl is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry. His ideal state is wonder, and he is easily shook. 

Emily Rosello Mercurio

Emily Rosello Mercurio is a poet born and raised in New England. Her work deals primarily in exploring the intersections of the area’s local ecology and questions of femininity and value. Her thesis, Slime Child, is a collection of poems confronting the question of what it means to be beautiful. Besides Cornell, Emily has served as the Literary Editor for Rushlight and an instructor for Education Unlimited at Yale University. Her work has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol,…

Cary Marcous

Cary Marcous was born in Gainesville, Florida. Her poetry has been exhibited alongside silk prints, mixed digital media, and sculptures at the Harn Museum of Art, where she was Poet-in- Residence for 2014-15. Her work can be found in the museum’s inaugural poetry publication, Ink Garden.

Shane Kowalski

Shane Kowalski was born outside of Philadelphia, PA. His work appears or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Electric Literature, The Offing, Hobart, Funhouse, and elsewhere. He's the author of Dog Understander (Frontier Slumber Press). 

Jasmine Jay

Jasmine’s writing is a questioning of aesthetics. What does it mean to write ugliness? And, if one writes ugliness, linguistically or semantically, is it another way of writing beauty? With these questions as her methodological framework, Jasmine’s writing explores familial roots, intergenerational trauma, mental health, and African American consciousness in a poetic voice that is often as playful and irreverent as it is cutting and somber. The working title of her manuscript for her M.F.A.…

Shakarean Hutchinson

Annie Goold

Peter Gilbert

Peter studies the politics, policies, and theories underwriting social and economic inequality. He is particularly interested in neoliberal forms of governance and subjectivity, as well as how these dynamics are represented in late 20th and 21st century film, literature, and journalism. He is currently drafting his first novel: Set in the near future, Foragers concerns a young, extremist couple inflicting acts of domestic terrorism along the west coast, fleeing pursuit of a detective bent on holding them accountable to the justice of a fraying state.

Mario Giannone

Mario Giannone is a fiction writer from South Jersey. He holds a BA in English from Rutgers University-Camden and an MFA from Cornell University, where he currently teaches as a lecturer. His work has previously appeared in Blue Mesa Review. He is currently at work on a novel.

Cristina Correa

Cristina Correa is originally from Chicago, where she earned degrees in creative writing (BA) and Latin American and Latino studies (MA). She served at-risk youth and their families and supported Latinx art and research as an administrator, grant writer, and teaching artist for more than a decade. She was recently published by Diálogo, The Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly, and awarded recognition by CantoMundo, Hedgebrook, and the Whiting Foundation. Her poem “Reflection from a Bridge” was…

Rocio Anica

Rocio Anica is a native of Southern California. Her thesis is an intertextual road-trip novel about a misfit Chicanx and the Spanish Missions of the West Coast. She has been published in Driftwood Press, Acentos Review, and Woven Tale Press, with fiction forthcoming in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas and Chiricú Journal. Her alter ego’s satirical column, The Bias Cut, can be found at Ohio Edit. Awards include JuxtaProse Magazine’s 2016 Short Fiction Contest. Find her at rocioanica.…

Ruoji Tang

Dissertation: Romanticism and the Persistence of Nature argues for the environmentalist legacy of a "rhetoric of nature" drawn from British Romanticism that challenges the globalizing tendencies of contemporary ecological thought.

Nancy Quintanilla

Kaylin O‘Dell

Kaylin O'Dell is a postdoctoral lecturer in English at Cornell University. She primarily works on early medieval literature, with a focus on reading, performance, and affect in Old English poetry and prose. Her dissertation, The Mind On Stage: Crafting the Self in Anglo-Saxon England, examines how early medieval readers brought the concept of public performance into the private sphere as they read. An excerpt from this project entitled "Dramatizing Devotion in the Old English Vercelli Homily IV…

Molly Katz

Michaela Brangan

My research and teaching resides at the intersection of literature, law, technology, and politics. I focus on contemporary Anglophone fiction, political economy, intersectionality, and the antinomian links between legal and literary realisms and formalisms. My dissertation, Future Promises: Reconfiguring Contract Realism in Experimental & Speculative Fictions, questions the long-accepted link between the common law contract and formal realism by examining contractual practices in…

David Aichenbaum

Nicolette Bragg

Nici Bragg works in 20th and 21st Century World Literature, Critical Theory, and Feminism and Gender Studies, with an emphasis on the theory and philosophy of maternity. She has published in Cultural Studies Review and The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Her dissertation, “Creature of Theory: Maternity and the Touch of Language,” explores the maternity of influential critical theory, focusing on later works of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault.

Lena Krian

Dissertation: The Prison of My Skin: Confinement and Relationality in Contemporary Native American Literature focuses on confined spaces: the boarding school, the prison, the reservation, and the nation.