Samia Ahmed is originally from Bhopal, India but now lives in New York where she is enrolled in the PhD creative writing program at Binghamton University. Her work can be found in The Kenyon Review, Coffin Bell Journal, deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, The Chakkar and Indus Woman Writing. She holds an MFA from Old Dominion University. She believes in breaking stereotypes and continues to practice it while petting pretty black cats and sipping chai.
Claire Balani is a student in the Master’s in Language and Literacy program at The City College of New York, studying the promotion of translanguaging and other multilingual supports in the adult English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classroom. She works full-time at the International Rescue Committee, overseeing refugee youth and education programs in New Jersey.
Roudri Bandyopadhyay is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from Old Dominion University and currently works as an English professor at Norfolk State University. Originally from India, her work primarily focuses on feminism, racism and internalized racism, social stigma, and political relevance. Her essays are published in The Women’s Inc., SunDaze Journey, Still Points Quarterly, and others.
Cole Depuy is the winner of the Academy of American Poets University Prize (Binghamton University) and the Negative Capability Press Spring 2020 Poetry Contest. His poetry has appeared in the I-70 Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Summerset Review, Rupture, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Co-Editor for Harpur Palate & the Binghamton Poetry Project Co-Director.
Julie Hornberger holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Queens College as well as an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. She lives in Long Beach, NY, with her husband, Andy, and daughter, Sienna. Julie writes creative nonfiction about family, motherhood, and marriage. She is currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, concentrating on creative nonfiction. This past winter, Julie was a creative nonfiction reader for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature.
Catherine LaSota is the founder of the Resort writing community and the LIC Reading Series, as well as the host of Cabana Chats, a podcast about writing and community. Her own writing and interviews appear in Literary Hub, Vice, Catapult, Electric Literature, and more, and she lives in Queens with her partner and two young children. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University and is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY.
Nina Lopez-Ortiz is a Masters Student at the Department of English at Queens College CUNY. Her research interests include young adult fiction, fairytales, folklore, trauma studies, cultural studies, Saussurean linguistic theory, gender studies, and Jewish history. She has a keen interest in the cultural relevance of fairytales as a storytelling medium.
Aidan M. Mohan is in his last semester of grad school at Queens. He is immensely proud of having attended CUNY. In work and life, he is interested in the intersection between political theory, labor history, and literature.
Victoria Morris is in the MAT English 7-12 program to become an English middle and high school teacher. She completed her dual bachelor’s degree in English and Childhood Education, here at Queens College. As she fell in love with the English coursework during her undergraduate studies and teaching fifth grade for almost four years, she decided to specialize in teaching English in Grades 7-12. She decided to share her work from English courses taken last semester and this semester with Professor Gloria Fisk.
Elizabeth O’Toole is a graduate student in the English Program at The State University of New York at New Paltz. She is passionate about sailing and works at the Hudson River Maritime Museum.
Isamar Perez Santiago is in her last semester at Queens College as an English MA student. She has explored various tropes and topics in her writing and credits QC for fostering and engaging her curiosity throughout many of the literary courses offered at the school. Some interesting facts about Isa include: being mom to two very active boys and a kitten named Roach. During the COVID pandemic Isa and her sons joined a karate dojo where she recently earned her orange belt, and she enjoys getting tattoos and is in the process of learning how to ride a motorcycle. Despite Isa’s active lifestyle, she enjoys staying home and zoning out to a good book while her kids run around the house practicing their ninja skills.
Corinne Shearer is a graduate student in the MA program in English Literature at the City College of New York (CUNY). In addition to her studies, she works as a professional dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist, as well as being the resident Book Reviewer at OyeDrum Magazine.
Mosammat Sultana is a first-year master’s student at St. John’s University. Her research focuses are medieval studies, race, and religion literature.
Aly Tadros (she/her) is a writer, musician, and MFA candidate at Queens College, City University of New York. She currently works as the Community Programs Coordinator for the Crime Victims Treatment Center, a nonprofit that provides free healing services to survivors of crime. Her essays on kink, sobriety and trauma have been featured in the New York Times, Narratively, and the Brooklyn Rail.
FACULTY PRESENTERS
Ala Alryyes is an associate professor of English at Queens College, The City University of New York. His book project in progress, War’s Knowledge and the Novel: Conflict, Subjectivity, and the Representation of Ordinary Life, 1660-1771, was awarded an NEH fellowship and an American Philosophical Society grant. He is the author of Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2001), A Muslim American Slavery: The Life of Omar Ibn Said (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), and several journal articles.
Miles Grier has published in both academic and popular venues on topics as varied as the expansion of racial profiling after 9/11, Joni MItchell’s black male pimp alter ego, President Obama’s desire for Beyoncé’s fan base, and August Wilson’s artistic experiments in placing white antagonism on the margins of Black life. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Inkface: Othello and the Hidden History of White Interpretive Community.
Hillary Miller teaches twentieth and twenty-first century drama in the English Department and serves as Assistant Director of the English MA program. She has published on numerous topics including performance and gentrification, activist theatre traditions, and interdisciplinary curriculum design. Her essays and reviews have appeared in RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, The Radical History Review, Theatre Survey, PAJ, and Lateral.
Seo-Young Chu‘s publications include “Free Indirect Suicide,” Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” and “I, Stereotype: Detained in the Uncanny Valley.” Her work has been listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020 and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and Advanced Creative Nonfiction. Current works-in-progress include a design-fictional memoir and a video essay on audio descriptions and anti-Asian violence.
Briallen Hopper is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction. She is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019) and is at work on a critical memoir about Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for the Rereadings series at Columbia University Press. She is the co-editor-in-chief of KtB, an online literary journal.
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario‘s research and teaching focuses on Caribbean and Latinx literature and culture, modernism, transnational feminisms, and poetics. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014), published in a Spanish edition as Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (2022). She is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (2010). She translated into English Mayra Santos-Febres’ collection of poetry entitled Boat People (2021). Currently she is editing an anthology titled “I am my own path: A Bilingual Anthology of Julia de Burgos’ Writings.”
Veronica Schanoes is an associate professor in the English department of Queens College – CUNY and a fiction writer. Her first book, Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale came out from Ashgate in 2014, and her debut collection of short fiction, Burning Girls and Other Stories, appeared from Tordotcom in 2021.
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of six books of poems, most recently Of Marriage and Girl after Girl after Girl, as well as two chapbooks and a novel. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College.
