M.F.A. Students

First Year

Ayesha Asad

Ayesha Asad (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Waveborne (Bottlecap Press, 2022). Her poetry has been included in the 2020 Best of the Net Anthology, and her work appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Boulevard, Mid-American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, PANK, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, and elsewhere. Her writing has been recognized with awards from UC Berkeley and UT Dallas. She is currently taking an academic leave from UC Berkeley School of Law to pursue an MFA in Poetry at Vanderbilt University. In her free time, she likes to dream.

Danielle Emerson

Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). Her maternal grandfather is Ashííhí (Salt People Clan), and her paternal grandfather is Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People Clan). She has a BA in Education Studies and Literary Arts from Brown University. Her writing centers healing, kinship, language-learning, and family.

Alexandra Green

Alexandra Green grew up in rural Maryland. She graduated with her MDiv from Yale Divinity School, where she was the Managing Editor of the journal Letters. Her master’s thesis explored figurations of Christ and the question of divine sovereignty in the poetry of Paul Celan. She has worked as a youth minister, non-profit director, and arts advocate. Her writing is primarily interested in the endless, vital ramifications of language, of the political, of nature, and of faith. She is often drawn along by song.

Noa Greenspan

Noa Greenspan is a writer from southeastern Virginia. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about coming of age and our relationships to place in the first part of the 21st century. Noa studied English, creative writing, and environmental studies at Princeton University and most recently worked at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Second Year

Christiana Castillo

Christiana Castillo (she/ella) is a Mexican-Brasilian-American poet, educator, cultural worker, and gardener. Her first poetry collection, Crushed Marigold, was published in 2020 by Flower Press. Her work appears in The Pinch Journal, Room Magazine, The Acentos Review, and The Detroit Metro Times. She has had residencies and fellowships with Room Project, insideOut Literary Arts, Voices of Our Nations, and Disquiet International. She holds a BA from Wayne State University and an MA in Education from the University of Michigan.

Kinsale Drake

Kinsale Drake is a Diné writer and citizen of the Navajo Nation. Her debut poetry collection The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press, 2024) was the winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series. Her work often celebrates elders, cacti, and rock ‘n’ roll. She is the founder of NDN Girls Book Club.

Yevheniia Dubrova

Yevheniia Dubrova is a second-year MFA candidate in fiction from Donetsk, Ukraine. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College. Winner of the 2024 Lando Grant for refugee writing from the de Groot Foundation, she writes about displacement, loss, memory, and what endures. She translates fiction, poetry, and plays from Ukrainian.

Johnny Nagle

Johnny Nagle completed his MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast in 2023. He is now a second-year MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University and is currently working on a revenge/campus novel set in South County Dublin.

Lana Reeves

Lana Reeves is a poet and composer from O’ahu, Hawai’i. She was the recipient of the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2025 Iowa Review Award. Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Poetry Online, Bellingham Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She received a BA from Harvard University with a dual degree from the Berklee College of Music. She is currently a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Fellow.

Kanchi Sharma

Kanchi Sharma (she/they) is a fiction writer, poet, editor, creative strategist & communications specialist. She is an MFA Fiction candidate at Vanderbilt University where she is the Russell G. Hamilton Scholar. A Tin House ’24 alum & Kenyon Developmental Editing Fellowship ’24 finalist, Kanchi currently is the Prose Reader for Quarterly West Magazine and formerly held the same position for GASHER Press & Journal. Older versions of Kanchi’s poems appear in Live Wire, HEArt, PANK, TinySpoon. Their translation of a human-interest profile appears in PARI (People’s Archive of Rural India). Kanchi comes from a small town near Mumbai and is at work on a linked story collection and novel.

Third Year

Langston Cotman

Langston Cotman (he/him) is a third-year MFA candidate in fiction from Takoma Park, Maryland. He graduated with a BA in American Studies from Goucher College. His fiction appears in The Virginia Quarterly Review and BOMB Magazine. He walks like this and he dances like that.

Kumari Devarajan

Kumari Devarajan is a third-year MFA student in fiction from Washington DC. They were most recently an audio journalist at NPR’s Code Switch podcast where they received a Murrow Award and Apple Podcast of the Year Award. They graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Economics and Women’s and Gender studies.

Ajla Dizdarević

Ajla Dizdarević has worked as an editor, educator, and Fulbright grantee in the US, Serbia, Croatia, and France. She was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship and received an honorable mention for a 2024 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been published in We the Interwoven, an anthology taught in high schools across Iowa; Plainsongs; and on by the Iowa Review as part of a David Hamilton Prize. Additionally, she received a grant from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs to support her writing. She holds a BA from the University of Iowa and is currently a third-year student in Vanderbilt University’s MFA program.

Sydney Mayes

Sydney Mayes is a third-year poetry MFA candidate from Denver, Colorado. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. She was the winner of the 2021 Iowa Chapbook Prize, and her poems appear in Denver Quarterly and Prairie Schooner.

Athena Nassar

Athena Nassar is an MFA candidate in poetry from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the debut poetry collection Little Houses (Sundress Publications. 2023). She is the winner of the 2021 San Miguel Writers’ Conference Writing Contest, the 2021 Academy of American Poets College Prize, and the 2019 Scholastic National Gold Medal Portfolio Award, among other honors. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets, Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Los Angeles Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.

Iman Saleem

Iman Saleem is a third-year fiction MFA candidate from Colombo. She graduated from the University of Kent in 2018 with a BA in Drama & English and American Literature. Since then, she has worked as a journalist, covering the mass anti-government protests in Sri Lanka throughout 2022.