Season 20 Mentees
Congratulations to the twenty-five writers selected to participate in Season 20 of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program! This session’s mentees were selected out of hundreds of applicants based on their goals, experience, and promising writing samples.
Kait Hatch
Creative Nonfiction
Kait Hatch is a multigenre writer, mixed-medium artist, and trained Buddhist chaplain. Hatch’s lifelong goals include dismantling capitalistic standards of productivity, advancing disability justice, and unlearning the racist messages of white supremacy. She has determined that good tea, good food, and good suits are essential to this work.
Kait Hatch is working with Neema Avashia.
Anne Marie Wells
Creative Nonfiction
Anne Marie Wells (she/they) is a Queer, award-winning poet, playwright, and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. She is the author of the poetry collections Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2023) and Mother, (v) (Cinnamon Press, 2024). She is the education coordinator for The Poetry Lab and copyeditor for Mama’s Kitchen Press.
Anne Marie Wells is working with Laura Carney.
Alisa Bohling
Creative Nonfiction
Alisa Bohling is at work on a memoir in essays about how her search for home and healing became a political education. Her literary work appears in Lit Hub and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her journalism appears on Truthout, where she was a staff editor and reporter, as well as on Al Jazeera America and AlterNet, and has been cited by Project Censored and in scholarly books on gender identity. Bohling holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and she teaches medical narratives, creative nonfiction, and composition to community college students in the Intermountain West.
Alisa Bohling is working with Tracy Crow.
Patty Morris
Creative Nonfiction
Patty Morris is writing HUMAN SHIELDS, which braids the stories of three women, including the author, who each have a child with the same killer disease, cystic fibrosis. The narrative explores global healthcare inequity in a new era of precision medications that change lives—for those who can afford them. Morris lives in Maine, where she writes, records related music, and persistently fights “The Man.” Learn more at PattyMorrisAuthor.com or at @PattyMoAuthor on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Patty Morris is working with Amy Goldmacher.
Christina Berke
Creative Nonfiction
Christina Berke is a Chilean American adjunct professor of English and a teaching artist. She’s been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and Ragdale. Her work is in Teen Vogue, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, NPR’s Desert Companion, Edible, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She is working on WELL, BODY: A MEMOIR ON BODY IMAGE, EATING DISORDERS, AND CHILDHOOD TRAUMA, an excerpt of which was longlisted with the DISQUIET International Literary Program. A former middle school English teacher, she earned her BA at the University of California, Berkeley; EdM at the University of California, Los Angeles; and MFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Christina Berke is working with Hannah Grieco.
Andalyn Young
Creative Nonfiction
Andalyn Young is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans writing, sound, and performance. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction project exploring the aesthetic and moral dimensions of ugliness. She is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Andalyn Young is working with Jessica Handler.
Vesna Jaksic Lowe
Creative Nonfiction
Vesna Jaksic Lowe is a creative nonfiction writer who also works for nonprofits in the human rights and international affairs space. An immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, she has published essays on her immigrant experience in the New York Times, Catapult, the Washington Post, Pigeon Pages, and the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023. She runs a monthly newsletter on writing by immigrants and children of immigrants, Immigrant Strong.
Vesna Jaksic Lowe is working with Suphil Lee Park.
R. Murphy Fox
Creative Nonfiction
R. Murphy Fox (she/they) is a writer, poet, priest, witch, and dirty mouth with feet. Past lives include semiprofessional chorister, art model, beauty queen runner-up, redneck goth, and bullied queerdo. Their manuscript in progress details how they accidentally helped start a cult. Land back.
R. Murphy Fox is working with Cat Pleska.
Aimee Seiff Christian
Creative Nonfiction
Aimee Seiff Christian’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Poets & Writers Magazine, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more, and most recently she had an essay in the anthology Gifted-ish: Women and Nonbinary Writers on Intelligence, Identity and Education. She was the 2020–2021 Pauline Scheer fellow at GrubStreet, where she wrote the first draft of her memoir. She has two master’s degrees from Harvard University and currently teaches creative nonfiction and edits memoir and personal essays.
Aimee Seiff Christian is working with Elsa Sjunneson.
Charles Stephens
Fiction
Charles Stephens is an Atlanta-based writer. His writings have appeared in Copper Nickel, the Lumiere Review, Isele Magazine, and Queerlings. His work has been supported by Roots. Wounds. Words; the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices; and Periplus.
You can find him on most social media platforms at @charlesdotsteph.Charles Stephens is working with Nishant Batsha.
Tanya Robertson
Fiction
Tanya Robertson is an assistant professor in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her professional interests focus on race, class, and gender, and especially diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in academia. Her creative writing focus is varied, but currently she is immersing herself in crime writers of color.
Tanya Robertson is working with Diane Marie Brown.
Heather Bailey Terrell
Fiction
Heather Bailey Terrell’s essays, feature articles, and other nonfiction pieces have appeared in GGMG Magazine, on LITAblog.org, in The Relevant Library: Essays on Adapting to Changing Needs, and in Information Technology and Libraries journal. Terrell was a member of the Laidley Street Writers Group from 2012 to 2020 and works at a science museum. She became a first-time mom at age forty-four and is eager to return to work on a novel that’s been sitting in her drawer since then.
Heather Bailey Terrell is working with Shay Galloway.
Noel Torres
Fiction
Noel Torres is a writer currently living in New Rochelle, New York. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Adelphi University, where he concentrated in fiction. Although he primarily writes fiction, he tends to fall in love with poets, so he writes poetry sometimes too.
Noel Torres is working with Joseph Holt.
Laura Nagle
Fiction
Laura Nagle is a fiction writer and a translator from French, Spanish, and Irish. Her short fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Common, North American Review, Stanchion, and the 2024 Welkin Writing Prize shortlist, and her translations of prose and poetry have appeared in journals including the Southern Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and Circumference. Her translation of Prosper Mérimée’s notorious 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, was published in 2023.
Laura Nagle is working with Ciera Horton McElroy.
Sayantani Roy
Fiction
Sayantani Roy’s writing straddles India and the US, and she calls both places home. Her work appears in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, Impostor: A Poetry Journal, and TIMBER, among others. Find her on Instagram at @sayan_tani_r.
Sayantani Roy is working with Jennifer Savran Kelly.
Andrea Silen
Fiction
Andrea Silen is a writer and editor with over ten years of experience in children’s nonfiction. Her writing has been published by National Geographic Kids and Highlights. Silen is currently working on her first novel, a YA mystery. She lives in Washington, DC.
Andrea Silen is working with Yvonne Ventresca.
Kolina Cicero
Fiction
Kolina Cicero is a writer of fiction who is interested in how absence shapes our lives and whose work searches for meaning in loss, abandonment, and disappearance. Cicero has an undergraduate degree in journalism and mass communications with a minor in Italian studies, and a graduate degree in Italian studies from Middlebury College. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children.
Kolina Cicero is working with Kristen Witucki.
Nina Colette Peláez
Poetry
Nina Colette Peláez (b. 1989) is a poet, educator, artist, and cultural producer based in Maui, Hawaii. Peláez is an adoptee born in Las Vegas, Nevada, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MA in art history from Williams College and an MFA in poetry from Bennington College, and is the associate director of The Merwin Conservancy, an arts and ecology organization that cares for the home and garden of poet W. S. Merwin.
Nina Colette Peláez is working with Millicent Borges Accardi.
Abi Pollokoff
Poetry
Abi Pollokoff is the author of night myths • • before the body (Red Hen Press, forthcoming 2025). TriQuarterly nominated her work for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems can also be found in the Seventh Wave, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Radar, where she was a finalist for the Coniston Prize. Currently, Pollokoff is the managing editor for Poetry Northwest Editions and works in publishing.
Abi Pollokoff is working with Wendy Barnes.
Camille Hernandez
Poetry
Camille Hernandez is an author and trauma-informed education specialist. She calls herself a literary doula, tenderly providing readers with the strength to birth the unnamed vocabularies of our deepest ache to find pathways toward our collective liberation. Her debut book, The Hero and the Whore, debuted as Amazon’s number one new release in the sociology of abuse genre. She lives in Anaheim, California, with her family.
Camille Hernandez is working with Angela Gabrielle Fabunan.
Alana Pedalino
Poetry
Alana Pedalino is a writer with work in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Bon Appétit, and Struggle Mag. In 2024, she placed as a finalist in the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize competition; earned a special mention from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest Fellowship for Emerging Writers committee for her perfect jury score, in addition to a partial fellowship; and made her children’s book debut with Kenny and the Cookie Lady (Windmill Books). Other accolades include recognition from 92NY, ACES: The Society for Editing, the MDDC Press Association, the University of Maryland MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the Lannan Fellows Program.
Alana Pedalino is working with Keith Kopka.
Mikaela Hagen
Poetry
Mikaela Hagen lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a bilingual middle school teacher. After a childhood of prolific poetry writing, she took a two-decade break from the practice and is just now returning. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Naugatuck River Review and the Moon City Review, and she was the winner of the 2023 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest (traditional verse).
Mikaela Hagen is working with Amy Lerman.
Betsy Merbitz
Poetry
Betsy Merbitz (she/her) has been a featured performer at the queer music and poetry series Homolatte and a semifinalist in Guild Literary Complex’s Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards poetry competition. Her poems have appeared in the anthology S/He Speaks: Voices of Women and Trans Folx by Moonstone Press, Santa Clara Review, and Querencia Press Winter 2024. She works as a birth assistant and massage therapist.
Betsy Merbitz is working with Michelle Menting.
Lindsey Schaffer
Poetry
Lindsey Schaffer is the author of City of Contradiction (Selcouth Station, 2022) and Witch City (dancing girl press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Minnesota Review, Superstition Review, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and elsewhere. Schaffer has received scholarships and fellowships from the Indiana Writers Workshop, AWP, the City of Bloomington, and the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. She serves as a poetry editor for Variant Literature.
Lindsey Schaffer is working with Emily K. Michael.
Magdalena Arias Vásquez
Poetry
Magdalena Arias Vásquez is a trilingual storyteller, poet, and translator from Panama. Her words have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI and Jet Fuel Review. She has previously been recognized in Fugue Journal’s 2023 Poetry Contest and the 2023 Bullock Poetry Prize with the Academy of American Poets. Arias Vásquez graduated in June 2023 from Williams College, where she majored in English and French. She currently lives in New York City.
Magdalena Arias Vásquez is working with Karen Rigby.
