INCOMING FALL 2023 MFA COHORT

Ivy Braxton Harrington

Ivy Braxton Harrington grew up in Richmond, Virginia with a fondness for her family’s roots in Baltimore Her poetry developed out of her childhood connection to nature and sunlight She explores the nuance of their intermingling and tries parsing out the scenes of the natural world She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cornell University, completing a research thesis that combined the areas of her two majors, Linguistics and Literature. Recently, she has been finding richness in the works of Seamus Heaney and owes her love and appreciation of meter and rhyme to Dickinson, Housman, and Frost

Isabel Boutiette

Isabel Boutiette is a poet paying close attention to her dreams and the landscapes they unravel within She is interested in glitches, cyber ecologies, anthropogenic horror, and mediumship Sometimes, she uses Photoshop to render celestial bodies. She has lived in San Francisco, Madrid, and Seattle, where for a few years she worked at Wave Books.

Makella Brems

Makella Brems is a first-year MFA student and fourth-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame Her writing explores the rapidly evolving relationship between humans, nature, and technology in the age of the Anthropocene Brems is a Graduate Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (2023-2024) She was previously a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich (2022). Brems is from Phoenix, Arizona.

Samuel Ekanem

Samuel Ekanem is a Nigerian writer He was born and bred in Uwa in the Niger Delta, southern Nigeria His fiction largely contemporary and historical explores life on the margins and spirituality His works have appeared in The Fictional Café (USA), Down in the Dirt (USA), Literary Yard (India), The Sun (Nigeria) and elsewhere A first-generation graduate, Samuel studied Communications Arts at the University of Uyo in Nigeria. While there, he served as the general editor of the student union magazine, The Informer, and as a research assistant Away from literature, Samuel is passionate about humanitarian services In 2020, during his compulsory national youth service in Nigeria, he raised funds and set up an ultra-modern public restroom He also led a team of his fellow graduate volunteers to facilitate the Financial Inclusion Campaign on behalf of the Central Bank of Nigeria. He bagged an award from the government in recognition of his efforts.

Camille Lendor

Camille Lendor is a writer from Toronto. Her work has appeared in Canadian Literature, PRISM international, The Malahat Review, and Stellium Literary Magazine, among other publications