INCOMING FALL 2023 MFA COHORT

Noah Loveless

Noah Loveless is an MFA candidate in poetry from Maine. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maine in 2020 with degrees in English and Philosophy His work benefits from the merging of these fields, using poetry as a unique means of understanding and asking questions about topics like experience, self, and memory During his undergraduate career he won UMaine's Grenfell Prize for a portfolio of poems and he received a McGillicuddy Humanities Fellowship which he used to research the philosophy of Walter Benjamin He is further interested in the wide field of language and the depth and dynamism of words He lives in South Bend with his partner and two cats and likes to bake

Oli Peters

Oli Peters attempts to weird the word while writing about corporeal and corporate weirdness. She received her BA from the University of Iowa. She is based in the Midwest.

Ryan Phung

Ryan Phung, a Los Angeles native, is a graduate from UC San Diego where he studied Political Science and Creative Writing His primary interests are apocalypse, movement, memory, and the poetics of stupidity. In his free time, he likes to pretend he doesn't know what a ladder is.

Kyla D. Walker

Kyla D. Walker is a Turkish and Creole writer from Los Angeles She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Pomona College and will be pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame this fall. Currently, she is an editorial intern at Electric Literature. In 2023, she was selected to be a Periplus Collective Fellow and to attend the Tin House Summer Workshop in July Her prose has been published in Electric Literature, Cultbytes, Agave Review, The Alexandria Review, and is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review

Sachie Weber

Sachie Weber is a fiction writer born and raised in San Francisco As a mixed race woman, Sachie writes about isolation, belonging, and communication by miscommunication She has a Creative Writing minor from Stanford but majored in chemistry and worked as a software engineer for five years These experiences both inform the themes of her writing and validate her certainty that writing is her life’s passion. She loves science fiction, magical realism, and believes in ghosts when in the right company. She expresses love through food.

Dionne Irving Bremyer

In 2022-23 Dionne Irving Bremyer's story collection THE ISLANDS was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and she received two Pushcart nominations, one for an essay that appeared in West Branch and one for a story that appeared in Electric Literature THE ISLANDS was twice featured in The New York Times She also presented and gave readings at the Miami Book Fair, the Association of Writing Programs Conference, and the Printer's Row Literary Festival, among other places

Johannes G Ransson

Johannes Göransson began the school year with the publication of his new book-length elegy, Summer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022), and ended the year with the publication of The New Quarantine (Inside the Castle, 2023), a collaborative reimagining - with Swedish writer and performance artist Sara Tuss Efrik - of his first book A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (2007). In between he gave talks and readings at a bunch of places, such as Washington University, Bennington College, Stockholm Poetry Festival, The Splice Poetry Series, and he edited four new volumes for Action Books

Joyelle Mcsweeney

Joyelle McSweeney has spent the first half of her Guggenheim year writing public-facing criticism of US and international contemporary poetry for such major venues as the Poetry Foundation and the New York Times Books Review and readying her tenth book, Death Styles, for publication next Spring She is presently consulting with John Milton in preparation for her next project, a War on Heaven.

Orlando Menes

Recent publications include The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2022, 84 pages). (Reviewed in the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, The Hudson Review, Plume, Literary Matters, and America: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture ) Poems in journals: “How Not to Build a Model Rocket” and “Salvador Dalí with Anadromes ” TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics [tabjournal org/ Chapman University], vol 10 4 (July 2022) “First Communion,” “Triptych Number 3: Victor Manuel,” and “The Magnificent Jeremiah Expounds on the Impending Doom of Miami.” Literary Matters [literarymatters.org/ The Catholic University of America], vol. 14, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2022); “Letter to José Lezama Lima” and “Minotaur.” Literary Matters [literarymatters.org/ The Catholic University of America], vol. 14, no. 2 (Winter 2022); “Ezan.” Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (2022), 57-58. Critical Essays in Books: “Testarudo ” Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry Ed Ruben Quesada (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2022)

Xavier Navarro Aquino

Xavier had short stories published in The Sewanee Review (“Two Young Kings” Winter, 2023) and Prairie Schooner (“Blood Brothers” Volume 96, Number 1, Spring 2022).

Roy Scranton

In summer of 2022, Roy took over as director of the Creative Writing Program, and that fall taught the first iteration of his innovative, large-format creative nonfiction course, “Witnessing Climate Change.” In 2022–2023, Roy also served on the Notre Dame Presidential Forum Advisory Committee, where he organized two events marking the twentieth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, “Aftermaths I: The Invasion of Iraq in Historical Perspective,” a panel featuring Spencer Ackerman, Andrew Bacevich, and Omar Dewachi, and “Aftermaths II: The Invasion of Iraq in the Present,” a reading featuring Amal alJurbouri, Dunya Mikhail, Mortada Gzar, and Salar Abdoh.

Meanwhile, Roy applied for two NEH grants; finished a draft of a scholarly book on climate change, narrative, and ethical pessimism; and started making notes for a new book on the 1980 Robert Altman film Popeye He also published an essay, “What Good Is Dissent?” in Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Forever Wars, edited by Daniel Sjursen and Andrew Bacevich, and another essay, “The Arc of History,” in the art magazine Nuda And little by little, Roy’s Environmental Humanities Initiative continues to grow, supporting graduate student workshops, talks, and field trips integrating ecology, scholarship, and the arts.