M.F.A. Students

Alex Connors (Fiction, 3rd year) is the 2024-2025 Hemingway Fellow. They attended UMas-Amherst, where they studied poetry and social thought. Their piece "Spaceship" was selected as runner-up in the 2024 Hayden's Ferry Review fiction contest. Before coming to the University of Idaho, Alex spent many years as a farmer in western Massachusetts.

Maggie Nipps (Poetry, 3rd year) is a poet from Wisconsin. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, Salt Hill, Peach Mag, mercury firs, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Fugue and is the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, a journal of poetry and hybrid text.

Gianna Starble (Fiction, 3rd year) is a writer, educator, and performer from Colorado. They serve as the Art and Hybrid Forms Editor for Fugue. Their work is forthcoming in Foglifter. Outside of writing, Gianna helps organize the Pop-Up Prose reading series and performs drag in Moscow, Idaho.

Spencer Young (Poetry, 3rd year) is a poet, librettist, and editor. They write about punk music, queerness, and good books. Terrain.org, Thimble Literary Magazine, Thirteen Bridges Review, and others have published their work. They edit reviews and interviews for Fugue, and their first chamber opera, Let’s Blow Up a Gas Station!, premiered with Seattle Opera in 2024.

Emily Holmes (Nonfiction, 3rd year) is an essayist, poet, and rangeland ecologist from Idaho. Her writing asks questions of survival and hope in the American West, and her recent work can be found in Arkana and About Place Journal. Emily is the nonfiction editor for Fugue. 

Tymber Wolf (Nonfiction, 3rd year) is a lover of things with scales, long walks, and epistemology. They are happy to be writing in Idaho, but would prefer if Idaho were a bit tropical. Tymber writes of swamps, bodies, cycles, and the depth of family in meditative braids. 

Miriam Akervall (Poetry, 3rd year) is a translator and poet from Michigan. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Oroboro, Academy of American Poets, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. They work in the Writing Center where they co-founded a journal of creative writing for incarcerated students.

Alicia Gladman (Nonfiction, 3rd year) is from Western Canada. She has been published in The Malahat Review, Sundog Lit, Plentitude Magazine, and the Southern Literary Festival Anthology.

Trixie Zwolfer (Fiction, 3rd year) received her BA from Montana State University, where she studied writing and literature. Currently, she serves as the fiction editor for Fugue and writes about strange forests, bodily transformation, and owls. In her free time, she can be found drinking copious amounts of tea.

Katie Ludwig (Nonfiction, 2nd year) moved to North Idaho 20 years ago to pursue her dance degree. After starting a family, she didn’t quite finish but came back years later and fell in love with writing. She is also a singer/songwriter and runs a local native landscaping business.

Jason Cahoon (Fiction, 2nd year) came to the program from western Massachusetts. Since arriving, he has sought to incorporate STEM principles into his fiction. He is particularly interested in how the body’s biological and physical mechanisms shape human experience.

Reid Davis (Poetry, 2nd year) is a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor from South Carolina who writes on themes of family, the body, memory, and femininity. She serves as the Managing Editor for Fugue and loves a good pantoum.

Karissa Carmona (Poetry, 2nd year) is from Western Montana. Her chapbook barn fire was selected for FootHills Publishing’s 2024 Montana Poets Series. Lately, she’s been seeking out little morsels of light and gobbling them up.

Jennifer Yu (Fiction, 2nd year) is the author of three novels, including Grief in the Fourth Dimension. She is exploring. 

Annie Burky (Fiction, 2nd year) is a writer, poet, and journalist from Colorado. Her work has been published in the Gallatin Review, Confluence, Ms. Mayhem, and elsewhere. She writes about humor and heartbreak in interpersonal relationships, the ridiculousness of having a body, and how humans struggle to fit themselves into the world corporations create. 

Rya Sheppard (Fiction, 2nd year) is a writer from northern Idaho. She earned her BA from the University of Idaho where she studied English and creative writing. She is interested in the strange and unsettling, and often explores this in her writing. In her free time she is often painting, hiking, or excessively photographing her cat.

Raquel Gordon (Poetry, 2nd year) is a writer, dancer, and singer from Seattle where she earned her BA in creative writing and dance from the University of Washington. She loves performance and exploring surrealism. She is the poetry editor for Fugue.

Megan Poe (Fiction, 1st year) has her BS in philosophy and English from Northern Michigan University, where she interned for Passages North. She writes surrealist eco-fiction and character studies. She loves artsy horror films, shoegaze, and woodland animals. Her first publication was nominated for Best of the Net.

Jasmine Jones (Fiction, 1st year) is a writer from southern Missouri. Before moving to Idaho, she worked in local journalism and led community poetry workshops. She currently serves as the Marketing Editor for Fugue. 

Jonah Radeke (Poetry, 1st year) was raised in the suburbs of Chicago and studied creative writing and art history at DePaul University. They often write about bodies, art, and memory. They also do photography and develop film at home.

Kyle Singleton (Poetry, 1st year) is a Florida-born poet who has spent the last fourteen years living in Utah and Idaho. He often writes about the intersection of place, identity, and spirituality. Outside of writing, he enjoys fly fishing and binge-watching The X-Files. 

Annie Sheneman (Nonfiction, 1st year) grew up in Moscow, Idaho. She attended the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, where she studied English & Theatre. Since then, she has worked as an audio engineer, cook, grant writer, and 1913-era school teacher. She writes about whatever interests her at any given moment. 

Madison King (Poetry, 1st year) is a writer from the Central Valley in California. She writes about forgotten agricultural lands, raising lamb, and learning food sovereignty. She likes to collect cheesy landmark fridge magnets and watch Adventure Time when she’s not writing. 

Paige Phillips (Fiction, 1st year) grew up in Marin County, California, and earned her BA in English and Classical Studies from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Currently she finds herself engaged in a heated custody battle with her little sister over their beloved cat, Piper.

Caitlyn Simson (Fiction, 1st year) was raised in North Carolina but calls many places home. She earned her BA from Virginia Tech and is excited to both teach and study at the University of Idaho. 

Dylan Bourne (Poetry, 1st year) is from fair Verona, Wisconsin. He received his BS in Philosophy and Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. Since then he’s been working odd jobs and writing. Recently he saw Emily Dickinson’s bed, but didn’t touch it. Her bed, along with her desk, faces west.