Current MFA Students

Lewis Millholland is a D.C. native whose writing explores the tension between transience and permanence. Professionally he’s covered small-town news, worked a stint on Bloomberg’s news automation team and coded video games. Recently he inherited his great-aunt’s 100-year-old typewriter but promises he’s not that kind of hipster.

Michelle is a fiction writer who can’t sit still. She grew up wandering and writing in the Great Smoky Mountains and is drawn to gothic, lyrical prose with a strong sense of place. Her work has appeared in Fiction International, Nowhere Magazine, and The New York Times. When she’s not at her desk you can find her enjoying and advocating for public lands.

Megan Slusarewicz is a poet and pigeon enthusiast from Lexington, Kentucky. She received BAs in literary arts and cognitive neuroscience from Brown University. Her interests include writing (duh), the science of addiction, photography and thinking about learning classical guitar. Recently, she’s been undertaking the perilous journey of leash training her cats. Megan has a fondness for verbs, but she also finds that nouns and adjectives are essential for writing sentences. Her work can best be described as eclectic and reflective.

Cassandra Kiyoko Woodard is a second year fiction student from Cupertino, California who harbors obsessions with summer fruit, marine life, and gardens. She holds a BFA in creative writing from Boise State University. Her writing explores the echoes of generational trauma in the Japanese American community she grew up in, and the fraught relationship between holding compassion for others and the self, especially in mother-daughter relationships. When she is not writing, she can be found peddling her cooking (of varying quality) onto her loved ones (all of high quality).

Charles Pineda is a fiction scribbler (writer, only if you insist) born and raised near New Orleans, LA. He worked professionally in film and the tech industry for much of his professional career before pursuing writing full-time. In the great tradition of ‘Southern writers,’ he can often be found wandering around with a cigar clutched in hand, a slightly dazed look on his face, and incomprehensibly mumbling to himself about the beauty of a streetcar that no longer runs ‘here’ (and probably never existed to begin with) before sitting down and fortunately typing it into something far more sensible. He enjoys finding both the serious and especially the humor in things.

Kara Killinger is a fiction writer from Texas. She writes about sad girls, situationships, and the weight of emotional intimacy.

Kira Compton is bad at writing bios, as well as several more important things.

Adam Ray Wagner is a poet from various states—mostly Nebraska. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University and an MA in English: Poetry & Poetics from the University of Maine. His poetry is rooted in the Objectivist tradition with a concern for the ethics of perception—particularly how that perception relates to ecological and political crises.

Caleb Merritt is a second-year poet who grew up in South Dakota, though he most recently resided in Alabama. During the pandemic, he married his undergraduate Speech & Debate duo partner, Alli, who he met at Hastings College where he received his BA in Studio Art. Before graduate school, he worked for Habitat for Humanity. His work was most recently put out as “Chappbook” and “Dyfficuhlteh Mhineous” — respectively his third and fourth collections of poetry. You can find his work for free online at literarymerritt.gumroad.com.

Christofer Arbudzinski is a 2020 Pomona College graduate and Dole Kinney Prize recipient. His poems have been said to possess “a searing sense of the line.” His style has been described by its aversion to “[calling] a spade a spade.” His presence in one undergraduate workshop led to the coining of an affectionate phrase: the “Chris Nod,” which involves a satisfied closed-mouth half-smile (pictured) and a slow head motion (not). Christofer has gone by “Chris” all his life while readily admitting that “Christofer” fits better for a fantastical setting or grand occasion.

Savy Butler is a first year poetry student and holds a BA in English from the University of Maine. Her poetry seeks to understand and process what at first doesn’t make sense, ranging from the human psyche to flash floods. She is interested in how language can be used and further stretched to understand the human experience. In her free time, she can be found wandering, practicing yoga, and playing with her dog.

Trey Hayden is a first-year poetry student. He holds a BA in economics from Rhodes College. Born and raised in Kentucky, he is grateful to be in Idaho now, studying poetry.

Ayotola Tehingbola (’93, Nigeria, Yorùbá) is a lawyer, photographer, writer & translator. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Witness, Passages North, Quarterly West, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Pidgeonholes, Kahalari Review, etc., and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has been supported by Hudson Valley Writers Center in New York and the Alexa Rose Foundation in Idaho. She also received a 2022 & 2023 Glenn Bach Award for Fiction. You can find her at www.ayotola.com.

Hannah Lucille Phillips is a fiction writer from the Endless Mountains region of Pennsylvania. She has BAs in creative writing and English education, and she’s a teaching-writer for The Cabin, Boise’s nonprofit literary center. Currently, she is working on her first novel while serving as the associate editor of the Idaho Review. Her debut TV pilot OUT is in post-production through BSU’s NTVI (Narrative Television Initiative) and will premiere in early 2024.

Daisy Clar Rosenstock is a second-year poetry student. Her work explores the very spirit of writing and she is specifically interested in when said spirit shifts from one place to another and whether or not this is abandonment or simply a higher plane of movement. When not writing, Daisy can be found daydreaming about abandoned houses or chatting with the local dying pine tree.

Kelsey Hennegen believes her best hope for grappling with what it is to be human lies in her work as a poet. Her poetry traverses memory and grief, vulnerability and violence, intimacy, and defiant redemption, often drawing from mythic traditions and theology. She holds MAs in Liberal Arts and Eastern Classics from St. John’s College and English from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. As a resident artist with the Historic Santa Fe Foundation (2020-21), Kelsey created a month-long poetry exhibit for the foundation’s El Zaguan gallery and published a chapbook titled “To Keep the Name Daughter.”