Graduate Student Profiles

Clayton Bradshaw

Clayton Bradshaw is a queer, formerly homeless veteran who was a finalist for the Kinder-Crump Award for Short Fiction and is an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. His work can be found in or is forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review; F(r)iction; Green Mountains Review; Barren Magazine; War, Literature, and the Arts, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @WriterClaytonB.

Corinne Dekkers

Corinne Dekkers is a Canadian-American poet. Her writing has appeared through Smartish Pace, The Carolina Quarterly, and Fonograf Edition's FE, and has been adapted for ritual and performance. Her second chapbook, DIVE, was published by Tolsun Books in June 2022.

Hannah Feustle

Hannah Feustle is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi and a graduate of the University of Memphis’s MFA program in fiction. She is the recipient of the 2019 Deborah L. Talbot Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work forthcoming or published in The South Carolina Review, The Worcester Review, Bayou Magazine, LandLocked, The Citron Review, and Chautauqua.

Emily Goldsmith

Emily M. Goldsmith (they/she) is a queer Cajun-Creole poet originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They received their MFA in Poetry and a Graduate Certificate in College Teaching and Learning from the University of Kentucky in 2021. Emily was the 2021 recipient of the Patricia and William Stacy Endowed Fellowship. They are currently the managing editor of Giving Room Mag. Their creative work can be found in The Penn Review, Bullsh*t Mag, Fifth Wheel Press, Pile Press, and elsewhere.

David Greenspan

David Greenspan earned an MFA from UMass Amherst where he won a Best New Poets Prize and served as an editor for Slope Editions. His thesis manuscript, One Person Holds So Much Silence, is forthcoming from Driftwood Press. Recent poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Protean Magazine, Sleepingfish, Superstition Review, and other journals. 

Brooke Harries

Brooke Harries' work has appeared in Salamander, Sixth Finch, Laurel Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the University of California at Irvine and is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she serves as Associate Editor for Mississippi Review. 

Emilee Kinney

Emilee Kinney (she/her)  is a poet from the small farm-town of Kenockee, Michigan, near one of the Great Lakes: Lake Huron. She received her BA in Creative Writing and History from Albion College in Albion, Michigan, her MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is now a PhD student in Creative Writing at USM’s Center for Writers. Her work has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, West Trestle Review, Cider Press Review, SWWIM,and elsewhere. Kinney is a poetry editor for MAYDAY. Her creative interests include the power of place/nature, Irish folklore, magical surrealism, and navigating womanhood and its inheritance (www.emileekinneypoetry.com).

Jamie Logan

Jamie Logan (PhD, Creative Writing) recently completed her MFA at the University of Memphis. While at Memphis, she served as Managing Editor of The Pinch and won awards such as the Fiction Concentration Award, the Ruth & Henry Loeb Scharff Scholarship, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Award. Her work can be found in the New Ohio Review and various news sources such as Tulane’s New Wave online magazine.

M. Caroline McCaulay

M. Caroline McCaulay is a writer from Carmel, Indiana. She earned her MFA in Fiction at Indiana University and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing. She frequently writes about sisterhood, Hollywood, and mental health – but also about sorority girl werewolves and pregnant cows. 

Andrew McSorley

Andrew McSorley is the author of What Spirits Return (Kelsay Books). A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Southern Illinois University, his poetry has previously appeared in journals such as The Minnesota Review, UCity Review, Poet Lore, HAD, and many others. He serves as an Assistant Prose Poetry Editor for Pithead Chapel and is currently a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. 

Keri Miller

Keri Miller is pursuing her PhD in creative writing (fiction) at the University of Southern Mississippi where she was the 2022 recipient of the Dr. Jeremy Lespi Memorial English Scholarship. Her novel-in-progress was a semifinalist for the 2022 Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. She has work forthcoming in Fiction Southeast.

Marisa Mills

Marisa Mills's fiction has been published by Hydra Publications, Wicked East Press, Ethereal Tales, and Fickle Muses. She earned her BA and MA at the University of South Alabama. Her academic interests include the High and Late Middle Ages, Arthuriana, ecocriticism, and Welsh mythology.

Apoorva Mittal

Apoorva Mittal (they/she) is a gender/queer author from northern India. They are pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at University of Southern Mississippi. They hold a B.Tech. in Software Engineering from Delhi Technological University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. They want to tell stories that break the monolith of the desi diaspora and present desi queerness in all its twisted beauty. Their short stories and essays have appeared in Catapult,Electric Literature, and elsewhere. They are a 2022 alum of Tin House Winter Workshop and a 2022 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer’s Retreat Fellow. You can check their work out at apoorvamittal.com or on Twitter and Instagram @MittalWrites.  

Matthew Moniz

Originally from the DC area, Matthew Moniz holds an MFA and MA from McNeese State University and a BA from Notre Dame. Matt’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and has been awarded the SCMLA Poetry Prize, and he has participated in workshops with the Community of Writers and Tin House. His poetry is metaphysical, anthropological, neoclassical, and it’s driven by too much curiosity.

Jennifer Peterson

Lila Robinett

Lila Robinett is a poet from East Texas. She has been published in Ekstasis Magazine, Yes, Poetry, and Five South Journal's The Weekly. She recently received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi. 

John Tobin

John Constantine Tobin (PhD, Creative Writing - Poetry) grew up in the woods of Maryland just outside of Annapolis. He earned his MFA at The University of Baltimore and BA at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His poetry has been published in Welter Literary Journal and the Café Shapiro Anthology. He's written and designed a poetry book titled The Order in Which They Went, which served as the thesis to his MFA. He most recently spent two years as a Co-Founder and the Narrative Designer at Merfolk Games in Shanghai. He's passionate about the roles of family and the environment in contemporary poetry, historic preservation, the intersection video games and literature, and swimming in the cold northern Atlantic waters of coastal Maine.

Elizabeth Trueblood

Elizabeth Trueblood (she/her) is in her third year in the PhD program at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her genre is fiction, and her short stories have previously appeared in Apricity Magazine, The Thieving Magpie, and Typehouse Literary Magazine, among others. She was a finalist for the Beloit Fiction Journal’s Hamlin Garland Award for the Short Story in 2021. She received her BA in English from Northern Michigan University in 2017 and her MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University-Mankato in 2020. Her creative and critical interests include speculative fiction, feminist literature, and pop cultural influence and context. She is on Instagram and Twitter (@truelizrose).