Organizers

Daniel Davies is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston and 2024-25 Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and his research interests center on the literary and historical writing of late-medieval England and Scotland and extend to the history of poetry and poetics and war literature. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. With R.D. Perry he is co-editor of Literatures of the Hundred Years (Manchester University Press, 2024). He is currently completing a monograph on perpetual warfare and late-medieval English literature. 

Marshall Woodward is pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston where he works as a poetry editor for the journal Gulf Coast and is supported as an Inprint Fellow and a Mitchell Scholar for interdisciplinary art. He leads workshops for adults at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and students at the Cy Twombly Gallery. He is currently working on a manuscript about objects of empire and the myth-making of medieval America. His recent poetry appears in Fence, Annulet and Hot Pink, as well as a recent chapbook “LAVA!” from Bottlecap Press.

Participants

Maha Abdelwahab is an Egyptian poet and aspiring translator. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is pursuing her PhD at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Audrey Dial is a graduate student at the University of Houston, pursuing an M.A. in English with research interests in literature, medieval studies, linguistics, and theology. Outside her studies she works as an editor in publishing and, in her spare time, can be found reading, writing, and/or enjoying a cup of tea.

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in NY and Houston; she’s the translation editor for Gulf Coast.​

KT Herr (they/she) is a queer writer, stepparent, and curious person with work appearing or forthcoming in Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and as winner of the 2023 American Literary Review Award in Poetry, among others. KT is a Four Way Books board member and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in critical poetics at the University of Houston.

Katharine Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, late medieval labor, gender, and identity, aesthetics, lyric and lyric theory, form and formalism, the events of the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381, and performativity. She the editor of Vernacular Aesthetics: Politics, Performativity, and Reception in the Later Middle Ages, From Literature to Music. (Palgrave, 2019) and her poetry has appeared in Found Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Commonweal, and Friends Journal, among other publications.

Leisa Loan is from Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Marymount Manhattan College and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. UNLV she was co-managing editor of Interim Poetics. Her work has recently been published in Hobart and WAS Quarterly. She is currently the Digital Editor of Gulf Coast and pursuing her Phd at the University of Houston.

Kelan Nee is a poet, writer, and carpenter from Massachusetts. His debut book Felling was released in April 2024 and was a winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller Prize. 

Bevin O’Connor grew up in Southern California and received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California. A 2022 finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology, her work can be found in Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.

Skye Oliver was raised in a close-knit community nestled in the forested foothills of the Appalachians, she grew up experiencing the closeness of the natural world and its entanglement with human notions of love, desire, and identity. She discovered medieval literature as a field of study as an undergraduate and followed her feminist ideas about Chaucer and his ilk to public librarianship, where she became a children’s librarian known for her special knowledge of the medieval period in England. Translating medieval verse romance during her lunch breaks led her back to academia, where she uncovered a thriving and supportive community of medievalists at the University of Arkansas. Now she coaches high school rowing and works on the creative projects that have spun out of her dissertation. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Arkansas. The title of her dissertation is “Desire Lines: Reading Queerly Through the Forests of Medieval Love Literature”.

Biz Rasich was born in Texas but grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She returned to Texas for her BA in Mathematical Economic Analysis at Rice University, and comes to the MFA program after working at the University of Chicago doing press strategy and research for a book about gun violence. Her fiction explores oddities of all kinds, including conspiracies, corporate culture, reality TV, and human-animal relationships.

Camilo Roldán is a bilingual Colombian-American poet and translator born in Milwaukee, WI. He is the author of the poetry collections Dropout (Ornithopter Press, 2019) and El último soneto y nos vamos (HAO Rotativo de Letras, 2022). His translations include the chapbook Amilkar U., Nadaísta in Translation (These Signals Press, 2011), and María Paz Guerrero’s book God is a Bitch Too (Dios también es una perra) (UDP, 2020). Individual poems and translations have appeared in various print and digital magazines in the US and abroad.

Aishwarya Sahi is a writer and editor from Patna, Bihar. She writes about the body and its small graces and indignities, imagined homes and true homes, and the bright but false promise of return. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Poetry Project’s The Recluse, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

Dillon Scalzo is a poet and translator with a passion for working back and forth between the mediums of Spanish and English. He spent thirteen years based in the U.S./Mexico border in San Diego, CA/Tijuana y Tecate, Baja California. He has also worked in other parts of México and Spain. In 2016, he completed a U.S. Fulbright grant to teach creative writing in Uruguay and pursue his work in translation. His work centers on the movement of poetry and art across physical and imaginary borderlands. Dillon currently teaches creative writing to K-12 students for Writers in the Schools (WITS) Houston. In the summers, he leads the WITS / Rice University creative writing camps. Dillon also teaches ESL for adults at AEC Texas, and is a translator and museum educator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokiksas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX), holds an MFA from the currently under threat program in Creative Writing at Purdue University, and has had poems appear or forthcoming in guesthouse, Gulf Coast, Grist, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Oversound, Quarter After Eight, Southern Indiana Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere.

Mathew Weitman is the winner of the 2021 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (The Georgia Review) and was a writer in residence at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, WA. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The Evergreen Review, New South, Bennington Review, The Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the New School where he was a student poetry editor for Lit Magazine.