SHARON
BURNS is an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago.
ALISON
CARPENTER is a traveler, teacher, and writer. She earned a BA in Secondary
English Education from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor in 2008 and went on
to teach high school in Waianae, Hawaii. She is now teaching at Columbia
College Chicago while pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction. Alison hopes to continue
traveling the world, teaching English, and essaying her observations.
MATTHEW CWIKLINSKI graduated from University of Iowa in Religious Studies, despite
spending most of his time in Essay Workshops and Linguistics classes.
He has taught English as a Second Language since 2008, both abroad
and in the US, currently for Kaplan Aspect. He is an MFA candidate
and Follett Fellow in Columbia College's Creative Non-fiction
program, where he also teaches undergraduate writing.
AMYE DAY ONG is an MFA
candidate in Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago. She holds an MA in
Religion from Yale University and a BA in Spanish from Transylvania University.
Prior to returning to school full-time at Columbia College, she worked in
the field of study abroad administration for five years. She has read
her nonfiction work at 2nd Story, a Chicago storytelling collective,
and Essay Fiesta, an essay reading series at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square.
She originally hails from Villa Hills, Kentucky.
ADRIANA GONZALEZ is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction
at Columbia College Chicago where she is also Follet Fellow and a Graduate
Student Instructor candidate. She received her Bachelor’s degree in
English Education in the course of three years from California State University
Long Beach where she graduated with honors. Lover of hiking, photography, and
gardening, Adriana describes herself as a woman of the earth—one who insists on
vibes and intuition to guide her writing. Adriana hails from Corona, California.
MADDISON
HAMIL earned her BA in Creative Writing and Latin from DePauw
University in 2008. Her work has appeared in Eye
on the World and
Music Emissions
and appears
daily on her blog.
She is a MFA
Nonfiction candidate and Graduate Student Instructor at Columbia
College Chicago and an editor for Hotel
Amerika and
South Loop
Review. Maddison
is an expert napper, wanderluster and lover of all things Italian.
She is on a quest to find the perfect cup of coffee in Chicago.
As an undergraduate
at Otterbein College, WES JAMISON double majored in Literary Studies and
Creative Writing and earned a minor in Women’s Studies. His work has been
published in Quiz & Quill and Echoes of Creativity and
Conscience; and his manuscript, Where You Yourself Were, won the
2010 John W. Fisher Memorial Senior Writer’s Award. Now pursuing an MFA in
Nonfiction, he hopes to continue to find ways to speak, read, and write
honestly in order to try to make sense of all those things that seem to not
make sense. His essay, "The Secret Garden", won first place in South Loop Review's
2011 essay contest.
Louise earned an M.F.A. in Painting from Northwestern University in 1994. She has exhibited her paintings throughout the United States, and in Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. In 2010, she wrote a blog essay about her studio practice at the invitation of Studio Chicago, a yearlong collaborative project sponsored by The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
Her website is: www.louislebourgeois.com
CAITLYNN
MARTINEZ-McWHORTER is a native of the Chicago suburbs and an MFA candidate at
Columbia College Chicago in Nonfiction. She earned her undergraduate
degree from Columbia in 2010, in Marketing, and after some soul searching in
the Australian outback she decided to return to her alma mater, where she is a
Graduate Student Instructor. Her work has appeared in The North
Branch Literary Magazine.
MICAH MCCRARY is a Graduate Student Instructor and
MFA Candidate in the Nonfiction Program at Columbia College Chicago. In
addition to being a regular contributor to Bookslut and Chicago-based Newcity,
his essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in South Loop
Review, The Heated Forest, and TimeOut Chicago, among
other publications, and his work has received mention in the online edition of The
New Yorker. He serves as Assistant Editor at Hotel Amerika, is a
Diversifying Faculty in Illinois (DFI) Fellow, and, in the summer of 2012, was a
John Woods Scholar in Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program.
TONI NEALIE is
interested in global perspectives and how our interconnectedness impacts our
cultural expression. She has been a journalist, editor and communications
advisor in the UK, Singapore, the USA and her homeland, New Zealand. Toni
has two sons, a dog, six goldfish and a filmmaker husband. She teaches Culture,
Race and Media in the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago, holds
degrees in Journalism and English Literature, and is currently a candidate for
an MFA in Nonfiction at Columbia College.
COLLEEN O'CONNOR lives in
Chicago, where she is a nonfiction MFA candidate at Columbia College
and the managing editor of Switchback Books. Her work has appeared or
is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Pank,
Columbia Poetry Review, and Everyday Genius.
EMILY SCHIKORA is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at
Columbia College Chicago where she is also a Graduate Student Instructor and
Follet Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cirque: A Literary
Journal for the North Pacific Rim, Habit, and M Review. She
grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska and now divides her time between Chicago and
Portland, Oregon.
INGRID SAGOR received her BA in English in 2010 from Western Washington University—the most northwestern point of the continental US—and moved to the flatlands of Chicago in November 2010. For five years, Ingrid worked as a hairstylist and while she loved creating beautiful styles, she is happy to put her brain instead of her hands to work while studying at Columbia College in their MFA in Creative Nonfiction program. Her work has been published in Jeopardy Literary Magazine, Labyrinth, Free Verse and The Everett Herald. She is a Follett Fellow and is looking forward to teaching as a Graduate Student Instructor come spring semester.
RYAN SPOONER is a Graduate Student Instructor and
Graduate Writing Consultant at Columbia College Chicago, where he is an MFA
candidate and the recipient of a Follett Fellowship. He was selected as the
winner of CutBank's Big Fish Essay Contest in 2011, and his work has
appeared in New Wave Vomit and South Loop Review. Spooner's
essay "On the Lifespan of a Fact" took second place in South Loop Review's
2011 essay contest.
MAGGIE
SULLIVAN, an Ohio native that grew up in the exotic bowels of Hong
Kong, graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in May 2012 where she
earned her BA in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing,
and Psychology. During her senior year, she worked as a co-editor for
OWU's formal literary magazine The OWL and had work published
in OWU's informal literary magazine Confiscated.
She is now an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago, where
she also works as the Nonfiction Events Assistant for Columbia
College's English Department, is a Graduate Student Instructor
candidate, and an Assistant Editor for South Loop Review.
When she isn't busy writing, reading and organizing events,
Maggie has work published in an online blog, The Clickpeas.
JENNIFER TATUM is the managing editrice for 1913
Press, an assistant editor for Hotel Amerika and a Follet Fellow. She is a
Graduate Student Instructor and the Nonfiction Graduate Ambassador at Columbia
College Chicago. Her work can be found in 1913: a journal of forms, The
Breadbox Parsons and South Loop Review's Creative Nonfiction + Art
Online.
PATRICK THORNTON holds a Bachelor of Science in Arts Administration with a
concentration in Theatre from Butler University. He is currently a
first year MFA Nonfiction Candidate, a reader for Hotel Amerika, and a candidate in the Graduate Student Instructorship Program. Patrick was one of the first men to perform his work in Listen To Your Mother, a national series of live readings by local writers. He also keeps a book review blog called Reading Under the Covers.
TATIANA M. UHOCH is an MFA candidate in
Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago, where she is an instructor, the
coordinator of the Tutor Mentorship Program at the Learning Studio, and a
Follett Fellow. She is the former coordinator of URI's Ocean State Summer
Writing Conference, and misses the ocean in ways she cannot yet put on paper.
DAUREN VELEZ studied
French and Ancient Greek in her undergraduate work at St. John's
College, and translated literature in both languages as a part of the
college's liberal arts program. She is an MFA Candidate at Columbia
Chicago, where she is currently exploring the essay form. She loves
living in Chicago, and would like to continue working in translation
after graduation.
NAOMI WASHER received her BA in Dance, Theatre and
Literature from Bennington College in 2012. She is a Graduate Writing
Consultant and Graduate Student Instructor candidate at Columbia College
Chicago, where she is pursuing her MFA in Nonfiction as a Follet Fellow. She
served as Senior Nonfiction Editor of plain china: Best Undergraduate
Writing 2011. Some of her work has appeared in The Silo. She reads
for Hotel Amerika and is an Assistant Editor for South Loop Review. She
is Co-Founder and Nonfiction Editor of Ghost Proposal, the
online literary journal for boundary-crossing, broken and re-arranged
contemporary letters. http://www.ghostproposal.com
ERIN WISTI graduated with honors from Michigan State
University in 2011, receiving a BA in English/Creative Writing. While she
dabbles in screenwriting—and has a pretty good idea for a film that’s basically
the prequel to It’s Wonderful Life—she works primarily in
nonfiction prose. Her work has appeared in Red Cedar Review and Ampersand
Review and she received 1st Place for Creative
Nonfiction in MSU’s 2011 Creative Writing Awards. Her writing tends to
circulate around mental illness, animals, her family, and a very odd upbringing
in a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her first attempt at nonfiction
was a memoir about a herd of 16 buffalo her grandfather owned. It wasn’t a
particularly good piece of writing, but it told a pretty entertaining (and
true) story. Ask her about it some time.
