2023 Wisconsin Institute For Creative Writing Fellows Reading

Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance. He has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.

Yalitza Ferreras is the 2022-23 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and is a recent Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Winner of the 2020 Bellevue Literary Review prize in fiction, her stories have also appeared in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Aster(ix) Journal, Colorado Review and elsewhere.

Chessy Normile is the 2022-23 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. She received a BA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in poetry from The Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas at Austin. Her first book of poems, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, was selected by Li-Young Lee for the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She edits a zine series called Girl Blood Info.

Amanda Rizkalla is a graduate of Stanford University and an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been published in No Tokens Journal, The Esthetic Apostle, and Archipelago, as well as the Allegory Ridge fiction anthology. Her work is forthcoming in The Fabulist Words & Art.

Taymour Soomro is the 2022-23 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. He is a Pakistani writer whose debut novel Other Names for Love is forthcoming from FSG in 2022, and whose short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Southern Review. He has published a textbook on law with Oxford University Press, and he is the co-editor of the anthology Letters to a Writer of Colour: Fourteen Authors on Craft, Race and Culture, forthcoming from Random House in 2023.