Graduate Students - MFA

Alexis Aceves Garcia

Maya Beck

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2020 

Maya Beck is a broke blipster, lapsed Muslim, recovering otaku, pan demigirl, socially-anxious social justice bard, and speculative fiction writer. She is an alum of writing programs including VONA, Kimbilio, Tin House, The Loft Literary Center, and the Givens Foundation. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart and the Best of the Net, and has been awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. She tweets as @mayathebeing, blogs at mayabeck.com, and is pursuing a creative writing MFA at UCSD. Maya was born on Kumeyaay land with a Detroit/Chicago Black American pedigree. She is also petmom to a sassy bunny named Blossom.

Oluyemisi Bolonduro

Email Address: obolonduro@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2023 

B.A. in Africana Studies, minor in English — Pomona College

Writing/Research Interests: African self-consciousness theory, Pentecostal Christianity, (a)sexuality

Fun Facts: Adores alliteration, lucid dreams, favors water Pokémon

Sims 4 Traits: Active, Bookworm, Geek

Website: OAB Shares

Oluyemisi Ayoyinka Bolonduro (she/they) is a Christian, Nigerian American writer with a background in autofiction and blogging. Her writing often explores magical universes, friendship trios, and distorted truths. They tend to borrow too many library books at once and cannot resist running in circles around a track. In the future, Oluyemisi hopes for a 5-star island in “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” and opportunities in video game writing to create more playable Black characters.

Aminta Dunn

Iman Farahani

Matt Ford

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2020 

BA, Anthropology, Vassar College; Domestic Exchange, African-American Studies, Morehouse College

Writing and research interests: Blackness, queerness, ethnomusicology, performance studies, liberation discourse, the human condition, mental health, healing, multimedia storytelling, lyric essays, installation art, cultural iconography, digital publishing, public libraries and archives, citational poetics, cosmology, geography, divinity, dance.

Matt Ford is a writer, archivist, and educator who calls both Detroit and Chicago home. Principally an essayist and music journalist, Matt is now focusing on poems and art elucidating blackness, love, and inner consciousness. They also dabble in deejaying, radio hosting, portraiture, and erotic literature, and count God, Janet Jackson, and Audre Lorde as personal saviors. Matt previously completed an art handling fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and prophetic life training in Michigan; they’ve been published in the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and Chicago Reader.

Website: www.5-d.works

Adrienne Herr

Email Address: aherr@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021

Adrienne Herr works primarily with text, sound, installation and performance to complicate the splitting of immaterial from material in the expanding context of memory and grief. The voice is of particular importance to her work, figured as an extension from language-based sense making into vibratory matter. With a foundation in poetics and experimental writing, her practice broadens from the page to emphasize improvisation and an embodied experience of language. She is currently studying under the German voice artist Ute Wassermann, and writing a full-length book that uses the theatrical play form as a poetic form to explore multivocality as well as the performative potential of the page. Adrienne collaborates with Swedish artist Sanna Helena Berger on collective project amatter for which they currently organize a performance + printed matter series on immaterial art practices.

Through blending and defamiliarizing the performative and formal contexts of 'music' 'art' and 'literature', Herr enacts an anti-disciplinarity that undermines the notion of professionalization in these fields and instead uses the 'discipline' as a material unto itself. Therefore, her work has been published and exhibited internationally for a wide range of literary, sonic, and gallery contexts including Fence Journal, Scherben, Retreat Radio, C-, Daisart, Centrale Fies, Exile, Novembre Magazine, Shore, Edit Literaturzeitschrift, and Tagvverk. Her written work has been published in German translation and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Cross-Genre Writing at University of California San Diego.

Lucia Herrmann Benitez

Email Address: lherrmann@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022

Lucia Herrmann Benitez is an artist and educator from Miami, FL. She spent eight years in Philadelphia, PA prior to joining the MFA program at UC San Diego, teaching high school English, then Spanish for nursery to sixth grade students. Lucia is primarily a poet and performer, with experience in dance, comedy, devised and improvised theater. Writing interests include the environment (ocean, the impending climate apocalypse, inspiring flora & fauna of Florida), Miami in all its port city eccentricities, cultural hybridity, Caribbean diaspora, linguistic tensions, and deciphering home. Find her scribbling in her notebook and sunbathing in the sand or a nearby expanse of verdant land.

Kira Jacobson

Aditi Kini

Kimaya Kulkarni

Rebecca Lane

Alaric López

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Texas at El Paso, 2020, summa cum laude

Writing/research interests: play, Fluxus, Happenings, music, conceptual art, sound art, intermedia, performance, participatory art/poetics, ephemeral forms, non-textual poetics, uncertainty/indecision, social media, video, film, social alienation, technological disruption, documentary poetry, punk, improvisation, addiction, digital poetics, cyberpunk, text in visual art, open works, playing the text, relational aesthetics.

Alaric López is a musician, songwriter, intermedia artist, and poet. Since 2012, Alaric has recorded, released, and performed his music under the alias Monarcadia (available through his Bandcamp site monarcadia.bandcamp.com or via streaming platforms). He has had poems published in the Rio Grande Review, and has held multimedia performances around El Paso, TX, including at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. Alaric is interested in developing new forms of poetry through extensive experimentation, and developing intermedia forms that effectively blend his various interests and practices.

Julia Moncur

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

JRM is a genre-destroying, necromaternal, and mental health activist. Her poetry and prose can be found at Versification, Chrome Baby, Thrice Fiction, Riggwelter Press and others.

Ricardo Novaes De Oliveira

Rose Pacult

Email Address: spacult@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022 

I like to complicate through removal.… Perpetually intensive, I find, initially, theoretics best ignored; instead primary sources, character and prose should be explored. 

First navigating the full-force application of the self on my surroundings merges the lines distinguishing the individual from society into a consistent renewal. Every interaction offers a moment to fill space with a multi-layered event via deliberate, location-dependent, and precise action. Inevitably, my baseline mode arrives forcibly, also: free-spirited, spontaneous, fluid. Every interaction is the teacher that tidies previous understandings and the one I strongly grab hold of, and allow to lead me to the next.

Then, at that junction, there is a sense of being stranded, until the next involvement — the stacking impact of moments — guiding craft into my absolute limitless research and application. This approach leads to a permanent fuel for productivity, outside of prevailing limitations, stipulations, and conditions. At this place, my mode of being is akin to a primal tooth held in humanity’s jawbone, where the stories of us find an interlude for entrance and exit.

Today, I follow the movement. 

You may find me where life intersects with the propulsion forward to the next newest thing. Or at rose@queen.house :)

Isadora Petrovsky

Email Address: ipetrovsky@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022 

Isadora H. Petrovsky is a speculative fiction author, who aims to draw forth the inherent queerness of the SFF, fairytale, historical, and gothic horror genres. Her current project explores the ecological ramifications of monopolistic capitalism and its inherrent colonialism on a pre-apocalyptic planet with a fractured crystal core. Isadora finds a Jim Henson’s the Labyrinth sort of humor in the macabre and the weird, which makes the almost apocalypse, dare she say, fun. She is currently attending the MFA Writing program at UC San Diego. When not writing, she can be found teaching it, reading, playing Dungeons and Dragons, watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and snuggling with her cat Basil. Isadora was awarded the Ron L. Hubbard Writers of the Future Honorable Mention for her short fiction “Red”, published in Gingerbread House Lit Mag. A reprint of her queer gothic fiction “I AM STRUCK DEAD AT THE CLASP OF HER HAND” can be found in KALEIDOSCOPED’s Winter 2023 issue Ghosts & Gossip. To keep up with Isadora’s work follow her @izzypetrovsky on Instagram or visit her website https://isadorahpetrovsky.wordpress.com/.

Olga Mikolaivna Petrus

Email Address: opetrus@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022 

Born in Kyiv, Olga works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. She is interested in memory, dream spaces, absences, inheritance, (dis)place, and the construction of language. She cofounded and co-curated Desuetude Press, and is constantly in motion. Her first chapbook cities as fathers is forthcoming in 2023 with Tilted House.

Bailey Sneed

Email Address: bsneed@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2023 

Bailey Sneed is a mythweaver, a bookbinder and a papermaker with a belief that the tactile elevates the reading of a text.  Interested in the overlap of art and writing, many of Bailey’s pieces focus on conversing with art history and the visual archive, particularly the deceptions of historical women and mythical scenes. This highlights her research interests in feminine spirituality, queer expressions, and womanly embodiment.

She is fascinated with water, goddesses, and the women of antiquity. She keeps Sappho, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Carson by her bedside. 

Gin To

Emily Yang

Email Address: elyang@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021 

Writing/research interests: revolutionary intimacies, queer futurities, (mis)translation, ghosts, cyborgs, ritual, Taiwanese history/geopolitics, anime/manga, film (particularly Taiwanese & Hong Kong New Wave), the intersections of nationalism & patriarchy, myth & mythmaking, glitch feminism, mutation, decolonial caregiving & caretaking, tropes, gossip, posthumanism, gender failure, intergenerational memory, misrepresentation, fandom, archival gap-flossing, queer ekphrasis & relational poetics, multilingual literatures, transpacific entanglements.

Emily Yang/楊佳諭 (she/they) was raised in Taipei, Taiwan and, for better and for worse, holds American citizenship. She writes and makes things about slippery encounters between languages and people, or else the way structures of violence infringe on people’s capacity to care for and build intimacies with one another. She is always missing papaya milk and her bidet, and she tweets unprofessionally @taromilkpng.