Graduate Students - MFA

Bilal Bikile

Email Address: bilalbikile@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2026-2027

Bilal Bikile is an Ethiopian-American writer, curator, and multidisciplinary artist based in San Diego. He is also the founder and director of Deixis Gallery, an emerging contemporary art gallery.

www.bilalbikile.com

Bikile's work spans fiction, photography, film, and electronic literature. Themes of interest to Bikile include fine art, literature, and contemporary social issues, as well as Islamic theology, spirituality, and existentialism thru fiction, essay, and screenwriting.

• "Mountain Man", Short Story, Selected for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (2026) (Print)
• "Nobody Wants to Be an Exorcist", Short Story, Featured in The Perfect Healthy Newspaper, (2025)
• "Power and Expression", Essay, Selected for Pacific Review, (2020)
• The Deixis Newsletter
• The Dilettante Don Newsletter
• "Bekele" Short Film, By Bilal Bikile & Avia Rose Ramm

• Creative Mornings, "Local", Speaking Engagement, (2026)
• Outstanding Graduating Senior in Comparative Literature, San Diego State University, (2020)
• Mundt Peace Fellow, San Diego State University, (2019)

• B.A. in Comparative Literature, San Diego State University, 2020

Ava Garcia

Email Address: atygarcia@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: 2026-2027

Ava primarily writes fiction and essays.

Ava is interested in cross-genre and multimedia arts.

Emilio Loew Muscarolas

Email Address: eloewmuscarolas@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2026-2027

Biography:

Emilio is a writer or poet or other thing from Los Angeles, California. They enjoy collecting objects, looking at cool textures, and lists of three.

Writing/Research Interests:

Experimental textuality, visual hybridity, semiotics, the Neo-Baroque, glitch, subjectivity and meaning production in a landscape of digital and cross-sensory noise.

• B.A. in English & World Literature, Pitzer College, 2025

Fiona Martinez

Email Address: fimartinez@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2024-2025

Fiona Martinez is a poet and community organizer from Boise, Idaho. Most at home in nature, she writes while walking, ocean wading, watching the branches for birds and the cracks in the sidewalk for the unexpected.

Fiona understands writing as a liberatory practice that requires free verse and hybrid forms including bilingual writing and visual poetry/autobiography. Her work centers nature, water, home (as place and embodiment), and the persistent entanglement of violence and tenderness.

• “Though my hair is not black”, Jeopardy Magazine.
• “Palm”, Cedar.
• “Algo De Nuestras Raíces Empezó Aquí”, Jeopardy Magazine.

• B.A. in English - Creative Writing Emphasis with minors in Education & Social Justice and Spanish, Western Washington University, 2024

Sarah Mullen

Email Address: srmullen@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2024-2025

Sarah Mullen is a nonfiction writer & educator who is obsessed with the thin line that separates fact from fiction. Apart from writing, you'll find her perfecting her garden companion planting strategy, binge watching reality and sci-fi tv, or visiting local libraries with her two children.

www.sarahreneemullen.com 

Personal and Lyric Essay, Memoir, explorations of nature and identity, Deconstruction, Addiction, Spirituality, Matrescence, and Re-Storying. Entanglements, Identity Construction, Post Structural and Materialist Feminism, and Auto-ethnography.

• "Notes on Homemaking" in Roxane Gay & The Audacity's Emerging Writers Series - (May 2025).
• "Anything But” in Mulberry Literary- Issue VII - (Nov 2023).
• “Pendant” in Wordrunner eChapbooks- 2022 Anthology – (Apr 2022).
• “Cigarettes & Silence” in Feels Blind Literary- Issue 7 – (Mar 2022).
• “We Made Them: Degendered Play and Shifting Subjectivities in ABC’s Bluey” in The Journal of Children in Popular Culture- Issue 13- vol. 1 – (Nov 2022).

• B.A. in English with a minor in Writing, Portland State University
• M.A. in Literature & Writing, California State University, San Marcos

Anaïs Ornelas Ramirez

Email Address: a2ornelas@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2026-2027

Biography:

Anaïs Ornelas Ramírez is a Mexican fiction writer moving between genres and languages. She writes in Spanish, English, and French, and spent thirteen years in Paris. Her work is preoccupied with our stubborn need to belong somewhere.

Speculative fiction, strange intimacies, weird friendships, speculative technologies, cloning and doubles, parallel universes, unconventional love stories, (sometimes fussy) formal experimentation.

• “Servicio de despedida”, Colectivero, Vol. 11.
• “Teoría de los universos fecundos”, Revista Weird Review, No. 4.

• Flores Scholarship recipient, Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2025
• Writers of Color Scholarship recipient, Viable Paradise, 2026
• Selected participant, McCormack Writing Center Speculative Online Workshop, 2026

• M.Phil. in Screen Media and Cultures, University of Cambridge, 2014

Emma Rault

Madison Rosandich

Fatima Abby Tall

Email Address: ftall@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2025-2026

fatima abby tall (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist with history in southern idaho and dakar, senegal.

https://www.fatimaabbytall.com/

(un)dead, hauntings/hauntology, water, pre-colonial religious systems, multiplicity, spiritual alterity

• "Goldfish Musings", Bottlecap Press

• Artist-in-Residence, Centrum Self-Directed Residencies in Port Townsend, WA (2023)
• Finalist for the Miracle Monocle Award for Young Black Writers, A Cow With No Name (2023)

• B.A. in English/Creative Writing and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Theater, University of Iowa, 2020

Chloe Watlington

Georgia Wright

Email Address: gewright@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2024-2025

Georgia Wright (they/she) is a multidisciplinary writer and creative shapeshifter with roots in coastal Rhode Island. Their speculative, kaleidoscopic work explores climate, metamorphosis, and the inexplicable. Georgia is an alum of the 2025 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer's Workshop.

https://www.wrightgeorgia.com/ 

freaks and queers, experimental ecopoetics, disability and neurodivergence, the horizon of abolition, protest & performance art, dreamscapes, hybridity, island-dwellers, utopia & its discontents, becoming ungovernable

• B.A. in Literary Arts with Honors, Brown University, 2017

Klytie Xu

Email Address: klx001@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: 2024-2025

Klytie Xu is a writer and artist from California.

Her writing and research interests include poetry, hybrid writing, visual literature, Asian American studies, (mis-,dis-) translation, artist’s books, and public & personal archives.

• B.A. in Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing, UC Santa Cruz, 2021
• B.A. in Art, UC Santa Cruz, 2021