Season 20 Mentors and Mentees

AWP celebrates the mentors and mentees participating in Season 20 of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. We are thrilled to introduce twenty-five pairs this session, who were matched based on their experience, goals, and writing style. Thank you to our volunteer mentors, and congratulations to the mentees they selected!

Creative Nonfiction

Mentor: Neema Avashia

Neema Avashia is the author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (West Virginia University Press, 2022). She has spent the past two decades working as an educator in the Boston Public Schools. She lives in the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.

Mentee: Kait Hatch

Kait Hatch is a multigenre writer, mixed-medium artist, and trained Buddhist chaplain. Hatch’s lifelong goals include dismantling capitalistic standards of productivity, advancing disability justice, and unlearning the racist messages of white supremacy. She has determined that good tea, good food, and good suits are essential to this work.

Mentor: Laura Carney

Laura Carney is a writer and copyeditor in New York. Her work as a copyeditor has been primarily in magazines, for twenty years, including Good Housekeeping, People, Guideposts, Vanity Fair, and GQ. Her book My Father’s List: How Living My Dad’s Dreams Set Me Free was published by Post Hill Press in June 2023.

She’s @myfatherslist on Instagram and @lac30 on X (formerly Twitter), and her website is ByLauraCarney.com.

Mentee: Anne Marie Wells

Anne Marie Wells (she/they) is a Queer, award-winning poet, playwright, and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. She is the author of the poetry collections Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2023) and Mother, (v) (Cinnamon Press, 2024). She is the education coordinator for The Poetry Lab and copyeditor for Mama’s Kitchen Press.

Mentor: Tracy Crow

Tracy Crow, a former Marine Corps officer, is a literary agent and the publisher of MilSpeak Foundation’s two imprints, MilSpeak Books and Family of Light Books. She is the author/editor of six books and currently teaches in the Queens University of Charlotte and Southern New Hampshire University MFA programs.

Mentee: Alisa Bohling

Alisa Bohling is at work on a memoir in essays about how her search for home and healing became a political education. Her literary work appears in Lit Hub and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her journalism appears on Truthout, where she was a staff editor and reporter, as well as on Al Jazeera America and AlterNet, and has been cited by Project Censored and in scholarly books on gender identity. Bohling holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and she teaches medical narratives, creative nonfiction, and composition to community college students in the Intermountain West.

Mentor: Amy Goldmacher

Amy Goldmacher is a traditionally published nonfiction author and Author Accelerator–certified nonfiction book and proposal coach. She has coached writers from book idea to polished, pitch-ready proposals and manuscripts that get agents and book deals. An excerpt from her flash memoir in the form of a glossary won the 2022 AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her website is AmyGoldmacher.com, and she can be found on social media at @solidgoldmacher.

Mentee: Patty Morris

Patty Morris is writing HUMAN SHIELDS, which braids the stories of three women, including the author, who each have a child with the same killer disease, cystic fibrosis. The narrative explores global healthcare inequity in a new era of precision medications that change lives—for those who can afford them. Morris lives in Maine, where she writes, records related music, and persistently fights “The Man.” Learn more at PattyMorrisAuthor.com or at @PattyMoAuthor on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).

Mentor: Hannah Grieco

Hannah Grieco is a writer and editor in Washington, DC. She edits novels and prose collections for Alan Squire Publishing, where she is also the editor in chief of the ASP Bulletin, and she teaches writing at American University. Her own work can be read in the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, CRAFT, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, Brevity, Poet Lore, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at @writesloud.

Mentee: Christina Berke

Christina Berke is a Chilean American adjunct professor of English and a teaching artist. She’s been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and Ragdale. Her work is in Teen Vogue, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, NPR’s Desert Companion, Edible, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She is working on WELL, BODY: A MEMOIR ON BODY IMAGE, EATING DISORDERS, AND CHILDHOOD TRAUMA, an excerpt of which was longlisted with the DISQUIET International Literary Program. A former middle school English teacher, she earned her BA at the University of California, Berkeley; EdM at the University of California, Los Angeles; and MFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Mentor: Jessica Handler

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize; the memoir Invisible Sisters; and Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss. She teaches creative writing and lives in Atlanta with her husband, novelist Mickey Dubrow.

Mentee: Andalyn Young

Andalyn Young is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans writing, sound, and performance. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction project exploring the aesthetic and moral dimensions of ugliness. She is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Mentor: Suphil Lee Park

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is the author of Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), winner of the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, and Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She’s also the translator of If You’re Going to Live to One Hundred, You Might As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo, forthcoming from Union Square Books and Ebury (Penguin UK), to be translated and published in sixteen territories and counting. She has received fiction prizes from Indiana Review and Writer’s Digest and had a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2022.

Mentee: Vesna Jaksic Lowe

Vesna Jaksic Lowe is a creative nonfiction writer who also works for nonprofits in the human rights and international affairs space. An immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, she has published essays on her immigrant experience in the New York Times, Catapult, the Washington Post, Pigeon Pages, and the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023. She runs a monthly newsletter on writing by immigrants and children of immigrants, Immigrant Strong.

Mentor: Cat Pleska

Cat Pleska is an award-winning writer, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir Riding on Comets was published by West Virginia University Press in 2015. Her second memoir will be released in spring 2024 from Uncollected Press. Her personal essays have appeared in many literary magazines.

Mentee: R. Murphy Fox

R. Murphy Fox (she/they) is a writer, poet, priest, witch, and dirty mouth with feet. Past lives include semiprofessional chorister, art model, beauty queen runner-up, redneck goth, and bullied queerdo. Their manuscript in progress details how they accidentally helped start a cult. Land back.

Mentor: Elsa Sjunneson

Elsa Sjunneson is an award-winning Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. She has been a Hugo Award finalist nine times and has won three Hugo Awards, an Aurora Award, and a British Fantasy Award for her editorial work. When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her work includes her debut memoir, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism; her Assassin’s Creed Valhalla novel, Sword of the White Horse; and her episode for Radiolab, “The Helen Keller Exorcism.”

Mentee: Aimee Seiff Christian

Aimee Seiff Christian’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Poets & Writers Magazine, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more, and most recently she had an essay in the anthology Gifted-ish: Women and Nonbinary Writers on Intelligence, Identity and Education. She was the 2020–2021 Pauline Scheer fellow at GrubStreet, where she wrote the first draft of her memoir. She has two master’s degrees from Harvard University and currently teaches creative nonfiction and edits memoir and personal essays.

Fiction

Mentor: Nishant Batsha

Nishant Batsha is the author of the novel Mother Ocean Father Nation, which was named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, longlisted for a Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and listed among the best books of 2022 by NPR. His next novel, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, is forthcoming in 2025.

Mentee: Charles Stephens

Charles Stephens is an Atlanta-based writer. His writings have appeared in Copper Nickel, the Lumiere Review, Isele Magazine, and Queerlings. His work has been supported by Roots. Wounds. Words; the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices; and Periplus.

You can find him on most social media platforms at @charlesdotsteph.

Mentor: Diane Marie Brown

Diane Marie Brown is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing Program, where she studied fiction. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Hear Our Voices, Scary Mommy, Women Writers, Audible Blog, and the Daily Bruin. Her 2023 debut novel, Black Candle Women, was a Read With Jenna book club selection.

Mentee: Tanya Robertson

Tanya Robertson is an assistant professor in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her professional interests focus on race, class, and gender, and especially diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in academia. Her creative writing focus is varied, but currently she is immersing herself in crime writers of color.

Mentor: Shay Galloway

Shay Galloway is the author of the Depression-era novel The Valley of Sage and Juniper. She received an MFA from Roosevelt University and now teaches English composition in Washington State, where she resides with her husband and son.

Mentee: Heather Bailey Terrell

Heather Bailey Terrell’s essays, feature articles, and other nonfiction pieces have appeared in GGMG Magazine, on LITAblog.org, in The Relevant Library: Essays on Adapting to Changing Needs, and in Information Technology and Libraries journal. Terrell was a member of the Laidley Street Writers Group from 2012 to 2020 and works at a science museum. She became a first-time mom at age forty-four and is eager to return to work on a novel that’s been sitting in her drawer since then.

Mentor: Joseph Holt

Joseph Holt is the author of the story collection Golden Heart Parade (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021). His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and the Iowa Review. He teaches at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he also directs the Midnight Sun Visiting Writers Series.

Mentee: Noel Torres

Noel Torres is a writer currently living in New Rochelle, New York. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Adelphi University, where he concentrated in fiction. Although he primarily writes fiction, he tends to fall in love with poets, so he writes poetry sometimes too.

Mentor: Ciera Horton McElroy

Ciera Horton McElroy is an author, CEO, and film communications consultant based in St. Louis. Her past film projects have grossed a collective $147 million at the box office. Atomic Family (2023) is her first novel.

Mentee: Laura Nagle

Laura Nagle is a fiction writer and a translator from French, Spanish, and Irish. Her short fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Common, North American Review, Stanchion, and the 2024 Welkin Writing Prize shortlist, and her translations of prose and poetry have appeared in journals including the Southern Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and Circumference. Her translation of Prosper Mérimée’s notorious 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, was published in 2023.

Mentor: Jennifer Savran Kelly

Jennifer Savran Kelly (she/they) lives in upstate New York, where she writes, binds books, and works as a production editor at Cornell University Press. Savran Kelly’s debut novel Endpapers won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, was a winter/spring 2023 Indies Introduce pick, and has been shortlisted for the Over the Rainbow bibliography of the American Library Association. Savran Kelly’s short work has been published in Potomac Review, Black Warrior Review, trampset, and elsewhere.

Mentee: Sayantani Roy

Sayantani Roy’s writing straddles India and the US, and she calls both places home. Her work appears in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, Impostor: A Poetry Journal, and TIMBER, among others. Find her on Instagram at @sayan_tani_r.

Mentor: Yvonne Ventresca

Yvonne Ventresca is an award-winning author with an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her published work includes the young adult novels Pandemic and Black Flowers, White Lies, as well as two nonfiction books and several short stories for tween, teen, and adult readers. You can find her on social media at @YvonneVentresca or visit YvonneVentresca.com, where she features resources for writers and blogs about creative productivity.

Mentee: Andrea Silen

Andrea Silen is a writer and editor with over ten years of experience in children’s nonfiction. Her writing has been published by National Geographic Kids and Highlights. Silen is currently working on her first novel, a YA mystery. She lives in Washington, DC.

Mentor: Kristen Witucki

Kristen Witucki is the author of two books: The Transcriber, a Gemma Open Door Book for Young People, and Outside Myself, her first novel. Her shorter fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Brain, Child; Literary Mama; Exceptions: The Art and Literary Journal for Students with Disabilities; Wordgathering; and LightHouse Interpoint, the literary blog of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco. She works as the curriculum and content editor for Learning Ally’s College Success Program for students who are blind or visually impaired, as a teacher for VISTAS Education Partners, and as a mentor for New Jersey’s EDGE Program, and, during the pandemic, she worked as a homeschooling mother. She lives with her husband and three children in Highland Park, New Jersey, and is beginning to dabble in poetry.

Mentee: Kolina Cicero

Kolina Cicero is a writer of fiction who is interested in how absence shapes our lives and whose work searches for meaning in loss, abandonment, and disappearance. Cicero has an undergraduate degree in journalism and mass communications with a minor in Italian studies, and a graduate degree in Italian studies from Middlebury College. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children.

Poetry

Mentor: Millicent Borges Accardi

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Quarantine Highway (2022). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, CantoMundo, California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (COVID grant), Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal), and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in Topanga Canyon, California, where she curates the popular Kale Soup for the Soul literary series.

Mentee: Nina Colette Peláez

Nina Colette Peláez (b. 1989) is a poet, educator, artist, and cultural producer based in Maui, Hawaii. Peláez is an adoptee born in Las Vegas, Nevada, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MA in art history from Williams College and an MFA in poetry from Bennington College, and is the associate director of The Merwin Conservancy, an arts and ecology organization that cares for the home and garden of poet W. S. Merwin.

Mentor: Wendy Barnes

Wendy Barnes’s first full-length book, Landscape with Bloodfeud (2022), was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. She received a 2022 Fellowship in Prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is an associate professor of English at Union College in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and was recently a visiting artist in residence at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Mentee: Abi Pollokoff

Abi Pollokoff is the author of night myths • • before the body (Red Hen Press, forthcoming 2025). TriQuarterly nominated her work for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems can also be found in the Seventh Wave, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Radar, where she was a finalist for the Coniston Prize. Currently, Pollokoff is the managing editor for Poetry Northwest Editions and works in publishing.

Mentor: Angela Gabrielle Fabunan

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan is the author of Young Enough to Play (University of the Philippines Press, 2022). She was born in the Philippines and raised in New York. She teaches at the Department of English and Literature at Silliman University.

Mentee: Camille Hernandez

Camille Hernandez is an author and trauma-informed education specialist. She calls herself a literary doula, tenderly providing readers with the strength to birth the unnamed vocabularies of our deepest ache to find pathways toward our collective liberation. Her debut book, The Hero and the Whore, debuted as Amazon’s number one new release in the sociology of abuse genre. She lives in Anaheim, California, with her family.

Mentor: Keith Kopka

Keith Kopka received the 2019 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection of poems, Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020). He is also the author of the critical text Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry (Great River Learning, 2018). Kopka is a senior editor at Narrative and the director of the low-residency MFA at Holy Family University in Philadelphia.

Mentee: Alana Pedalino

Alana Pedalino is a writer with work in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Bon Appétit, and Struggle Mag. In 2024, she placed as a finalist in the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize competition; earned a special mention from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest Fellowship for Emerging Writers committee for her perfect jury score, in addition to a partial fellowship; and made her children’s book debut with Kenny and the Cookie Lady (Windmill Books). Other accolades include recognition from 92NY, ACES: The Society for Editing, the MDDC Press Association, the University of Maryland MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the Lannan Fellows Program.

Mentor: Amy Lerman

Amy Lerman lives with her husband and cats in the Arizona desert, where she is an English faculty member at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris, won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared in Book of Matches, the Madison Review, Midwest Review, Radar Poetry, Rattle, and other publications.

Mentee: Mikaela Hagen

Mikaela Hagen lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a bilingual middle school teacher. After a childhood of prolific poetry writing, she took a two-decade break from the practice and is just now returning. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Naugatuck River Review and the Moon City Review, and she was the winner of the 2023 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest (traditional verse).

Mentor: Michelle Menting

Michelle Menting is the author of three collections of poetry and teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Southern Maine. Some of her recent poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Passages North, the Cincinnati Review, West Trestle Review, Tar River Poetry, ONE ART, and others. She lives in rural Maine, where she also directs a small-town library.

Mentee: Betsy Merbitz

Betsy Merbitz (she/her) has been a featured performer at the queer music and poetry series Homolatte and a semifinalist in Guild Literary Complex’s Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards poetry competition. Her poems have appeared in the anthology S/He Speaks: Voices of Women and Trans Folx by Moonstone Press, Santa Clara Review, and Querencia Press Winter 2024. She works as a birth assistant and massage therapist.

Mentor: Emily K. Michael

Emily K. Michael is a blind poet and writing teacher from Jacksonville, Florida. She is currently the poetry editor for Wordgathering at Syracuse University. Her book Neoteny: Poems is available from Finishing Line Press.

Mentee: Lindsey Schaffer

Lindsey Schaffer is the author of City of Contradiction (Selcouth Station, 2022) and Witch City (dancing girl press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Minnesota Review, Superstition Review, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and elsewhere. Schaffer has received scholarships and fellowships from the Indiana Writers Workshop, AWP, the City of Bloomington, and the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. She serves as a poetry editor for Variant Literature.

Mentor: Karen Rigby

Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press) and Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, forthcoming 2024). A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, she has poems published in Poetry Northwest, the London Magazine, and other journals. She is a freelance book reviewer.

Mentee: Magdalena Arias Vásquez

Magdalena Arias Vásquez is a trilingual storyteller, poet, and translator from Panama. Her words have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI and Jet Fuel Review. She has previously been recognized in Fugue Journal’s 2023 Poetry Contest and the 2023 Bullock Poetry Prize with the Academy of American Poets. Arias Vásquez graduated in June 2023 from Williams College, where she majored in English and French. She currently lives in New York City.