Temperance Aghamohammadi (PhD) is an Acolyte of the
Exquisite. She is an Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New England Review, ANMLY, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, The Missouri Review, Annulet, and elsewhere. Her scholarship revolves around global avant garde poetry and poetics, focusing on critical hermeneutics, sound studies and sonics, nonrepresentational modes and techniques, and prosody, as well as philosophy and visual art. She holds an undergraduate degree in the Writing Seminars and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and recently completed an MFA in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis.
Maggie Allan (PhD) just earned her undergraduate degrees in English and Environmental Studies in Ohio University’s Honor Tutorial College. Her undergraduate thesis analyzes British and American science fiction imaginaries of the early 1960s through the lens of the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt school to confront the narrowed ecological and imaginative dimensions of the Anthropocene. Along with popular culture and science fiction studies, her research interests include Marxism, critical theory and pedagogy, labor history, and utopian fiction. Throughout and after college, she has worked as a journalist for Appalachian Voices, a farmer, and a union organizer.
Eric Aston (PhD) graduated from the University of Washington in 2022 with a BA in English and Philosophy. Broadly, he is interested in modernism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism—and, more specifically, in listening for the harmonies and dissonances created between these traditions as they adapt (or fail to adapt) to the political and cultural crises of the interwar period. Most of his writing in this field, up to this point, has focused on the work of William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Until recently, he worked as an English tutor at Walla Walla High School.
Hayon Cho (PhD) received her BA in English Language and Literature, with a minor in French Language and Literature, from Seoul National University in 2021. She went on to receive her MA in English Literature from the same university in August 2024, and is the recipient of the Fulbright Graduate Program Award. Her research focuses on contemporary representations of American slavery and African American racialization in fiction and dramatic literature. She is also interested in comparative race studies, concentrating on Korean (or Asian) and African American experiences.
Callum Goetz (PhD) is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies. His literary interests include American literature, Arabic literature, modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, political economy, critical theory, and deconstruction. Callum received his MA in English from New York University, having written his thesis on theories of metaphor under Prof. Robert Young, and his BA in History from Brown University.
Annie Howard (MFA+MA – Creative Nonfiction) is a journalist, historian, urbanist and organizer currently living in Bridgeport. Her written work has appeared in The Chicago Reader, The Guardian, The Baffler, Slate, Pitchfork, The Nation, and elsewhere. Annie works as a housing organizer and is currently fighting to pass the Just Cause for Eviction ordinance in Chicago’s City Council. You can also catch her radio show City Dreams on Lumpen Radio every first and third Wednesday at 10 am.
Jon (Won) Lee (MFA+MA – Poetry) is a Korean-American poet, visual artist, and writing consultant. He received his BA from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in creative writing at the University of Oregon, where he studied with Garrett Hongo and Matthew Dickman. His poems explore diasporic consciousness, grief, and the double binds of relationality. His work appears in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Action, Spectacle, and Airplane Reading.
River Ngu (PhD) was born in Borneo, Malaysia and raised in California and New York, both the suburbs and the city. They graduated from Princeton four years ago, where they studied English and anthropology. They conducted fieldwork on autonomous migrant squat communities in Athens, Greece and analyzed walking as a mode of constructing and deconstructing identity in mostly contemporary novels. After graduation, they worked on oral history and documentary projects on social housing and queer sports in New York. At Northwestern, they are interested in bringing together psychoanalytic, historicist, and queer methodologies to theorize narratives of development and nondevelopment in diasporic Asian American/Anglophone cultural texts.
Yaa Nkrumah (PhD – CLS) holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees from Howard University in African Studies and Political Science, where she graduated summa cum laude. Yaa’s scholarly investments interrogate embodied performance and the role of women in West African Islamic literary traditions, analyzing how women speak through the narrative as a form of societal critique and simultaneous religious devotion. Broadly, she is interested in the role of women in the Black radical tradition and exploring the literature of the African diaspora.
James Ortiz (MA) recently graduated from Vanderbilt University with a BA in English and History. His primary interests are in 19th-century American literature and environmental histories of the 20th- and 21st-centuries. Specifically, much of his scholarship focuses on the works of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe and their efforts to construct worlds of decentered human subjectivity as methods to reveal systems of inherent violence surrounding them. He also served as Vice President of Vanderbilt’s Bird and Bug Club and enjoys getting in touch with and learning about the natural world.
Wenshu Qiao (PhD) earned her BA in English and Psychology from Mount Holyoke College in 2020, followed by an MSt in English from the University of Oxford in 2021. Her master’s thesis focused on the presence and boundary of the auditory sense and Whitman’s language about sympathy in Leaves of Grass. Wenshu’s research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century American and British poetry, the history of senses and emotions, affect studies, cognitive poetics, and media studies. Before moving back to the United States, she worked as a journalist in China.
Rafael Reza (MA) recently finished a BA in English with a concentration in Literary History at DePaul University, where he focused on the major trends of European and American literature in the 18th-21st centuries. As co-president of DePaul’s Indigenous Alliance, he combined community outreach within the American Indian community of Chicago with his professional career. He volunteers as a tutor and support for Native students in their own academic pursuits, and also enjoys road trips, collecting vinyl, and saving abandoned plants.
Ronnie Rose (MFA+MA – Creative Nonfiction) is a writer and Fulbright fellow (Mexico 2017-18), and until recently, director of a community-based nonprofit for youth in Oakland, CA. He holds a 2022 MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from San Francisco State University, where he cultivated an interest in second-language writing development and teacher written feedback. He has worked in a variety of educational environments, including teaching at Mexico City’s second-largest public university, assisting in academic writing courses at SFSU and UC Berkeley, tutoring adolescents in East Palo Alto, and leading activist workshops across North America. He is the co-founder of an international animal rights organization, co-creator and producer of the now-defunct The Green Pill podcast. He has raised over $15 million to support homeless and systems-impacted youth, as well as adults recovering from substance use disorders, through grant writing, capital campaigns, and funds development. Ronnie has been vegan for 18 years and lives with an 18-year-old former street dog named Ira.
Before moving to Chicago, Robin Seiler (MFA+MA – Poetry) lived in Washington, DC, where she worked in communications on issues such as reproductive freedom and combatting book bans. Her poems seek to blur boundaries between internal and external landscapes, exploring desire, the mystical/apophatic, sound, synesthesia, and connections between queer identity and nature. Her poems have been published in L’Ephemere Review, Silk + Smoke, and Bowery Gothic.
Alaia Snell (PhD) recently completed her undergraduate degree at the University of North Texas, where she earned her BA in English Literature, BS in Economics, minors in Spanish and History, and a certificate in Latinx and Mexican-American studies. Grounded in racial and climate justice advocacies, her research interests include Indigenous studies, decolonial methodologies, speculative fiction, and the environmental humanities. Her work specifically studies connections between multiracial narratives of climate migrants, community-building projects in the face of forced displacement, and the role of traditional knowledges in imagining extra/planetary futurity, which she began exploring as an undergraduate with support from the Ronald E. McNair Fellowship. Her scholarship on Asian-American counterstory, inspired by AsianCrit Theory and her mother’s Vietnamese cooking, is published in Writers: Craft and Context and preparing for republication in Aja Y. Martinez’s second edition of her award-winning book Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. Her most recent project on Octavia E. Butler, space colonization, and Indigenous astronomies is forthcoming in Oxford Press’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.
Avi Waldman (PhD) received her BA and MA from the University of Chicago in 2022. She wrote her master’s thesis on temporality, nationalism, and utopian impossibility in the novel Isra Isle. Her research interests include postcolonialism, Jewish-American literature, American literature of the 20th-century, theories of nationalism, and Marxism. She recently taught writing to undergraduates in the social sciences core program at the University of Chicago.
Ruiyi Zhu (PhD) received her BA at Amherst College for English and Classics in 2024. She is interested in early modern drama and literature, affect theory, and psychoanalytic theory, as well as BIPOC/global/de-colonial reclaimings and appropriations of Shakespeare. Her undergraduate thesis was a Bataillean/Kristevan reading of Shakespeare centered around excess and the affective quality of femme corpses in Shakespeare plays. Rui enjoys bouldering, theater, manuscripts and artifacts, and the horror genre.