Meet our first-year students.
More student bios coming soon!
Tembisa Aborn (she/her) is a South African-American writer based in the Philadelphia suburbs. She primarily writes and reads speculative fiction, and is particularly drawn toward stories focusing on themes of memory, belonging, and trying to figure out what you are from what you aren’t, as well as the unpleasant and the absurd. She can be found getting turned around on public transportation and being moved by things that happen everyday.
Hussein Alkadhim is a first year in the MFA program, hails from Michigan, and already misses the winter.
Duboree Das (she/her) is an Assamese writer and filmmaker. Her work currently focuses on violence within systems of inequality. She has been published in Isele and her short films have toured festivals like Chelsea NY, Salento and Jaipur.
Bronwen Everill (she/her) loves a good story. She is interested in writing fiction about people in the past, exploring themes of migration, family, and intercultural misunderstanding. She especially enjoys writing surrealist humor and stories that are a little bit mysterious and eerie. As a historian, she has written several nonfiction books and her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, Smithsonian Magazine, BBC History Magazine, and the TLS.
Dani Guerrero (she/her) is a fiction writer formerly based in Miami. She has worked for several Florida based organizations focused on restorative justice, and most recently managed a volunteer-based program serving incarcerated writers and students in South Florida. Her writing explores her love for a city and place facing almost certain doom from climate change within her lifetime, and the many diasporic paths that cross within it. Florida and the Caribbean are full of absurd, tragic, magical places—ideal settings to explore ideas of intergenerational trauma, loss, environmentalism, immigration, and folklore. She currently lives with her partner, cat (Obi), and dog (Olive) in South Philly and is excited to experience autumn.
Leah Pellegrini (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer whose essays focus on chronic illness, queerness, and other ways the body reflects and resists the myths of dominant culture. Her writing is informed by her work in organic farming and astrology, and it’s oriented towards advocating for deeper inquiry, integrity, and liberation on both individual and systemic scales. Her work has been published in Compound Butter magazine, Medium’s Human Parts and Curious Publications, mindbodygreen, The Fold Magazine, and more. When she’s not writing, she’s probably running (badly), cooking an epic feast of at least eight different veggies (brilliantly, if she does say so herself), or snuggling her dog named Tomato.
Kat Echevarría Richter (she/her) is a writer based in South Philly. Her work explores matrescence, Puerto Rican identity, and American historiographies, often with a side of humor. Before returning to school, Kat taught dance at Stockton University and served as Artistic Director of The Lady Hoofers Tap Ensemble, for which her work received support from the Bartol Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her creative writing appears in Glamour, Apiary, and Skirt.
Eryn Sunnolia (she/they) is a Philly-based writer who got a business degree before figuring out they should have been a writer all along. Their fiction and nonfiction explores transformation, desire, and how we are changed and shaped by the things that happen to us when we let ourselves crack open right to the messy center. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, HuffPost, Well+Good, and others. She also likes making quilts, and she’s very excited to be here.