Gloria Alvarez is a novelist and freelance writer. Her third book, Desert Kiss, won a Latino Literary Hall of Fame award. She has lived in Mexico, Spain, and Indonesia and has served as a writer-in-residence with WITS for 9 years. A member of Novelists Inc. and the Authors Guild, Gloria holds a B.S. in Spanish from Georgetown University and an M.A. in linguistics from the Ohio State University. She lives in Houston with her husband, two daughters, and three Indonesian felines.

 

Miah Arnold is a fiction writer from rural Utah educated at Carleton College, The New School for Social Research, and the University of Houston where she recently earned a PhD in creative writing and literature. Miah also works for UH and Inprint, and has served as a fiction editor at Gulf Coast and a poetry editor at Lyric Poetry Review. She has also been a reporter at the Salt Lake City Tribune, a dog washer, and web programmer. Her stories appear in a number of literary magazines, including Confrontation, Painted Bride Quarterly, and the South Dakota Review. She won a Barthelme Award for nonfiction in 2006 and the Inprint/Diana P. Hobby Award for her fiction at the University of Houston in 2008. She is working on the last draft of a novel and relies heavily on the love and support of her children and her husband Raj.

 

Thomas Calder is currently working on his MFA in fiction at the University of Houston. In 2008, he received his BA in English from the University of Florida. He has taught for Asheville Writers’ Workshop and has attended the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, as well as Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop.

 

Chuck Carlise was born in Canton, Ohio, and has since lived in twelve states and on two continents.  He holds degrees from Wittenberg University and the University of California at Davis, and has been awarded fellowships from the Mitchell Center, Wildacres, Inprint, and the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow.  His poetry and nonfiction appear in Southern Review, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, and others.  He is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where he is the nonfiction editor of the journal Gulf Coast.  He has taught with WITS for four years.

 

Marcia Chamberlain earned a BA from the College of William and Mary and an MA from Rice University.  She has taught with WITS for 14 years.  In addition to receiving an Envision Grant from Rice University, she also has won a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Practicum Fellowship, a Teaching Tolerance grant from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Emerging Filmmaker Grant from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County (now Houston Arts Alliance), and was a finalist for the 2009 Bechtel Prize. She has published essays about medieval nuns and Chicano revolutionaries and is working on a collection of nonfiction.

 

Tova Charles is a performing spoken word artist from Lafayette, LA, and Austin, TX.  She served as the creative director for Texas Youth Word Collective, and she worked with Dr. Sheila Siobhan at They Speak, Austin’s premier youth poetry slam. She has opened for the legendary rap artist MC Lyte and has performed all over the country in national slams, placing 5th in the 2009 National Poetry Slam. Tova is the author of Quiet, The Voices in my Head have Something to Say and produced the CD Something New.

 

Carina Christensen is an artist and elementary teacher who gained her first teaching experiences in her native country of Argentina. After completing her studies in art and elementary education, she taught in elementary schools in Buenos Aires. She then completed an international lifeguard instructor certification and taught swimming to over 500 students during the summer time. Before coming to the United States, she instructed children and teenagers in yoga, art, and language at a non-profit rehabilitation community center in her hometown of Rosario. Carina lives in Houston with her husband and two-year-old son.

 

Sara Cooper comes to Houston from Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she received an M.F.A. in poetry. While there, she directed a college-access program for high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds and taught writing through The Border Book Festival’s Emerging Voices Program, The Women’s Intercultural Center, and Las Cruces’s Writers in the Schools program. Since becoming a Writer in Residence with Houston’s WITS last year, she has introduced alternative media to the writing classroom, including filmmaking and blogging through collaborations with the Aurora Picture Show and a Houston-area high school. She currently teaches at the University of Houston, where she is pursuing a PhD in English.  Her writing has appeared in The Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and Arizona Highways.

 

 

Jesse Donaldson was born and raised in Kentucky and attended Kenyon College, where he studied English and history. He was a James Michener fellow in fiction and playwriting at The University of Texas-Austin. His work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Little Star, The Kenyon Review, and Confrontation. He previously worked as an editor at Phaidon Press, as fiction editor for Bat City Review, and has taught at Eastern Kentucky University and Houston Community College.

 

 

Ryan Dilbert earned his BA in Chinese studies at University of Texas Austin and his M.F.A. in creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. His novel Time Crumbling Like A Wet Cracker (No Record Press) was published in spring 2011. His story Anything was Anything earned a spot in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2009. He has taught writing and ESL in South Korea, Austin, Venice Beach, and China.

 

Los Angeles native, Mignette Patrick Dorsey moved to Houston, Texas, and graduated cum laude with an English degree from the University of Houston. She began her journalism career as a staff reporter for Houston Community Newspapers and later the Houston Post where she won the Aldo and Atrium awards for fashion feature stories. After the demise of the Post, she worked freelance and on contract for the Houston Chronicle, later serving as an associate editor for a local magazine. She left to enter the world of public relations as a City of Houston spokesperson, followed by a career as a high school journalism and developmental reading educator. Currently, she is an English graduate student at the University of Houston, teaches writing classes at a Houston-area community college, and is the author of Speak Truth to Power, The Story of Charles Patrick, a Civil Rights Pioneer.

 

Ryler Dustin has represented his native Seattle twice in the National Poetry Slam and was a finalist in the Individual World Poetry Slam. He traveled the country performing his work in venues such as New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café and Chicago’s Green Mill before obtaining an MFA from the University of Houston. He is a recent finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and winner of the Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize. His book, Heavy Lead Birdsong, appears on Write Bloody press. He teaches for Project Row Houses and is excited to be entering his second year with WITS.

 

Katherine Elliott is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston.  She grew up in Richmond, Virginia and graduated from the University of Virginia.  She currently teaches composition and literature classes at the University of Houston. This is her third year with WITS.

 

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and literature. His poems and reviews have appeared most recently in Linebreak, The Laurel Review, Harpur Palate, Burnside Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Gulf Coast, where he is also a poetry editor. Most recently, he attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference on a graduate student scholarship.

Maryann Gremillion is in her fourth year with Writers in the Schools. Her first micro essay was published in The Sun magazine in October 2010, and in April 2011, she won the Educational and Cultural Opportunity Fund literary grant from Women in the Visual and Literary Arts. She also collaborates with other artists on both collage and writing projects, and her work has appeared recently in local studios and galleries. Maryann taught elementary school for fifteen years. She studied the teaching of writing at Columbia University's Reading and Writing Project.

 

MaryScott Hagle is a native Houstonian who has taught high school English, theatre, swimming, public speaking, and woodworking. She currently teaches Nia, yoga, studio art, and creative writing.  She was education director at the Alley Theatre for seven years and helped MTV Networks launch their newest web presence: ParentsConnect.com.  MaryScott has degrees from Wellesley College and UT Austin. She and her architect husband Daniel Kornberg live with their two daughters in the Historic Houston Heights, where they host regular live music performances in their restored 1904 bungalow.

 

Autumn Hayes is a freelance writer, creative writing teacher, and Teach for America alumna.  She holds a B.S. degree in business administration with a minor in creative writing, graduating cum laude from the University of Southern California. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Defenestration, Southern Women's Review, 7x20, Cuento, Jersey Devil Press, trapeze magazine, and the micro-fiction anthology 140 and Counting. A native Houstonian, she has taught reading, writing, public speaking, math, drama, and vocational welding in Los Angeles, Houston, and the Mississippi Delta.

 

Stephanie Hruzek is a graduate of the architecture program at the University of Texas in Austin. Her love for design and travel took her to Japan, where she taught ESL for six years. Her perfect day would consist of building mud pies after coffee, cycling up the mountain, snowboarding down to the river where a kayak awaits, then reading and writing waves of adventure in the evenings around the campfire. Houston’s concrete peaks and twisting rapids of people are the landscape where she now climbs through the community as Educational Director with FamilyPoint Resources, co-manages a bookstore, and writes.

 

Artist and elementary teacher Carmen Erna Jacobsen got her first teaching experience in Mexico City. She worked for a private English school teaching English as a second language, paying her way through medical school. Teaching came naturally and it was a skill she could carry anywhere she traveled. She loves to write non-fiction and poetry, a skill she worked on while living in Alaska. Carmen now lives in Houston where she has set up musical plays for a Montessori school at the Bayou Theater at UH Clear Lake. She loves to teach children songs, dancing, and writing. She is now beginning her fifth year with WITS and has worked with Family Community Centers in their after-school program. She also had the opportunity to create a small Ballet Folklorico group named “Aztlan”, where children combined poetry with the Mexican “zapateado.” She believes that every student carries a story getting ready to be unfolded.

 

Felicia Johnson is a writer, filmmaker, and mother of three who believes in the magic of the universe, the wonderment of nature, and that art reflects life. She has written about music and culture for the Houston Press, XXL, the Source, and Murder Dog Magazine, among many others. Her film projects include "A Day in the Life," a documentary about the early 90's Hip Hop scene in Houston, and "Street Roda," a video piece about the Brazilian martial art of capoeira angola. Currently Felicia is working on a collection of her children's poetry.

 

Lacy M. Johnson has a PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Lacy has taught writing for over a decade in a wide range of classroom situations—from graduate students at top-tier research institutions to women recovering from substance abuse; from teenagers in their first year of college to bilingual second-graders in Houston’s East End. Her creative and critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sentence, TriQuarterly Online, Nimrod, Memoir (and), Gulf Coast, Pebble Lake Review, and Irish Studies Review. Her first book of nonfiction, Trespasses: A Memoir, about class, race, and gender in the rural Midwest, is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press.

 

Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph is a Ph.D. student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where she is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Best New Poets 2011, Asian American Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Paul & Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship, she is also a Kundiman and Pirogue Collective fellow. She holds degrees from UC Riverside and the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she taught with the Starworks Foundation and Community Word Project. This is her third year with WITS.

 

Rob Kimbro is a graduate of Rice University.  A theatre director and educator with a keen interest in new work, Rob has worked with young writers in the Alley Theatre’s Houston Young Playwrights Exchange (HYPE) and McCarter Theatre’s YouthInk! Program.  He was also one of the founders of the Madison Young Playwrights Festival in Madison, Wisconsin.  Rob’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants premiered at Stages Repertory Theatre in 2011.

 

Emily Koehn was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and received a BA from Oberlin College, an MFA from Purdue University, and an MSW from the University of Houston. She has been a teacher with WITS for three years and previously taught creative writing and literature at Bates College. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Denver Quarterly, Seneca Review, and Pleiades, and she has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. As a licensed social worker in Texas, she has also worked with youth and adults in a variety of settings. She loves walking around the Montrose area with her hound dog.

 

Dickson Lam earned an MFA degree in fiction from Rutgers-Newark University and is also a graduate of UC Berkeley and Columbia University. He has taught in small schools in New York, Oakland, and San Francisco and was a founding teacher at June Jordan School for Equity.  He is currently a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he is working on a memoir about growing up with an absent father and struggling with his identity as an Asian American in a public housing project in San Francisco.  

 

Jameelah Lang received her B.A. in English Literature and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction), both from the University of Kansas. In Lawrence, Jameelah co-founded the Bathtub Kansas Writers' Collective, an initiative aimed at creating a more integral relationship between creative writing and community.  Jameelah also served as the year-long Writer-in-Residence at HUB-BUB, a non-profit, grassroots arts organization based out of Spartanburg, SC.  At the University of Houston, Jameelah is a Ph.D. candidate in Nonfiction/Fiction and has received an Inprint Fellowship, a Teaching Fellowship, and a Mitchell Center Fellowship.  She is a Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast Magazine and has taught with Writers in the Schools since 2010.

 

Weezie Mackey works full time as communications manager at the business school at Rice University and has been a writer and editor with Webster’s Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tootsietoy, Rotary International, and the Williams College Museum of Art. She holds a BA in English from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and an MFA in creative writing from American University in Washington, D.C.  Weezie is the author of the novel Throwing Like a Girl, which was nominated as Best Young Adult Book, 2007, by the Texas Institute of Letters.  She lives in The Heights with her husband and two sons and is currently working on another sports novel for girls called Kick.

 

Fiction writer Melanie J. Malinowski received her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. She holds an MA in English from the University of New Mexico and a BA in English from Pennsylvania State University. Melanie has taught writing throughout Houston to elementary, middle, and high school students and has worked with children at Texas Children's Hospital. She lives in Houston with her daughter Echo and her dog Jezebel.

 

Kate Megear recently moved to Houston from Gainesville, where she completed her MFA in fiction writing at the University of Florida while also teaching various English and creative writing courses.  Kate grew up in New York City and has also lived in Virginia and New Hampshire.  At the University of New Hampshire, she earned an MA in English with a concentration in writing and worked as a poetry intern for The Paris Review.  Currently, Kate is teaching at Houston Community College and working on a novel.

 

Brian Mensik is an Austin-born, Houston-raised fiction writer. He graduated in 2010 from the University of Houston with a BA in English-creative writing and hopes to pursue an MFA in creative writing within the coming year. For the past year, Brian has taught students ranging from 6th grade to the college level.

 

In August of 2009, Meggie Monahan packed up her green Jeep named Blanche and drove from Philadelphia to Houston with lousy air conditioning. Before coming to Texas, Meggie studied literature in Washington, D.C. and spent some time with the Philadelphia Deaf community, teaching adult daily living skills to folks with special needs. Meggie is an MFA student at the University of Houston, where she writes poetry, teaches freshmen, and serves as Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Cimarron Review, The Los Angeles Review, Greensboro Review, NANO Fiction, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Meggie is happy to report that Blanche is still alive and kicking, and she is looking forward to racking up some more miles by traveling to her first WITS classroom this year. 

 

Kelly Moore earned her MFA from the University of Houston where she is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry.  She has received a Collaboration among the Arts Fellowship from the Mitchell Center at UH and an Inprint/Barthelme Award in nonfiction.  Her work has appeared in New Letters, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, and other publications.

 

Deborah ''D.E.E.P'' Mouton is an internationally-known poet/vocalist/songwriter. She published her first poetry anthology, Heartstrings and Lamentations, at the age of 19. She is a certified teacher and the current co-coach of Houston Meta-Four youth poetry slam team and the head coach of the Houston VIPer adult national poetry slam team. She has traveled all over the continent writing, performing, and leading workshops. In 2008, she was ranked as the #2 best female performance poet in the world.

 

Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light, published by Perugia Press, won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for best poetry. Pearson has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships, including two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, she recently moved to Houston with her partner.

 

Caitlin Plunkett was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and spent the first 12 years of life roaming Europe, South America, and a tiny island in the Pacific.  After moving to the United States, she attended Virginia Tech for her undergraduate degrees in international relations and Spanish—all the while exploring the beautiful Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains. Caitlin’s environmental poetry has appeared on Poets for Living Waters, an online response to the recent Gulf Coast oil spill. She is currently in her final year as an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston.

 

Monica Rhor is a freelance journalist and a teacher who was born in Ecuador and raised in New Jersey. Monica has worked as a staff writer at the Associated Press (AP), Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Orange County Register. Her work has won numerous awards, including AP’s 2008 Texas Writer of the Year honor. She currently freelances for the Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle, Latina Magazine, Mamiverse.com, Fox News Latino, and other publications. Monica has taught high school English and journalism and is currently an adjunct instructor at Lone Star College-Kingwood. She received her BA in journalism from New York University.

 

Harriet Riley is a free-lance writer focusing on creative nonfiction and freelance writing. She taught undergraduate writing classes at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, before moving to Houston in 2007.  She has also worked as a non-profit director, hospital marketing director, and newspaper reporter. She has her MA in print journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA in English and journalism from the University of Mississippi.  She enjoys reading, running, and traveling with her family. She is looking forward to her fourth year with WITS.

 

D’Lynn Rubio is a second-year MFA student in the University of Houston's Creative Writing program where she serves as an Assistant Editor for Gulf Coast. She brings with her a practical pedagogy that comes from raising three children and various posts as a pre-school educator. She has a passionate love of reading that ranges from the Homeric classics to contemporary fiction. When she is not tending to her family and graduate studies, D’Lynn likes to sew without patterns, experiment with new bread recipes, and revisit her favorite classic films starring Katharine Hepburn.

 

Yolanda Schulte-Ladbeck, born and raised in Mexico, received an Associate’s degree in Audio Engineering from Houston Community College, where she interned and assisted with music recordings at a local studio. Her incredible passion for working with children grew while serving as an assistant teacher at Big Little School for six years. Yolanda has been a substitute teacher for Spring Branch ISD, where she worked for four years with all grade levels, elementary through high school.  In addition to working in inner-city public schools, Yolanda has held a variety of other placements with WITS including the Menil Collection and The Arboretum. Yolanda is currently working on her own poetry and rough drafting her first future children's book, while raising two wonderful children with her husband.

 

SaMantha “SaM” Shields is a passionate reader, writer, and educator.  A sixth year teacher, debate coach, and spelling bee coordinator at Pershing Middle School, Sam is dedicated to her students’ development as readers, writers, and thinkers.   Sam, who was recognized as a highly effective teacher by Battelle for Kids, believes that everyone has a powerful voice that can enact change.  She joined WITS in 2011.

 

Analicia Sotelo is from San Antonio, Texas and received a BA with honors in English literature from Trinity University. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. She works as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Houston, a writing tutor at Houston Community College, and reads for Gulf Coast. In 2008, she attended the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and, in 2010, she was nominated for the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation award for Texas writers. Her work has been published in Diagram, Gigantic Sequins, and Ink Node, and is forthcoming in Transnational Mexican Artistic and Cultural Production.  This is her second year working with WITS.

 

Rebecca Spears, a poet and instructor, is the author of The Bright Obvious: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her writing appears in If These Walls Could Speak: The Blanton Museum Poetry Project (Univ. of Texas, Austin), The Weight of Addition, TriQuarterly, Calyx, Minnesota Review, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Borderlands, Texas Review, and other journals and anthologies. She has received scholarships from the Taos Writers Workshop, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Vermont Studio Center and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award.

 

Elizabeth Tapia holds a BA in English from the College of Charleston and an MFA. in creative writing from Purdue University. She has worked with various non-profits, including South Carolina Young Playwrights, Center for Talented Youth, and Communities in Schools. For four years, she braved Chicago winters to serve as the Director of the Academic Resource Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In addition to writing, her academic interests include hybrid texts, educational policy, and bioethics. She is currently pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston.

 

Jia Tolentino is a fiction writer from Houston. After studying creative writing, literature, and critical theory at the University of Virginia, she worked in Kyrgyzstan as an English teacher for the Peace Corps. She has been freelancing since her return, recently published her first (ghostwritten) book, and is working on a second book following health care workers in Uganda.

 

Gabriela Villegas was born in Mexico City, where she earned her degree in theater from El Centro Universitario de Teatro. She is the founder of Jaguar Sun, a non-profit organization that combines theater arts with education. Gabriela has written several plays for Young Audiences of Houston, and she is part of their roster of artists. She lives with her kids Marina, Claudia, and Patrick and spends two months of the year in Puerto Vallarta.

 

Nicole Walker is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She received her BA in English and psychology at the University of St. Thomas. She was born at Texas’s southernmost tip, in the city of Brownsville. She thinks she and Emily Dickinson could have been best friends.

 

Elizabeth Winston is a fiction writer originally from the Washington, D.C. area. She earned a BA in fiction and literature from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Houston. In the intervening years, she worked as a newspaper reporter, freelance writer and editor, and grant writer, among other pursuits. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, photography, surfing, playing the drums, running, and taking care of her two bad cats and sixteen-year-old dog, Peanut.

 

Nicole Zaza worked as an editor for Gulf Coast Journal and Envy Magazine, and she has also had jobs looking after chickens, arranging flowers, washing dishes and volunteer coordinating. Nicole is working on her MFA in nonfiction at the University of Houston. She writes, teaches and mentors other writers in various community settings.