Andrea Arnstein
A non-traditional student who earned a BA in American Studies from Marlboro College in 1999 and a BA in English Literature from Keene State College in 2019. Has a passion for twentieth-century American as well as Post Colonial literature and analyzing how they reflect social changes in the Post Imperial/ Post-industrial world. Is also passionate about dystopian writing, Holocaust literature, and enjoys drawing similarities between the social norms and expectations represented in Medieval literature and contemporary mores.
KEVIN BERTOLERO
Kevin Bertolero is in the MA program for English Studies. Originally from Syracuse, New York, he completed his undergraduate degree at Potsdam College where he studied Literature, Philosophy and Art History. He is interested in studying 20th century American Literature, with an emphasis on LGBTQ Literature and Film Studies. Kevin is the founding editor of Ghost City Press, and his poetry and essays have appeared in Maudlin House, Drunken Boat, Peach Mag, Tenderness Yea, OUT/CAST and elsewhere. He loves food, film, and Frank O’Hara. Find him on Twitter @KevinBertolero.
Ellen Bruton
Ellen graduated with her BA in English from the University of New Hampshire in 2018. Her interests include British Literature ranging from the 17th to 19th centuries, along with British and New England history. Ellen combines her love of literature and history by working as a research assistant for Professor Baumgartner in the English department for a project on African American history in New England, and making that rich history better known and accessible to all. She hopes that she can further use her love of literature and history to continue down different avenues of primary source research in the future. Ellen also completed studies at the University of New Hampshire in Equine Science and has an interest on the influence of equines in our lives both in the past and in present day.
JACK CROUGHWELL
Jack Croughwell is a second-year Master's student in English Studies. He received his BA in English Creative Writing with minors in Theatre Arts and Italian Studies from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. A devout writer and reader of fiction, Croughwell loves exploring both the classic and contemporary modes of crafting stories. In 2017 he received a Writer's Digest Popular Fiction award for his short story "Love, Ben." In his spare time not on campus or working with books in any capacity, Croughwell is a reformed comedian and periodic actor from the Lowell, MA area. Before UNH, he was a substitute preschool teacher working with age groups between 3 months old and 4 years old and (above all else) misses the conversations.
JESS FLARITY
Jess Flarity is a science fiction scholar and writer. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, he has presented his research at the annual conference for the Science Fiction Research Association, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, Worldcon, and the international Philip K. Dick festival. He recently published a short story in the time travel issue of The London Reader and his debut novel is forthcoming from a publisher in New York. His current research interests include: interactive fiction, postcolonialism, the Anthropocene, bizarro literature, Stanislaw Lem, and the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. A former middle school teacher and writing specialist, Jess is excited for the opportunity to teach at UNH through a TAship.
Kate Pfeil
Kate Pfeil is an incoming Master’s student in English’s Studies and is originally from central Massachusetts with her BA from UMass Amherst. She is lover of fiction reading and writing, and particularly enjoys Shakespeare, Japanese Literature and Romantic poetry with her favorite author being Haruki Murakami. Kate is a professional book reviewer, working with many of the biggest publishers and authors in the states and Canada to bring readers early reviews and opinions on upcoming releases in all genres and age groups. She also speaks 5 languages and is currently working on her sixth and has a passion for learning about other countries and their literature.
Peri Sanechiaro
Peri Sanechiaro is a first-year Master's student in English Studies. She is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies. Peri received her Bachelor's degree in English Teaching and Women's Studies with a minor in Spanish from UNH in 2019. She is interested in women's literature and representation in curriculum. When Peri is not in school, she works for Girls Inc.'s Young Women's Leadership Academy teaching young women how to problem-solve and critical leadership skills. Her favorite book is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Emily Hemmer
Emily graduated from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2018 with a BAE double major in English and Spanish Secondary Education with a minor in International Studies. During her undergraduate career, she enjoyed literature-based research involving Shakespeare’s tragedies and the television series Game of Thrones. Now, she is excited to pursue a different track with English: Language and Linguistics at UNH. She grew up on a farm in Nebraska near the small-town of Lindsay, but enjoys travelling the world as much as she can as well as finding new favorite coffee shops along the way.
RACHEL BULLOCK
Rachel graduated from the State University of New York at Oswego with a degree in creative writing and biology. She is a third-year MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire. Originally from upstate New York, Rachel enjoys painting and cooking in her free time. Her favorite animals include but are not limited to: wolves, cows, and red pandas. Her favorite author at the moment is Carmen Maria Machado.
Luke Cai
Luke Cai is a freelance writer from Worcester County, Massachusetts with a BA in English and Sociology. Formerly, he was a contributor and editor at his college newspaper at newworcesterspy.net. Today, he pursues his late passion for art as an aspiring comic creator, a member of ArtsWorcester, and occasional zine contributor. He hopes to finish a novel and the limited sci-fi/martial arts webcomic series Return of the Hunted by the end of his MFA career. Follow his adventure @lukecwolf
Laura Chisholm
Laura is a part-time student in the MFA program and works full time in advancement at UNH. She studied English and Italian at Wellesley College and earned an M.A. in English Literature at UVA. Laura spent much of her life living abroad before moving to New Hampshire. After 22 years of campus life at Phillips Exeter Academy, where her husband teaches, Laura and family recently moved to an old farmhouse in Lee, where projects and critters abound.
Via D'Agostino
Via graduated from Ohio Northern University in 2019 with a double BA in Creative Writing and Spanish and minors in Psychology and Literature. She hopes to one day be able to support herself by writing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry full-time. Meanwhile, she plans to read and write her way through imagined lands while working on her MFA, and then travel the actual world teaching English before getting her Ph.D. She has several publications in a variety of genres, and in addition to her love of the written word, Via is also passionate about animals (especially dogs), hiking/backpacking/being outdoors, Greek mythology, and all forms of magic, big and small.
MARY DUQUETTE
Mary is a MFA candidate in Writing with a concentration in Fiction. She is also a singer and guitar player. She loves to cook, and walk her dog, and believes that staring into space and napping should be mandatory daily activities. She is currently at work on a novel.
Eve Glasergreen
Eve graduated from Cornell University with a BA in English and French, and an honors thesis on water imagery in Montaigne's Essais. She was a varsity distance runner for Cornell, and will compete for UNH track and field. She gets her best ideas on muddy trail runs. A few of her favorite creatives include Helen Oyeyemi, Federico García Lorca, and Frida Khalo.
ALEXANDRA GRIMM
Alexandra graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in English, and is currently in her fifth and final semester of teaching and studying fiction at UNH. A proud native of the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, Alexandra loves snail mail, strong black tea, and all dogs.
CHARLOTTE GROSS
Raised and educated in New Hampshire, Charlotte Gross never thought the granite hills and fall leaves would keep her here this long. A fiction student in the MFA program, she earned her BA from Dartmouth College where she skied on the Nordic team and wrote/illustrated a graphic novel about wildfire. When Charlotte's not writing, she can be found exploring the woods, drawing mountains and trees, and caring for two retired ranch horses back home. Charlotte was last year's Music Hall intern.
BARBARA HOOVER
Barbara Rath Hoover is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, a former Trustee of the NH Writers' Project (NHWP) and host of the NHWP Webinar writing series, and a member of Grub Street and Romance Writers of America. She's been published in the online journals, The Birds We Piled Loosely (October 2014) and The Scarlet Leaf Review (August 2018). She writes in the dark hours surrounding full-time work as an Information Technologist. Ms. Hoover's writing journey is chronicled at http://barbararath.com.
ESTHER LIM
Esther is a Taiwanese-Malaysian who has spent the last couple of years studying in Chicago, Illinois. She loves traveling, and she’s been blessed with the opportunity to study abroad in Hyogo, Japan in 2017 as an exchange student. While she studied Linguistics and Japanese as an undergraduate, She’s decided to pursue an MFA in Fiction here at UNH.
William Price
Born in San Diego, California, Bill has lived there, in Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and now New Hampshire. He is a veteran of the US Army, being another in a long familial line of veterans dating back before the 20th century. Bill has traveled extensively, having visited (among other places) Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Poland, Greece, the Aegean, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and a number of places in the Middle East. He has a Bachelor of Arts in English and History, as well as two Master of Arts, one in English and the other Classical Studies. Although interested most in writing creative fiction and some poetry, Bill is especially interested in narrative theory, the study of how we tell stories.
DOUG RODOSKI
Doug is an Army veteran and 2016 UNH graduate (English major, Anthropology minor). He is interested in all forms of journalism, and has taken classes here in Durham in sports writing, reporting world news, and creative nonfiction. While at UNH he has written for The New Hampshire and Main Street Magazine; He is honored to be able to communicate to the world the great job that the young people of the UNH community do every day. (It's a great day to be a Wildcat!) He enjoys reading detective and espionage fiction, and hopes to one day write successfully in that area.
Kelly Sennott
Kelly wrote for a New Hampshire-based arts and entertainment newspaper for five years before going back to school to earn her MFA in fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire, where she’s a third-year student. She's a figure skating fanatic but also loves running and hiking, especially with her dog Pepper.
JaNae Swafford
JaNae’s passion and love for writing goes all the way back to elementary school. She has been writing fiction since the age of 7. After graduating from undergrad with a BA in English (and a Creative Writing concentration), she decided to pursue a Master’s in Writing. She is originally from Ohio, and even though she has traveled to many places within the USA’s borders (and outside of them), she has never lived anywhere else except Ohio. She enjoys reading, writing, Netflix and Hulu, shopping, and pasta.
Bethany Clarke
Bethany received her degree in Anthropology from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin in 2015. Between hikes in the New Hampshire woods, she has conducted ethnographic research in Kingston, Jamaica, built houses during her AmeriCorps term with Habitat for Humanity in Minneapolis, MN, and made friends with cute dogs while walking across Portugal.
Wes Hood
Wes Hood is originally from Syracuse, NY; but did his undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, where he graduated this past April with a degree in nonfiction writing. He’s excited to start the MFA in nonfiction program and enhance his writing skills even further. He primarily focuses on memoir and lyric essay, though he has a strong interest in historical nonfiction and writes often about indigenous peoples. A few of his favorite authors include; Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion, Miranda July, & Wayne Koestenbaum. When he’s not writing he’s usually cycling on his road bike or just blaring Stevie Nicks around the house.
Richard Janvrin
From Seabrook, New Hampshire, Richard graduated from UNH in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in Journalism. After exploring multiple avenues, Richard decided to pursue an English teaching career, with the goal of teaching high school/college-aged students. Through the MFA Nonfiction program, Richard hopes to enhance his writing skills and explore portions of his life experiences that will create compelling story material. Outside of the program, Richard has an eight-year-old son, is a bartender, freelance sports journalist and is the lead vocalist for the metalcore band TrueShot. Richard hopes to also use lyrics he's written and morph those into longer-form stories for the Nonfiction program.
Courtney Spalding-Mayer
Courtney Spalding-Mayer is pursuing her masters in Creative Nonfiction. She studied Social Policy at Northwestern University and graduated in 2007. Over the last decade, she worked in strategic communications in Chicago before exploring the country as a farmhand and writer. She then returned to her native New England to teach at an independent high school near the White Mountains in Tamworth, New Hampshire. She lives now in Holderness.
Maggie Wallace
Maggie has written feature articles for New Hampshire Magazine, The Square, The Sound, and The Seacoast Summer Guide, and online for Backpacker Magazine. She has also bicycled across the Northern U.S., thru-hiked the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, and worked a season of trail crew, always with the sense that the White Mountains are her home base. Maggie writes from experience, focusing mostly on backpacking and hiking, growing up in NH’s Lakes Region, and her local community. She is excited to be in her second year of the non-fiction MFA and finished, for now, with instant oatmeal.
Lindsey Wente
Lindsey was born and raised in Minnesota, but her heart belongs to Phuket, Thailand and London, United Kingdom where she lived temporarily. She received her degree in English and theatre arts from The University of Minnesota. Lindsey has an affinity for odd jobs. She loves writing about her experiences as a teacher in Thailand, a Pizza Hut delivery driver, a door-to-door canvasser for PBS, and as a Segway tour guide. She considers herself a humor essayist and takes inspiration from David Sedaris, Chloe Caldwell, and Phoebe Robinson. Lindsey is in a long-term relationship with greasy fast-food. She tries to be the best yogi she can be, has a strong passion for astrology (a typical Aries), and will read your Tarot spread if you ask.
Emily Gore
Emily hails from Prattville, Alabama and received a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in English from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. She's a first year poetry student and a graduate teaching assistant with an interest in writing poems that make people feel the way Sylvia Plath made her feel in 2012. She expects her southern upbringing will leave her entirely unprepared for winter in New England and hopes to adopt a cat as soon as possible to join her first snowy hibernation. She finds joy watching stand-up comedy, scrolling through weird twitter, seeing New England bartenders' faces wrinkle in confusion at the sight of her AL drivers license, and in FaceTime sessions with her now long-distance best friends and little sister.
Lily Greenberg
Lily Greenberg is an MFA student in poetry. Born in Nashville, TN into a musician family, much of her upbringing was arts-centered. She holds a BA in English Literature and French Language from Gordon College in Wenham, MA, and followed undergrad by working as an English teacher in Northern France. Her current interests include translation, trail-running, Radiohead, and Louise Glück.
Rebecca Medvin
Rebecca Medvin is from Miami, FL and received a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Classics from UC Berkeley. Before joining the MFA Poetry program at UNH, Rebecca traveled for a year through South America, focusing on her writing and teaching yoga and meditation. Her interest in Eastern philosophy, eco-poetics, and feminist theory informs her poetry.
Theresa Monteiro
Theresa is a second year poetry student in the M.F.A program. She graduated from Boston College in 2001 with a B.A. in English and Secondary Education. She taught for four years in the Boston Public Schools and has been an at-home mother for fourteen years. She lives in Dover with her husband and six children.
Casey Roland
Casey Lynn Roland is a native of the North Shore of Massachusetts. She works as a Professional Tutor and Mentor in the Writing Center at Endicott College. In the past, Casey worked as a full time high school, and later middle school English teacher. Her primary creative focus is Poetry, however she is also a visual artist and accomplished theater designer/stage manager. Casey works closely with MassPoetry as a workshop leader and as an event coordinator/presenter during the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Casey holds a BA, an MA, and an MAT in English/Creative Writing, all from Salem State University. She spends most of her summers on Lake Winnipesaukee, and learned how to drive a boat long before she could drive a car. Her dog's name is Lucy, her parrotlet's name is Mouse, and she spends most of her time reading and cooking.
Johnna St. Cyr
Johnna is from Rye, New Hampshire. For undergrad, she attended Colby College. She majored in English with a creative writing concentration, and a minor in Economics. After college she completed a fellowship, where she taught in an elementary school in the South Bronx for three years, and earned her Masters in Teaching. At UNH, she studies poetry; she’s interested in hybrid forms where poems can act as a memoir or narrative. In her free time she likes to read and write both fiction and poetry. She also enjoys hiking, running, and spending time with friends, family, and her new pup—Lilah Bean.
Ann DeCiccio
This is Ann DeCiccio’s first year in the PhD program in Composition Studies. She has taught Composition at Nashua Community College for five years. Prior to that she taught English at high schools in three New England states. Earlier, Ann worked in communications and technical writing for several technology companies. She has also been a freelance writer. Some of her clients included a shelter for victims of domestic violence and the University of Massachusetts in Lowell.
Ann has an M.A. in Writing and Literature from Rivier University in Nashua, NH, and a B.A. in English from Wheaton College in Norton, MA.
In her free time, Ann enjoys reading and relaxing in Maine with her husband, Al; playing with her grandchildren; and walking her dog “Brigid,” a sassy, six-year-old mini schnauzer. Occasionally, Ann is inspired to write poetry.
Meaghan Elliott Dittrich
Meaghan is the director of the Connors Writing Center here at UNH, and a doctoral candidate of the PhD program in Composition, where her dissertation is a feminist rhetorical analysis of Eleanor Roosevelt’s rhetoric surrounding food and her failed collaboration with the first food critic of The New Yorker, Sheila Hibben. Meaghan and her husband Brad - a graduate of the Comp PhD program - live in Dover, NH with their daughter, Elliott (Ellie). When not in the Writing Center, Meaghan is either cooking/baking, going for a walk, writing poetry, or finding some delicious seafood chowder and a good beer.
Allison Giannotti
Allison is a 4th-year PhD student studying Composition and Rhetoric. Her research interests include Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines, embodied rhetoric, and science writing. When not hunkering down to read, research, and grade, you will most likely find her eating chocolate in the Connors Writing Center.
Danielle Lavendier-Vitrano
Danielle is a PhD candidate in Composition Studies and an Associate Director of UNH University Writing Programs. Her research interests include embodiment studies, feminist rhetorics, and disability studies. Her dissertation is about the way fat teachers are rhetorically read in the university and how that reading can complicate their professional and personal lives.
Samantha Riley
Samantha Riley is in her fourth year of the PhD in Composition and Rhetoric program here at the University of New Hampshire. Her research interests include embodied rhetoric and visual literacies. Samantha has been studying the literacy practices of student-athletes in order to understand how meaning can be created and conveyed through the use of the body.
Lauren Short
Lauren Short is a sixth year PhD candidate, Associate Director of the University Writing Programs, and general editor for Transitions. She received her MA in English from the University of Louisville, where she also received a Bachelor's in English and Humanities and a minor in Spanish. Her dissertation examines how scholars of faith-based rhetorics disclose their positionalities within, and outside of, their work and how that disclosure ties in with their own professionalization within the field. Call her the queen 'cuz she is obsessed with corgis.
Daniel Lauby
Daniel G. Lauby studies early modern adaptation, particularly as it relates to afterlives, intertextuality, and queer theory. During his time at UNH, he hopes to investigate how appropriations in both high and low culture create interventions through competing precedents. Much of his interest lies in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, but his work has also focused on sixteenth- and twenty-first century adaptations. Previous conference papers and articles have included “Deception and Desire: Queering Ovid in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” “Shakespeare Stage Performance as Character in the Slings and Arrows Television Series,” and "Sadomasochistic Cyclicality: Appropriations of Shakespeare's ‘Dark Lady’ Sonnets in Dickens's Great Expectations." He is currently working on an essay titled “’Speak Like Thyself’: Marlowe’s Ovid and Queer Fidelity” for a collection edited by Lisa S. Starks. Dan previously taught high school English and 3000-level undergraduate courses on Gothic literature and adaptation at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. When he isn’t working, Dan enjoys running, hiking, and playing the banjo.
Jin Lee
Jin Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on Asian American literature, graphic narratives, trauma studies, and postcolonial literary studies and globalization. Her dissertation addresses how contemporary Asian American novels and graphic narratives represent historical trauma. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, The Comics Grid, and American, British, and Canadian Studies.
Leanna Lostoski
Leanna Lostoski is a fourth-year Literature Ph.D. student and Teaching Assistant in UNH's Department of English. Her primary research areas are Modernist literature and Ecocriticism, and her work focuses on representations of the environment, temporality, and humanity's relationship with the nonhuman world in early 20th century texts. She would say her favorite author is Virginia Woolf, and she has published an article on Woolf titled “‘Imaginations of the Strangest Kind’: The Vital Materialism of Virginia Woolf” in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Society. When not working on her scholarship or teaching, Leanna likes to hike or ski depending on the season as well as tour New England's finest breweries.
Stephen Roxburgh
Stephen Roxburgh returned to graduate school after a 40-year career in publishing. Now, a fourth-year doctoral candidate, his fields are comics, visuality studies, and rhetoric. His dissertation will be on the rhetorical functions of photography in long-form graphic narrative. He divides his time between writing the dissertation and a new venture, restoring a historic 186-acre farm in Kingston, NH.