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.
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.
Chelsea Cabral
Chelsea graduated from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2019 where she studied English, Political Science, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her literary interests include contemporary American literature, multi-ethnic feminisms, women authors, and literary theory. She has most recently presented on the work of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s annual conference and the National Conference of Undergraduate Research. When not working or studying, she likes to cook, watch films, and find ways to help her community at large. Before coming to UNH, Chelsea spent a year serving in a fourth grade ESL classroom through City Year AmeriCorps in Providence, RI.
Seth Lewis
Seth Lewis is a first-year MA student in English Studies. He received his BA in English and Film Studies from East Tennessee State University in 2019. His research interests include early modern adaptation, specifically in the late twentieth century, global film culture, and the digital humanities. During his time at UNH, Seth aims to explore how the global appropriation of Shakespeare in film and television anticipates political conflict.
Kate Pfeil
Kate Pfeil graduated with her BA in English Literature and Special Education in 2019 from UMass Amherst. Her interests include adaptation studies, disability studies, and 18-20th Century British Literature and her primary novel of interest is “Peter Pan” by J. M. Barrie. She speaks four languages and is working on her fifth, and loves learning about cultures from around the world. She hopes she can combine her interests into her research to be able to more thoroughly explore British Literature with a new lens.
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 summa cum laude from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2019 with a BAE in English and Spanish 7-12 Education with a minor in International Studies. Her research interests include TESOL, language on the internet, and contact linguistics. However, she will still gladly chat with anyone about her previous research with Shakespeare’s tetralogies and Game of Thrones. She grew up on a farm in Nebraska, but enjoys travelling the world as much as she can as well as finding new favorite coffee shops along the way.
Godson Chinwe John
Godson Chinwe John ( an international student), holds a Bachelor's degree in English and Literature from the University of Benin and Post Graduate Diploma in Education, all in Nigeria. He is passionate about teaching English Language. He is so delighted to pursue his Master's degree in English Language and Linguistics in the University of New Hampshire with keen interest in Applied Linguistics and TESOL, which he believes will sufficiently equipped and enable him travel across many non-English speaking countries as an academia, where he intends to engage in writing and teaching English Language to speakers of other languages. He likes reading novels, plays, playing Table Tennis, and Football, his favourite authors include: William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, Chinua Achebe and Langston Hughes.
Irene Doukas Behrman
Originally from the Boston area, Irene Doukas Behrman lived in Portland, Oregon for 8+ years and holds a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from Portland State University. She's interested in delusion, in the stories we tell ourselves and failed attempts at communication, as well as the (very real) relationships between power and privilege. Irene is thrilled to be returning to her preferred coast to start school at UNH, on the same campus where she once visited her older brother at band camp. He was fifteen that summer and came home with a beautiful gothic girlfriend and black painted nails.
Austin Bolton
Originally from Michigan, Austin earned a degree in English from the University of Colorado before moving to New Hampshire to pursue his MFA. He loves reading, writing, poetry, philosophy, and the Oxford comma. Austin has no idea where his life will take him, but wherever that is he's sure to have a copy of the complete works of Henry David Thoreau by his side.
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.
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.
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.
Samantha Granville
Samantha Granville is a fall 2020 MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire for fiction writing. Outside her work in graduate school, she is a freelance writer and social media expert and currently serves as Junior Producer for TEDxPortsmouth and Advisor to UNH's undergraduate fiction journal Scriptor, which she founded during her undergrad at UNH. She’s the author of short story "The Heart of the Machine”, published in Decameron Days. Samantha lives in Rollinsford with her partner Ben and their rescue dog Banjo.
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.
Howard Zachary Lewis
Howard Zachary Lewis is a poet, journalist, playwright, and author. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English. Lewis recently published his serialized novella, The Adventures of Tracy and James, in The New Hampshire. Lewis also volunteers at creative writing workshops for the Telling Room. Currently, he is writing this biography. Lewis lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two cats.
J. Dominic Patacsil
Dom Patacsil is an MFA student in fiction. A Hoosier by birth, Dom graduated summa cum laude from Wabash College with a B.A. in English and Spanish. Between coursework and writing, Dom can be found running dirt roads in the rolling countryside or enjoying a coffee from his beloved Chemex.
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.
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.
Heidi Turner
Heidi is an MFA Fiction candidate originally from Maui, Hawaii. She graduated with her BA and MA in English from Azusa Pacific University in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Her 2015 study abroad experience in Oxford, England solidified her desire to write full-time, and after college, she completed her debut full-length work, The Sacred Art of Trespassing Barefoot, which was published by Heritage Future in 2019. When she's not writing, Heidi is an avid guitar and ukulele player, reader, and caffeine enthusiast.
Liz Joseph
Liz has returned to UNH after receiving her undergraduate degree in English in 2008. The decade in between, she worked as an organic farmer and educator in central Massachusetts. Before that, she played under the streetlights with her five siblings in North Providence, RI. Her writings are outgrowths of these experiences, exploring themes of growth and connectedness in both our internal and physical landscapes. In addition to writing, farming, and playing outside, Liz loves animals, food, photography, crafting, and getting organized.
Benjamin Savard
Benjamin is pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction with an eye toward chronic illness, queerness, and memoir. Prior to UNH, he studied film and media culture at Middlebury College and the University of Edinburgh, but to this day doesn’t know what “media culture” means. Since receiving his BA he has worked as a producer and video editor, primarily in Minneapolis. The writers he most admires are Porochista Khakpour, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maggie Nelson, and Ottessa Moshfegh.
Courtney Spalding-Mayer
Courtney Spalding-Mayer is pursuing her masters in Creative Nonfiction. She studied Social Policy at Northwestern University and went on to work in strategic communications in Chicago before exploring the country as a farmhand and writer. She returned to her native New England nearly a decade ago to teach at an independent high school near the White Mountains and has continued to write about place, attachment, and how we build our lives ever since. She is currently at work on a series of essays exploring family history told through various inherited objects and still enjoys living near the mountains in Holderness.
Rebecca Sperry
Rebecca graduated from UNH in 2006 with a Bachelors in History and a minor in English. She went on to obtain her Masters in Education and has worked as a Special Educator for the last nine years in various public schools in New Hampshire. She is a resident of New Hampshire and spends her free time hiking and writing. Her passion for hiking has translated into her writing and she has over forty articles published for a popular backpacking website, The Trek. Becoming a writer has been her dream since fifth grade, and she is finally ready to make that dream a reality.
Elise Wallace
Elise is most interested in the written word when it is spoken. She explores overheard phrases through her project Found Aloud (foundaloud.com). In her hiking blog (theoneswhowalk.com) she records conversations with hikers and incorporates their recorded stories into her writing. She also writes about backpacking for The Trek. Before pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction she helped a nonprofit, Authoring Action, teach a creative writing process based on memorized spoken word performances. Her writing is inspired by coffee-shop anecdotes provided by years working as a barista, her Appalachian Trail thru-hike, life experiences rooted in emotional memory, and the tenuous division of truth and fiction. She graduated from Wake Forest University with a B.A in English (2008). She and her dog Sadie will always call Winston-Salem, NC home.
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.
Peter Welch
Peter is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction after a career in Health Education and Counseling. He currently works with the UNH faculty unions through AAUP-UNH and Lecturers United-AAUP, and also teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies department. He is a watercolor artist, and recently released a book of his paintings, Splash! He's most interested in truth-filled stories and is currently working on a writing project about men and kindness. He lives in Kittery Point, Maine with his partner Michael and their rescue pup Dasher.
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 a poet from Nashville, TN. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Barnstorm Journal, as well as Graduate Assistant in Communications for the UNH Graduate School office. She studied English literature, French, and theology at Gordon College, and taught English in a French middle school before starting at UNH. Lily is particularly interested in translation, text/image collaborations, dark ecology, and feminist theology.
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.
Johnathan Riley
Johnathan Riley comes from a properly salted family of artists on the glacial shores of Maine, was raised in a house made of blueberries, and rode a moose to school where Stephen King was rumored to be a janitor. After losing a bad bet the night of his high school graduation Riley spent a brief stint in Costa Rica hitch hiking and living in the jungle. He eventually emerged from the thickets of Central America to attend Florida State University where he found spoken word poetry and consequently his writing career blossomed. Riley left FSU with publications in the Kudzu Review and Vellichor Magazine and in 2018 was the recipient of FSU’s Poetry Literati award. He spent the next year in Southeast Asia learning to navigate traffic on a motorbike and teaching English in Ho Chi Minh City. He currently resides in Portland, Maine with his roommate Ryan and his dog Jake. Together they are working on a mixtape set to drop in 2021.
Samuel Rucks
Samuel is a poet from Tulsa, OK, and received a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Oklahoma State University, where he served as a T.A. in the philosophy department. He's interested in urban and rural imagery and their influence on memory. He enjoys meditation and cooking and hopes to perfect his sourdough while living in New Hampshire.
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
Ann DeCiccio is in her second year of the PhD program in Composition Studies. Her interests include the writing students do and the political language society uses around anxiety, invisibility, and trauma – all three of which have been highlighted during the coronavirus pandemic. Ann taught Composition at Nashua Community College for five years. She has taught English Language Arts and Creative Writing at high schools in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Earlier, Ann wrote for several New England technology companies in their communications and technical writing departments. She has also been a freelance writer; some of Ann’s clients included the University of Massachusetts in Lowell and a shelter for survivors of domestic violence.
Ann earned 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. She studied poetry with Robert Pinsky and, as a licensed reading specialist, assisted students with dyslexia using the Orton Gillingham method of instruction.
In her free time, Ann enjoys reading; relaxing at her cottage in Maine with her husband Al and her dog Brigid (a feisty mini schnauzer); learning to play the piano (again); as well as building Legos, coloring, and running around with her six grandchildren. Ann writes a poem every morning.
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.
Scott Lasley
Scott Lasley is a doctoral candidate and an Associate Director of the University Writing Program. His research interests lie in writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines and undergraduate research. His dissertation examines how students' identities as research writers influence how they utilize information literacy practices across different research writing experiences.
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.
Rachel Roy
Rachel is in her second year of the Composition and Rhetoric Program. Her research interests include writing center studies, disability studies, and the teaching of writing to non-native English speakers. She has her BA in English and MS in Publishing from Pace University.
Jennifer Daly
Jennifer Daly is a PhD student in English Literature. Her conference presentations include: “Let It Be Known: Margaret Fuller’s Voice in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Work on Women’s Rights” and “The Father of Transcendentalism and the Mother of American Feminism: The Influencing Friendship between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson.” She also attended the 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Session "Transcendentalism and Reform in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller." Her research will focus on the transcendentalists, original ideas, plagiarism, and teaching writing. She has been teaching First Year Writing for the past four years at Montclair State University and Sussex County Community College, both in New Jersey.
Elizabeth Davis
Elizabeth is a PhD student studying 19th-century British literature. Her main interests are women’s literature, the marriage plot, and the incorporation of fairy tales and folklore into the novel. Her favorite authors include the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Gaskell. She received her MA in English Literary Studies: Romantic and Victorian Literature from Lancaster University in 2016 and wrote her dissertation on the use of oral folklore in the Victorian Gothic novel.
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.
MElissa Kleinschmidt
Melissa Kleinschmidt is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Hampshire. In her doctoral studies, she is particularly interested in early modern women’s epistemologies, early modern women’s practice of medicine, the spaces where these epistemologies and medicine interact, as well as how their practice of medicine interacts with other intellectual shifts, especially religion, science, and race. She recently presented at the 2019 Conference on John Milton on Eve’s medical knowledge in Paradise Lost, as well as the 2019 CLA Conference on medicine and intertextuality between August Wilson and Shakespeare. She also served as a co-workshop organizer at the 2018 Attending to Women Annual Conference. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Manual Culture, Women’s Medical Practice, and English Health in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Wroth,” argues that early modern women’s medical practice was not only grounded in the tenets of expectations prescribed in early modern domestic and conduct manuals, but also participated in broader nation-building enterprises—as is seen in depictions of women’s actions in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Wroth.
Daniel Lauby
Daniel G. Lauby is a third-year Ph.D. student studying early modern adaptation, gender and sexuality, and the nineteenth-century domestic novel. He is currently revising a series of articles that deal with early modern adaptation and nationalism in various novels and films. He recently received his feminist studies graduate certificate in May, 2020 and published an essay titled "Queer Fidelity: Marlowe's Ovid and the Staging of Desire in Dido, Queen of Carthage" in the collection Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre, edited by Lisa S. Starks. His previous publications include "Sadomasochistic Cyclicality: Appropriations of Shakespeare's ‘Dark Lady’ Sonnets in Dickens's Great Expectations" and “The Duchess of Malfi and the Male Grotesque / Royal Shakespeare Company.” Before coming to UNH, Daniel was a high school English teacher and adjunct instructor. When not researching and writing, Daniel enjoys camping, hiking, snowboarding, and playing classical guitar.
Leanna Lostoski-ho
Leanna Lostoski-Ho is a fifth-year Literature Ph.D. candidate 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. She is currently working on her dissertation, which will focus on representations of the environment in Modernist literature. 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.