W2W Season 22 header image.

Season 22 Mentors & Mentees

AWP celebrates the mentors and mentees participating in Season 22 of the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. We are thrilled to introduce twenty-five pairs this session, who were matched based on their experience, goals, and writing style. Thank you to our volunteer mentors, and congratulations to the mentees they selected!

Creative Nonfiction

Mentor: Estelle Erasmus

Estelle Erasmus is a 2025 TEDx speaker and the author of Writing That Gets Noticed: Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, Get Published (New World Library, 2023), named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers. She is an adjunct writing professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, an in-demand speaker, a former magazine editor in chief, and the host of the popular podcast Freelance Writing Direct, which was named the 2025 Podcast of the Year in Education from the American Writing Awards. Her website is EstelleSErasmus.com and her Substack is EstelleSErasmus.Substack.com. She can be found at @estelleserasmus on Instagram and TikTok.

Mentee: Julia Beckmann

Julia Beckmann graduated from Harvard in 2022 with degrees in economics, psychology, and Spanish. She was a Division I athlete who previously competed at the junior Olympic level in volleyball for many years. She loves Florida beaches, reading, traveling, writing, and singing, and is a passionate advocate for women’s rights. Beckmann is currently building a startup company alongside writing her first memoir, which focuses on her experiences as a young woman in the male-dominated world of investment banking.

Mentor: Martha Gies

Martha Gies is the author of Up All Night (OSU Press, 2004) and Broken Open (Wandering Aengus, 2024), as well as many stories, essays, reviews, and features in magazines—both literary and slick—and newspapers. She taught creative writing for thirty-four years, at Oregon universities and workshops abroad.

Mentee: Emily Gates Prucha

Emily Gates Prucha is a practicing memoirist and a high school English teacher in her adopted homeland, Prague, Czech Republic. Her personal essays have been published online at Motherwell, Entropy, WOW! Women on Writing, and The Keepthings, among others. She loves baking chocolate chip cookies, foraging Czech forests for mushrooms, and mountain biking with her Czech American family.

Mentor: Hannah Grieco

Hannah Grieco is the author of First Kicking, Then Not (Stanchion, 2025). She writes a literary column for Washington City Paper, edits prose at a variety of small presses and literary journals, and teaches writing at Marymount University. She also works one-on-one with writers as an editor and book coach, helping with manuscript development, agent and publishing house searches, essay and short story placement, and more. Read her work in The Washington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, Brevity, CRAFT Literary, Wigleaf, The Offing, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at HGrieco.com and on most social media at @writesloud.

Mentee: Adela Wu

Adela Wu (she/her) is a second-generation Chinese Taiwanese American physician, writer, and illustrator who currently lives in the Bay Area. She has published science writing for NPR through the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship as well as for ABC News. Her other creative works also appear in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, CLOSLER, Consilience, and Stanford Medicine Magazine, for which she has won national recognition for personal essay writing through AAMC and CASE. Her work has been or will be supported by VONA, the Seventh Wave, GrubStreet, and AWP.

Mentor: Court Harler

Court Harler (she/her) is a queer writer, editor, and educator based in Northern Kentucky. She holds an MA and an MFA. She’s the owner of Harler Literary LLC, founding editor of Flash the Court, and former editor in chief of CRAFT Literary Magazine. Her award-winning, multigenre work has been published around the world. Learn more at HarlerLiterary.llc or FlashTheCourt.com. Find her on Instagram at @CourtneyHarler.

Mentee: Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Hillary Moses Mohaupt is a list maker: She’s a writer, nonprofit operations aficionado, baker, flaneuse, and Francophile. Her work has been published in sneaker wave magazine, Brevity’s blog, The Writer’s Chronicle, Hippocampus Magazine, Distillations Magazine, Split Lip, Lady Science, the Journal of the History of Biology, and elsewhere. She holds degrees in history from Macalester College and the University of Delaware, and an MFA in fiction from Pacific University.

Mentor: Lisa Levy

Lisa Levy is a writer, essayist, and critic. Her work has appeared, among others, in The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, the CBC, and LitHub, where she is a contributing editor. She writes a column on crime books for The Washington Post Book World. Her book, Funeral in my Brain: A Biography of Migraine, is a narrative of her twenty years of chronic migraine; an examination of migraine treatment; a consideration of creative works by migraineurs from Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath to Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud; and a paean to the solidarity of joining the ranks of migraine advocates. Learn more at LisaLevyWrites.com.

Mentee: Amanda Finegold Swain

Amanda Finegold Swain is a family medicine physician and mom of two teenagers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2021 she finally gave in to her creative urges and started her MFA at Rosemont College! Her personal essays and opinion pieces have been published in literary magazines and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is currently working on her MFA thesis, a book of personal essays exploring her experiences as a physician, patient, and mother.

Mentor: Lara Lillibridge

Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of Mama, Mama, Only Mama and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home, and coeditor of the anthology Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility. Her essay collection The Truth About Unringing Phones is forthcoming with Unsolicited Press. Lillibridge is the interviews editor for Hippocampus Magazine and a creative nonfiction editor for HeartWood Literary Magazine, and holds an MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Mentee: Lexxus Coffey Edison

Lexxus Coffey Edison is a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Barbara, in the English PhD program, pursuing an emphasis in Black studies. Her research areas include African American literature and culture, Black performance studies, and creative writing. Her critical creative writing focuses on her upbringing as a young queer Black girl in Palmdale, California, and her Black American experience. In her spare time, she watches K-dramas, tends to her plants, drinks tea, and reads romance novels.

Mentor: McKenzie Long

McKenzie Long is a graphic designer and writer with a passion for nature and public land. She is the author of This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments, which won a Foreword INDIE Gold for Ecology and Environment. She likes cream in her coffee, bright color palettes, and splitter sandstone cracks.

Mentee: Ruth Jeffers

Ruth Jeffers is a nonfiction writer documenting the places, humans, and nonhumans she has witnessed and known. Her essays can be found in Cellar Door and betweenthehighway press, and she is currently writing a travel memoir about the five months she spent in Palestine. She lives in her home state of North Carolina, where she cares for rescued farmed animals.

Fiction

Mentor: Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow’s debut novel, Names Have Been Changed, will be published by Tiny Reparations Books in June 2026. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize special mention, won the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize, and been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. She has an MFA from Boston University and has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among others. Originally from Singapore, she lives in Boston.

Mentee: Shanti Chandrasekhar

Shanti Chandrasekhar is a Maryland-based writer whose words have appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, and many more publications. She has studied fiction writing at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Masters Review Summer Workshop, and Iowa State University, and continues to attend writing courses. Writing gives her a deeper understanding of life, human relationships, and her own self.

Mentor: Tara Campbell

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio fellow, and fiction coeditor at Barrelhouse. She teaches flash and speculative fiction and is the author of two novels, two hybrid collections, and two short story collections. Additional publication credits include The Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. This is her second term as a Writer to Writer mentor. Learn more at TaraCampbell.com.

Mentee: Cathelina Duvert

Cathelina Duvert’s debut novel, The Box, was born from her own experiences with depression. Recognized for her work, Duvert received an honorable mention in the 2024 Chapter One Writing Competition by Black Writers Workspace. She continues to share her journey through writing and speaking engagements, shedding light on the complexities of mental health with authenticity. She lives in New York City with her twin sister and her rescue kitten Maxie.

Mentor: Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities (an NPR Book Concierge and Brooklyn Rail pick for best books of 2020), Patterns of Orbit, Escaping the Body, and more. Her collection Every Galaxy a Circle is forthcoming from JackLeg Press. She is also a founding coeditor in chief of Cotton Xenomorph.

Mentee: Gabriela Lemos

Gabriela Lemos is a Brazilian American writer living in Texas. She received her MA in English with a minor in linguistics and completed coursework for a PhD in comparative literature.

Mentor: Katharine Coldiron

Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials, Junk Film, Wire Mothers, and Out There in the Dark. Her work as a book critic has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other places; her work as an essayist has appeared in Conjunctions, Ms., Booth, and elsewhere. She and her books have been profiled in three countries on radio and television. Find her at KColdiron.com.

Mentee: Meghan McKellar

Meghan McKellar holds a bachelor’s in Spanish and sociology and a master’s in public health specializing in health promotion and behavioral science. She worked in behavioral science for over a decade before pursuing writing full-time. Outside of work, she volunteers on forest restoration projects, studies beginner Portuguese, and attempts to walk long distances through the never-ending summers of Austin, Texas—and anywhere else her feet will carry her.

Mentor: Zeke Jarvis

Zeke Jarvis is a professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Posit, and KNOCK, among other places. His books include So Anyway..., In a Family Way, The Three of Them, Antisocial Norms, It’s Haunted! and The Calling. His website is ZekeDotJarvis.WordPress.com.

Mentee: Nimi Finnigan

Nimi Finnigan is the author of the poetry chapbook A Coconut-Palm Kind of Woman. Her writing has also appeared in The Meadowland Review, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, The Lindenwood Review, and Rosebud. She teaches at South Plains College in Lubbock, Texas, where she lives with her three children and five cats.

Mentor: Albert Liau

Albert Liau is an editor, writer, and educator—as well as a podcast and audiobook enthusiast. His stories have been described as “deeply felt and written with precision” by Ben Loory and as “capturing moonlight in Ziploc bags” by Jack Cheng. Liau holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in biophysics from UC Berkeley. Currently a prose editor at The Adroit Journal, Liau previously was a short fiction editor at CRAFT, where he contributed to the column Art of the Opening.

Mentee: Lauren Holstein

Lauren Holstein is a Seattle-based writer and data specialist with nearly ten years of experience as a nonfiction ghostwriter. Shifting her focus to fiction, she is currently writing a middle-grade novel. She holds a degree in biological sciences and creative writing from Carnegie Mellon University, and her writing tends to explore STEM themes and the fun side of science.

Mentor: Paula Santonocito

Paula Santonocito is a journalist, poet, and fiction writer. She is the author of more than a thousand articles that have been featured in many publications and information outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Florida Times-Union, and others; her work has also been referenced in academic and legal publications as well as books, and translated into several languages. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including West Branch, RHINO, and others. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first novel, COLLECTABLES.

Mentee: Michael Lundy

Michael Lundy holds an MA in English from Northwest Missouri State University and an MFA in fiction from the University of Nebraska. He is retired and is a substitute teacher. He enjoys reading and research, and the outdoors.

Mentor: Marguerite Sheffer

Marguerite Sheffer’s collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, won the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award, was named a “Best Debut Book of 2024” by Debutiful and a “Most Exciting Debut Story Collection” by Electric Literature, and was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Cosmic Background, BOMB, LitHub, and others. At Tulane University she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change.

Mentee: D. P. Snyder

D. P. Snyder is a bilingual writer, poet, critic, and literary translator from Spanish. Her book-length translations include Scary Story by Alberto Chimal, Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, and Arrhythmias by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman. Her original fiction and essays have been translated into Spanish and Chinese, including the story “Sonríe,” translated by Lavín when they were both fellows at the Hermitage Artist Retreat. She teaches literary translation at the NYU School of Professional Studies.

Mentor: Sophie Stern

Sophie Stern is the author of Sweet Nightmares: The Vampire’s Melody, The Luck of the Wolves, Pretty Little Fairies, and more than two hundred other romance, fantasy, and dystopian novels. Her work features characters who are vibrant, sassy, and complicated. Stern’s short stories have been published by Outland Entertainment and Apokrupha, and she regularly hosts writing workshops for Kansas City–based creators. She also writes as L. C. Mortimer.

Mentee: Jennifer Lane

Jennifer Lane is a Michigan-based writer of plays, novels, poems, and essays. A special edition collection of her poetry was published by Edizioni INAUDITE in Italy, and she has published several science fiction romance novels under a pseudonym that reached number one in several categories on Amazon. Her award-winning play To Fall in Love was adapted into a feature film, and her other plays have been developed across the US and internationally. She is a content strategist and creative director, with representation for her fiction by Katie Shea Boutillier (Donald Maass Literary Agency) and for her dramatic writing by Amy Wagner (Stewart Talent). She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Mentor: Laura Venita Green

Laura Venita Green is the author of the debut novel Sister Creatures (Unnamed Press, October 2025). She has an MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received two Pushcart Prize special mentions, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, and Fatal Flaw. She grew up in Germany and rural Louisiana and currently lives in New York City.

Mentee: Elizabeth Vex

Elizabeth Vex started writing as a young child and won her first national poetry award at age twelve. When she’s not busy writing fiction, you might find her tending to her menagerie of goats, ducks, chickens, and cats; riding a unicorn; or taking a nap.

Poetry

Mentor: Gustavo Adolfo Aybar

A lover of hybrid forms of literature, tattoos, and all things martial arts, Gustavo Adolfo Aybar writes about fatherhood, masculinity, baseball, and law enforcement. With an MA in Romance languages and literature from the University of Missouri–Kansas City, Aybar became a writer, translator, and scholar. His first full-length collection, We Seek Asylum, is indicative of his education and diverse passions, along with new work available online via SpanglishVoces.com.

Mentee: Yoon Nam

Yoon Nam was born and reared in Korea. She holds a PhD in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, is a DJ and loves records, and also draws and paints. As a self-taught and multidisciplinary artist, she writes when she can’t paint, and paints when not writing, though her visions, whether nonliteral, conceptual, or verbal, often interact and inform each other. She lived in South Korea for the first two decades of her life, and Korean is her native language. She currently composes poetry and nonfiction prose in both English and Korean. Her three cats are named Reginald, Spicy, and Televisión.

Mentor: Amy Ash

Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase, winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award and the Etchings Press Whirling Prize, and coeditor of Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rogue Agent, River Heron Review, SWWIM, The Journal, and Erase the Patriarchy. She is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Indiana State University.

Mentee: Catherine Menick

Poetry chose Catherine Menick when she ended up an X-Files kid with TGIF-on-ABC peers. She examines health, aging, family, and other human experiences, poking back at the topics’ sharp edges with her own acerbic evaluation. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and their perfect cat.

Mentor: Maya Cheav

Maya Cheav is a Cambodian writer and environmental justice organizer, as well as the author of Lykaia (Bottlecap Press) and Tan’s Donuts (Chestnut Review). Their writing is featured in ALOCASIA, Scapegoat Review, Across the Margin, and others. They were a top ten finalist for the 2023 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize, guest judged by Danez Smith, and a 2024 Tin House Workshop alum. Their work is in the Kevin Atwater “Achilles” Literary Collection. Read more at MayaCheav.com or @mayacheavwrites on Instagram.

Mentee: Brandon Vu

Brandon Vu is an educator in the Bay Area. He has a mother named Julie and a cat named Raymond. His work has appeared on KQED and in Ghost City Review and The San Franciscan.

Mentor: Subhrasankar Das

Subhrasankar Das is a luminary in contemporary Indian literature and hails from Tripura. He is a bilingual poet, translator, and editor whose poetry is known for nuance, satire, and symbolism. Das has authored four poetry collections and translated several notable works. He edits two international journals and has represented India at esteemed literary forums. His work has garnered several awards and has been published globally.

Mentee: Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose is a poet from Los Angeles County with an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Rose’s prose explores the intersections of cultural identity through storytelling, social advocacy, and participation in the global community. Her poems have appeared in notable publications such as the Pushcart Award–nominated Future Splendor: Celebrating a New Renaissance (Infinite Bee Publishing) and the international anthology Regeneration: Writings About Hope and Beyond (edited by Monica Mastrantonio), and as part of the A Eulogy for Jane Doe art exhibition at WOO Studios Art Museum, San Diego (curated by Amalia Clarice Mora).

Mentor: Ann Huang

Ann Huang is a multilingual Chinese American poet, filmmaker, and visual artist based in Newport Beach, California. Her poetry has been featured in Denver Quarterly, Ruth Stone, CONFRONTATION, Poets Choice, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere. She is Ephemera’s June 2023 poet. Her latest manuscript, GARDEN BY THE GLASS DOOR, is the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ 2024 semifinalist. Her collection of poems, Saffron Splash, is forthcoming in 2025 from The Raw Art Review. Learn more at AnnHuangPoetry.com.

Mentee: Adèle Jeanne-Rose

Adèle Jeanne-Rose is a Martinican Afro-Caribbean poet, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist completing an MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work explores queer Caribbean poetics, opacity, and ecological memory, blending multilingual verse, visual poetics, and archival fragments. She is a recipient of the 2025 Fellowship of Honor in Writing from SAIC, one of the program’s highest distinctions awarded to graduating writers. She is also a 2025 AWP Writer to Writer mentee, a 2025–2026 Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library, and a former Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney fellow at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). Her work has appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Antennae, Social Science Information, and A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery.

Mentor: Candice M. Kelsey

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet and educator living in both LA and Georgia. She’s developed a taste for life’s absurd glow, long skirts, and juicy opera podcasts. She also roasts vegetables like it’s a sacred ritual and wears mostly black because her late father-in-law said it’s not her color. Somehow her work has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, and she woke up one day as the author of eight books. Kelsey reads for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal. Please acknowledge her existence at @Feed_Me_Poetry or CandiceMKelseyPoet.com.

Mentee: Marceline White

Marceline White is a Baltimore-based writer and activist whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, The Ekphrastic Review, trampset, yolk, Prime Number, The Orchards, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, and others. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, when not writing, White can be found serving her two cats and telling her son to text her when he arrives at the EDM show. Read more at MarcelineWhiteWrites.com.

Mentor: Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa, and an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire – Barron County. His first book of poems, This Smile Is Starting to Hurt (SEMO Press; Black Lawrence Press), came out in 2024. His poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, jubilat, Ninth Letter, Laurel Review, and Forklift, Ohio. Along with his friends Kate MacLam and Jordan Deveraux, Loring edits Lost Pilots.

Mentee: Joseph Verhelle

Joseph Verhelle is a high school English teacher based in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He is excited to receive guidance from an experienced writer who can help him navigate the life of an emerging artist.

Mentor: Khalisa Rae

Khalisa Rae is a poet, journalist, and author of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press, 2021) and the forthcoming YA novel in verse Unlearning Eden. Her work explores themes of identity, desire, faith, and the Black Southern experience. A former English professor and current Theater & Literature director at the North Carolina Arts Council, Rae is the founder of the Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference. She has been published in LitHub, Southern Humanities Review, PANK, Driftwood Press, and others. With over a decade of mentoring emerging writers, she believes in writing as resistance, healing, and community building.

Mentee: Nathan Phillips

Nathan Phillips is a hip-hop and spoken word poet currently living in Madison, Wisconsin. He spent a lot of his years in the rural areas of the state. His poetry explores the wide world of spirituality and self-discovery.