Season 19 Mentees
AWP celebrates the twenty-three writers selected to participate in Season 19 of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. This session’s mentees were selected out of hundreds of applicants based on their goals, experience, and promising writing samples.
Sara Rosenberg
Poetry
Sara Rosenberg’s poetry has appeared in Pine Row Press, Passengers Journal, and Ocotillo Review. She was shortlisted for Blue Mesa Review’s 2021 poetry prize. She is a graduate of Hollins University and Emerson College. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Sara Rosenberg is working with Doug Ramspeck.
Ellen White Rook
Poetry
Ellen White Rook is a poet and contemplative arts teacher who divides her time between upstate New York and Maine. Retired from a career as an information technology manager, she now offers writing workshops and leads retreats that combine meditation, movement, and writing. She was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry collection, Suspended (2023), was selected by Cathexis Northwest Press for its unpublished author chapbook contest.
Ellen White Rook is working with Janée J. Baugher.
Andrew Garvin
Poetry
Andrew Garvin (He/Him/His) has been featured with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, pioneertown, Cola Literary Review, Sonora Review (forthcoming) and more. He received his MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, MSW from Columbia University in New York, and BA from the University of Southern California. He lives in San Francisco.
Andrew Garvin is working with Allison Whittenberg.
Elizabeth Tomanio
Poetry
Elizabeth Tomanio is a poet and physical therapist living outside of New Haven, Connecticut. Her writing has been published in Please See Me, Caesura, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Here, and Waking Up to the Earth Anthology with Grayson Books. Her empathy and deep connection to her ancestors guide her literary voice.
Elizabeth Tomanio is working with Sean Singer.
Nicole Bird
Poetry
Nicole Bird's writings have appeared in the Ariel Chart International Literary Journal, Monadnock Underground, and Granfalloon, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she’s currently revising a poetry chapbook about Los Angeles. You can read more about Nicole at nicolebirdthewriter.com.
Nicole Bird is working with Gustavo Adolfo Aybar.
Fatma Omar
Poetry
Fatma Omar was born in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Brooklyn in 2002 with her parents. She began writing in the third grade and has been writing about her Sudanese Muslim American experience through poetry and short stories ever since. She recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as an English major with a concentration in creative writing.
Fatma Omar is working with Kimberly L. Becker.
Beth Curran
Poetry
Beth Curran has been teaching high school English for twenty-five years. In 2019, she served as the Schafer Teaching Fellow at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. In 2020, she was a finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Award. Her work has appeared in the Worcester Review, Love’s Executive Order, High Shelf Press, Write Launch, and elsewhere. A born New Englander, Beth now resides in northeastern Florida with her husband and three children.
Beth Curran is working with Claire Wahmanholm.
Alison Fromme
Creative Nonfiction
Alison Fromme is working on her first book-length manuscript, THE WAX WOMAN, which weaves the history of an eighteenth-century anatomical model with her quest to understand her traumatic birth experience. As a science writer, Alison has published in National Geographic Magazine, Pregnancy, New York Times Learning Network, and other outlets. She lives in New York's Finger Lakes region with her family.
Alison Fromme is working with Helen Thorpe.
Susan Baek
Creative Nonfiction
Susan Baek started writing stories around age five and got her first rejection slip at age seven. After five decades, three degrees (microbiology, English literature, and law), and various careers (cancer researcher, technical writer and editor, stay-at-home mom, attorney, health-care lobbyist, and adjunct professor), she has decided to pursue creative writing once again. She and her husband of thirty-three years live in Portland, Oregon.
Susan Baek is working with Ursula Pike.
Carolina Pfister
Creative Nonfiction
Carolina Pfister is a Brazilian-American writer, or at least she thinks she’s a Brazilian-American—no one tells an immigrant when it’s time to hyphenate. Carolina is also a multimedia artist and nonprofit director in the Columbia Gorge region of the Pacific Northwest. Blending cultural criticism and memoir, her manuscript-in-progress deconstructs an immigration and a marriage, untangling in-betweenness in a South and North American coming of age. http://carolinapfister.com/
Carolina Pfister is working with Jill Talbot.
Leslie Stonebraker
Creative Nonfiction
Leslie Stonebraker lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two rambunctious kiddos. You can find her work in River Teeth, Kenyon Review, Brevity, Upstreet, Motherwell Magazine, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Invisible City, and she has a piece forthcoming in iō Literary Journal. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Leslie Stonebraker is working with Estelle Erasmus.
Brooke Randel
Creative Nonfiction
Brooke Randel is a writer and associate creative director in Chicago. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, and elsewhere. She is a prose editor for Chestnut Review. She is currently writing a memoir about her grandma, literacy, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.
Brooke Randel is working with Mark Pleiss.
Max Boenish
Creative Nonfiction
Max Boenish (she/they) took the plunge in 2019 to find out if she could go from being an avid bus rider to bus driver and now delights in driving a forty-foot city bus each day on the streets of Los Angeles. They find immense joy in maneuvering a massive vehicle and connecting with the rhythms of different neighborhoods and people who ride each day. As someone who loves to work with their hands, Max’s current creative pursuits involve sending homemade cards via snail mail, sewing quilts by hand, and embarking on writing a graphic novel about bus life.
Max Boenish is working with Joanne Nelson.
Jessie Rothwell
Creative Nonfiction
Jessie Rothwell is a writer and musician who writes about, among other things, music, family, mental illness, and artistic and career identity. She is from Washington, DC, and currently lives in Takoma Park, Maryland. She both loves, and struggles with, her tendency for breadth over depth. You can find her work on the Rumpus and Barrelhouse and on Breadcrumbs Magazine. Her musings on work, play, music, and jellyfish can be found on Substack at: https://jessierothwell.substack.com/.
Jessie Rothwell is working with Ceilidh Michelle.
Lori D'Angelo
Fiction
Lori D'Angelo is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation and an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Recent work has appeared in Bullshit Lit, Idle Ink, JAKE, One Art Poetry Journal, Toil & Trouble, and Wrong Turn Lit. Find her on Twitter @sclly21 or Instagram and Threads at lori.dangelo1.
Lori D'Angelo is working with Cara Diaconoff.
Victoria Martinez Diaz
Fiction
Victoria is a social worker and psychology graduate with an incessant passion for writing and reading fantasy romance novels until 3:00 a.m. She lives in Texas with her fiancé and when she’s not writing, she’s taking care of her remarkably active infant and two cats. Her publication history includes a segment in her local university magazine in 2019, and way too many fan fictions.
Victoria Martinez Diaz is working with Diana Lopez.
Kamie Maddocks
Fiction
Kamie Maddocks is a mom and registered nurse. When she isn’t playing pirates or reading about dinosaurs with her boys, she loves to write and is currently working on a variety of fiction projects as well as nonfiction for her blog, Caring Health Journal. Her essays on motherhood have been featured on Pregnant Chicken, Scary Mommy, and Her View from Home.
Kamie Maddocks is working with Miranda Joy.
Audrey Hosford
Fiction
Audrey Hosford is a poet and fiction writer living in New York City. She holds a BS in computer science from Northwestern University and an MBA from Yale School of Management. Her work is inspired by her experiences as a neurodivergent woman in male-dominated spaces.
Audrey Hosford is working with Erin Riha.
Saida Bulhan
Fiction
Born and raised in a nomadic region in Somalia, Saida Bulhan learned to read after immigrating to the United States as a teenager. It was then that she discovered her passion for writing. She’s currently seeking representation for her first novel, a semi-autobiographical, historical young adult coming-of-age story set in the early 2000s. Saida resides in the beautiful state of Washington with family, but Minneapolis, Minnesota is her hometown in the States.
Saida Bulhan is working with Amelia Brunskill.
Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk
Fiction
Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk is a Japanese American writer, fundraiser, and foodie who grew up in Kāneʻohe, Hawai'i. She is the daughter and descendant of poets, artists, orchard farmers, and beach dwellers. A 2015 and 2018 VONA/Voices alumna, Kundiman Fellow, and runner-up for the 2023 Iowa Review Award in Fiction, she lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her husband and two children.
Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk is working with Sara Rauch.
Kiani Laigo
Fiction
Kiani Laigo is a Black and Filipino writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing from Mills College. She is currently working on her first novel, a YA fantasy that touches on themes of family, culture, and archeology.
Kiani Laigo is working with Tara Campbell.
Scott Hoshida
Fiction
Scott Hoshida spent his first years out of college in the archives of the National Japanese American Historical Society and discovered how much of the past, no matter how suppressed, lives within us. After teaching in Japan, he earned an MFA in fiction, and now lives with his family in Oakland while bike commuting Berkeley City College where he teaches English.
Scott Hoshida is working with Amy Gottlieb.
J.M. O'Malley
Fiction
J.M. is a certified hospice and palliative care nurse. By day, she guides souls through life's final chapters; by night, she navigates cosmic realms with her pen. Beyond the written galaxies, she roams the open road on her motorcycle, Starless, bridging the ordinary and the extraordinary.
J.M. O'Malley is working with Aimee Ogden.
