First Year Students
Mahrukh Aamir is a first-year fiction student. Here are some basics: she is from Lahore, Pakistan. So far she’s written about the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). She’s a disliker of small talk and saying things one doesn’t mean. And a liker of lots of things, but right now nothing is coming to mind except for American grocery stores. She might even write about them one of these days.
Natanya Biskar is a first-year fiction student. She holds a BA in Art from Macalester College. Originally from San Francisco, she has lived in Portland, Minneapolis, Japan, France, and Ireland. For over ten years, she worked as an elementary teacher at independent schools. Her interests include film, speculative fiction, progressive education, and art history. She enjoys finding fruit trees on public lands, doing deep reads of pop culture, and watching dogs play.
Meredith Higgins is a first-year poetry student. Meredith struggles with being and feeling in this world. She has sought meaningful living and writing since being moved by the beauty of war novels and religious writings as a teenager. During her restless, undergraduate education across five colleges, she endured iterations of the terrible pain that accompanies changing belief and continued to fumble with meaning and how we make it. She is slowly becoming familiar with the power of presence, equanimity, and self-sacrifice and currently writes poetry that explores speaking strange, ecological testimonies.
Lilly Jenner is a first-year Poetry student. Lilly does what? She creates poetry in nefariously multitudinous forms, such as: textile, metal, and film. To borrow from Luce Irigaray’s preface in The Way of Love, Lilly cares “to prepare a place of proximity: with the other in ourselves and between us […] a relation which favors the act of speech in the present, and not a language already existing.” Lilly has authored four poetry books, all hand-crafted, self-printed/published/distributed: Oranged (2018); that’s heaven over there (2018); Or, I Could Roll Myself into A Ball and Never Come Out for Anything Ever (2017); There Are So Many Ways to Die (2017). Her most recent, ostensibly fifth poetic text, In Another Language (2019), was her undergraduate thesis. A monograph (a collaged self) on translation performance,practice, and theatrical projection, this book was and is presented as a dance.
Kathleen Olp is a first-year fiction student. She comes to Boise from Chicago, IL. She previously worked as a middle school literature teacher sharing her love of stories and writing. Her interests include surrealist and satirical fiction. She looks forward to begin work on a novel and continue a short story collection.
Shriram Sivaramakrishnan is a first-year poetry student. Shriram is a proud alumnus of Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, UK. His debut pamphlet, Let the Light In, was published by Ghost City Press in June 2018. He started his career as a software engineer, coding in computer language. Then he switched to the real one.
Second Year Students
Di Bei
Di Bei is a second-year MFA fiction student from Beijing, China. She holds a B.S in biology from Randolph College in Virginia. Most of her works are in Chinese but she is eager to explore writing in English.
Sydney Britsch
Sydney Britsch is a second-year MFA poetry student originally from the Midwest. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder and is published in the undergraduate-run journal, Walkabout. While in Colorado she discovered that mountains and music are a must. She loves hiking and skiing, water and trees. And she is looking forward to exploring poetry surrounded by Idaho’s incredible backcountry.
Noah Leventhal
Noah Leventhal is a second-year poet from Los Angeles, California. He enjoys discourse on anti-poetics and many varieties of cheese.
Aaron LoPatin
Aaron LoPatin is a second-year poet from Detroit, Michigan. He holds a BA in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Aside from Poetry, he is a certified tea sommelier and has spent significant time in China studying tea. He is an avid enthusiast of baseball, burgers, and country music.
Rory Stone Mehlman
Rory Stone Mehlman writes fiction and teaches creative non-fiction.
E.J. Pettinger
E.J. Pettinger is a second-year MFA fiction student, and a native Boisean. He is the creator of Mild Abandon, an award-winning cartoon that has been published in newsweeklies around the United States for the past thirteen years. He is married to Sasha and has two sons, Jack and Raleigh. This is his fourth short bio.
Edvin Subašić
Edvin Subašić is a second-year fiction student and was born and raised in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He left Bosnia in 1993 and spent three years in Germany. He immigrated to the US in 1997 at the age of 21 and learned English. Edvin now lives with his wife and daughter in Idaho where he teaches English as a Second Language at Boise State University. In the fall of 2018, Edvin was awarded the Redivider Beacon Street Prize, a fiction award judged by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Adam Johnson. His writing has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Issue 52.
Third Year Students
Becca Anderson
Becca Anderson is a third-year fiction student from Green Bay, Wisconsin. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket’s Amuse-Bouche spotlight feature. In high school, she was voted by her 600 peers as the most likely to attempt world domination. Her ambitions currently operate on a much smaller scale and include working on her current project, a young adult novel about Midwestern witches.
Stephen R. Miller
Stephen R. Miller is a third-year MFA fiction student. A native Midwesterner, he spent fifteen years living in New York City and San Francisco. In addition, he has lived in Boise long enough to remember when it wasn’t cool to live in Boise. He holds degrees from Brown, UC Berkeley, and UC Hastings Law. In addition to fiction, he is also a law professor and writes non-fiction on urbanism and the development of cities. He recently traveled to Australia, England, and Ireland with his wife and two young children. Everyone survived, mostly.
Jacqui Reiko Teruya
Jacqui Reiko Teruya is a third-year fiction student. A lover of bookstores, a hater of Amazon, she worked as an indie bookseller for years before pursuing an MFA in fiction.
Tessy Ward
Tessy Ward is a third-year poet and the author of My Head Can Feel the Vibrating of a Full Heartbeat Through a Chest That Is Neither Hollow Nor Dark, a chapbook from Press 254. She was a Sutherland Fellow in poetry at Illinois State University.
Mark Wood
Mark Wood is a third-year fiction writer who was born and raised on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. He’s a U.S. Navy veteran, and holds degrees in English and Secondary Education. An inveterate trespasser and thrill-seeker, Mark knows just enough about hiking, kayaking, and snowboarding to get himself into big trouble. His novel-in-progress is set on the mountain where he was born.