PhD Fellows Reading

This is a reading event showcasing UNLV Creative Writing’s PhD Fellows. Readers featured:

Jumi Bello is a Washington DC native who is a writer of consciousness. Through formal experimental narrative structure, her fiction wanders in the realm of mental illness, race, social institutions, and memory. She published two poetry chapbooks while studying history at Grinnell College. At UNLV, she wants to write about the history of psychiatry, race, homelessness, the War on Drugs, and the police.

Dominque Demetrea Conway is a writer, mother and wife who is struggling with grief after recently losing her beloved husband, Eddie Conway. She is currently a first year PhD student, and is working on her memoir, Far From The Tree.

Tanya Shirazi Galvez is from Lynwood, California. She is Senior Editor of Aster(ix) Journal and Fiction Co-Editor of Witness Magazine. She writes about girlhood, the blessings and curses that comes with it. At UNLV, Tanya is working on hybrid-genre projects that center Salvadoran women and girls.

Miranda Hannasch is a writer and teacher who grew up in Las Vegas. Her work focuses on early modern and 18th-century drama and its intertexts, and she’s especially fascinated by magic, genderbending, unruly women, and modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare.

Xiaoqiu Qiu is a part-time poet, or at least he strives to be one. His chapbook Other Side of Sea is coming out this May by Etchings Press. His poetry has won Meridian Editors Prize and Goldilocks zone poetry prize finalist.

Areej Quraishi’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Indiana Review, The Normal School, Parentheses Journal, Identity Theory, Cola Literary Review, JMWW and Reservoir Road Literary Review.

Dorothy Allred Solomon is a middle kid, the twenty-eighth of her father’s forty-eight children, the only daughter of his fourth wife. Descended from Mormon polygamists, Dorothy was destined to be a plural wife, but willfulness drove her to monogamy and education at the University of Utah and UNLV. Solomon has taught literature, creative writing, and life skills to people throughout the world, has published several books, has written for various journals and magazines, and has appeared on Oprah, Today, Larry King, Live, and on podcasts about polygamous families, the violence of fundamentalism, and the impact of war.