Fiction Students

Amy Cameron

Amy Cameron is a NYC writer originally from Philadelphia. She is a reader for Narrative Magazine, and her work has been published in Bellevue Literary Magazine and Mount Hope Literary Journal. An alum of Bread Loaf, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, she is currently working on a novel.

Ashby Mei-Ling Baker

Ashby was raised in montane Colorado and graduated from Northwestern University with degrees in Creative Writing and Biological Sciences. She loves dogs, homemade sweets, Pokemon, and all things nature. When not experimenting with structure and form, she enjoys reading about scientific discoveries and playing video games.

Charlie Espinosa

Originally from Virginia, Charlie lives with his partner and two cats in California. Prior to joining UCI, he worked as a nonprofit consultant and journalist covering mineral extraction in Latin America. He enjoys ambient electronic music, the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, and the marshes and open waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Find his writing in Catamaran, The Fourth River, Strange Horizons, Flyway, and more.

Chen Gu

Chen Gu was born in Chengdu, China and raised in Dallas, Texas, which probably explains their obsession with spicy food and parking lot hangouts. Their stories highlight unconventional families and queer love, a minute into the future and decades into the past. Once upon a time a playwright, painter, and hotel receptionist, they now moonlight as a bobarista. Come cha with me sometime.

Desi Isaacson

Desi Isaacson grew up in Portland, Maine and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing, and later from Georgetown University with an M.A. in English Literature. His fiction explores causes of shame. His fiction, nonfiction, and academic work can be found in Allium and Down East, among other places.

Ferdia Burke

Ferdia spent twenty-five years as a union concrete laborer in NYC and attended classes at night at Queens College, CUNY. He is a former wannabe writer who has worked his way up to aspiring writer in the hopes he can one day be a (fingers crossed) failed writer. His attempt at delivering poignant revelatory insight into a person or a people never gets in the way of his firm belief that story is king.

Hannah Pfister

Originally from the Santa Cruz Mountains, Hannah has lived in Los Angeles for the last nine years. She is currently at work on a novel and several short stories that explore themes of spirituality and doubt, however absurd or despairing.

Jessica Cutrone

Jessica Cutrone is a writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been supported by scholarships from the Community of Writers and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She is currently at work on a novel.

Lauren Quinn

Lauren Quinn is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Guernica, and Best American Travel Writing. Originally from Oakland, Lauren has been a travel writer, expat, and high school teacher. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and 17 chickens. She is at work on a novel, an excerpt of which earned her the inaugural Break Scholarship at the Fall 2024 Tin House Workshop.

RJ Szuba

RJ is from Central New York, five hours northwest of New York City. He has lived in Southern California for ten years, mostly in Downtown and Northeast LA. He enjoys callbacks, multiples of five, and ordinal directions.

Hannah Liberman

Hannah Liberman is a writer from the Southwestern United States. She has a BA in Political Theory and History from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Programs in Writing, she worked as a legal researcher at Columbia University and as first nonfiction and then Arts Editor at Boston Review. Her essays and fiction appear in many venues in print and online. She teaches undergraduate fiction.

Jaime Sandoval

Jaime Sandoval hails from Mexicali, Baja California, a city on the border of Mexico and the United States. Through the exploration of the borderland experience, their writing aims to bridge the divide between sexuality and religion, and queerness and conservatism. As an immigrant, Jaime is particularly interested in the voices of the alienated and socially displaced. Their work can be found in Westwind and Masque and Spectacle Journal.

Jamie Kim

Lawyer turned fiction writer. Crossword puzzle enthusiast. Proud immigrant. Dog and cat person. In the words of the great Sandra Oh, it’s an honor just to be Asian.

John Comerci

John is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Alongside his MFA, he is pursuing an MA at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. He spends much of his free time up to his neck in Zen literature.

Kelin Sophia Tham | 譚琦蓮

Kelin Sophia Tham is a Chinese Burmese writer and artist from San Francisco and Los Angeles County. She received her Bachelor’s in English and Master’s in Education from UC Berkeley. Through a combination of realistic and fantastical works, she writes fiction, poetry, and multimedia literature exploring queer womanhood, techno-orientalism, the sounds and rhythm of Toisanese, and legacies of colonialism within and immigration from China and Myanmar. She also enjoys watercolor painting, practicing the erhu and traditional Chinese dance, foam sword combat, and foraging for flowers.

Zak Buczinsky

Zak is a fiction writer originally from the Chicago area. Before moving to California he worked as an ESL teacher in South Korea and a freelance reporter in Seattle. In California he worked in the Orange County recovery community as a speaker and a group facilitator in a drug and alcohol rehab. Although he is currently focused on writing short stories, he has aspirations to write a novel.