Visiting Scholars | MFA in Creative Writing

Introduction

Each MFA residency, through the DeSales MFA program, brings accomplished writers, editors, and literary professionals to campus to work closely with students through workshops, seminars, and readings. Visiting Scholars play a central role in the residency experience, offering mentorship, perspective, and insight that supports students’ creative development and professional goals.

Page Overview:

Visiting Scholars who teach, mentor, and lead workshops during MFA residencies
Writers, editors, and literary professionals working directly with students
A rotating group of scholars contributing to the Creative Writing MFA experience

MFA Visiting Scholars

Amanda Latrenta Crane

Amanda Latrenta Crane is the author of The Queen of Joyful Things as well as the chapbook Barbiecue. She has a BA in English from SUNY New Paltz and an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. She lives and works in New Jersey remotely as full-time online English Professor for Strayer University. She has poetry published in numerous journals and magazines and describes her writing as “a mix of pop culture and private imagery.” She is also very interested in the "rawness" of poetry.

Daniel Donaghy

Daniel Donaghy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which was named co-winner of the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. His previous poetry collections are Start with the Trouble (University of Arkansas Press, 2009), winner of the University of Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence and a Finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and Streetfighting (BkMk Press, 2005), a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. He earned a BA in English from Kutztown University, an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins College (now University), an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University, and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Donaghy was awarded the 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and a 2019 Artist Fellowship by the Connecticut Office of the Arts. He is Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he edits Here: a poetry journal with his students, and serves as Poet Laureate of Windham, CT. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, PA, which has inspired many of his poems.

Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is the author of three books, including The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: Music, Technology, and the Search for Transcendence (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, as well as dozens of essays, articles, reviews, and prefaces for the New York Times and its Book Review and Sunday magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Commonweal, as well as the New Yorker. His third and most recent book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in May 2025.

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry collections: the full-length collection Common Grace from Beacon Press, and Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. His paintings have appeared in galleries throughout Connecticut, including Chester Gallery, the John Slade Ely House, Westport Arts Center, and City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee).

Aimee LaBrie

Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in The Minnesota Review, The Rumpus, Swamp Pink, Iron Horse Literary Review, Cagibi, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Fractured Lit, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost, and others. Her work has been anthologized in A Darker Shade of Noir: Body Horror by Women, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and Philadelphia Noir, among others. Her second short story collection, Rage and Other Cages, won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and was published by Leapfrog Press in June 2024. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her fiction has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.

Tom McAllister

Tom McAllister is the author of the collection of essays, It All Felt Impossible published by Rose Metal Press in 2025 as well as two novels How to Be Safe (Liveright) and The Young Widower's Handbook (Algonquin) and the memoir, Bury Me in My Jersey (Villard). His short stories and essays have been published widely, and his short story "Things You're Not Proud of" was included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. He teaches at Rutgers University-Camden in their MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs.

Curtis Smith

Curtis Smith has published over 125 stories and essays, and his work has appeared in or been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Best Short Fictions, The Best Microfictions, and the WW Norton anthology New Micro. He has worked with independent presses to put out five story collections, two essay collections, and one book of creative nonfiction. The Lost and the Blind is his sixth novel. His most recent novel, Deaf Heaven, was released in early 2025. In addition to his creative work, he has also published over 100 author interviews. He teaches at Elizabethtown College.

Hananah Zaheer

Hananah Zaheer is a writer, editor, improvisor and photographer. She is the author of a flash chapbook Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). Other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as The Cut, Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, Pleiades, Waxwing, AGNI, Pithead Chapel, Smokelong (Pushcart nomination), Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, South West Review, Alaska Quarterly Review (with a Notable Story mention in Best American Short Stories 2019) and Michigan Quarterly Review, where she won the Lawrence Foundation Prize for Fiction. She was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for 2019, was a finalist for the Smoke Long Fellowship 2019, the Doris Betts’ Fiction prize 2014 and a recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Rivendell Writers’ Colony and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. She is a 2023-24 Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute fellow at the Center for Asian Pacific American Women, serves as a Fiction Editor for Los Angeles Review, and as senior editor for SAAG: a dissident literary anthology—a project that seeks to make space for radical and experimental South Asian art and writing. She is the founder of the Dubai Literary Salon, an international prose-reading series, and a guest editor for a Pakistan folio for Pleiades, out in Fall 2023. Currently, she is working on a novel.

Visiting Scholars – MFA Residency