At the Punch Bucket Literary Festival in Asheville, alongside CWP graduate students Ellen Boyette and Christina Wood and UGACWP graduate Dr. Hannah V. Warren, Maxime Berclaz presented creative works centered on the question of horizons, while also providing a critical overview of the use of this theme within their work.

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin was interviewed by Tolu Oke in the Journal of Artistic Creation and Scholarly Research published at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He has other interviews in Obindo Magazine and forthcoming in 'From the Horse's Mouth: Interviews with Notable Nigerian Writers by Sumaila Umaisha of New Nigerian Newspaper. He was interviewed (again) by Emma Auer of WUGA Radio to celebrate his John Lewis Grant for Poetry awarded by the Georgia Writers Association. The purpose of the grants is to elevate, encourage, and inspire the voices of Black writers in Georgia; and are generously supported by The Hawthornden Foundation. He was invited as a juror for the Good Hart Artist Residency where he was a writer-in-residence last summer. In addition to his John Lewis Grant, Georgia Writers Association also awarded him the Fine Art Work Center scholarship to participate in the summer workshop. “Embouchure”, one of his two poems published in The Poetry Review (UK), won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, awarded annually by The Poetry Society for the best poem by a poet who does not yet have a full collection at the time of publication. Afrocritik recently published an essay, Lyrical Ceremonies: On Poems by Agbaakin, Okigbo, and Umukoro (penned by the Nigerian critic Ernest Jesuyemi) on his poem “Tenebrae” republished by Cincinnati Review  from his chapbook, The Sign of the Ram. Agbaakin presented on a panel at the interdisciplinary symposium themed “Natural History” organized by the Georgia Review. This summer he will present a paper on Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds! at the Lagos Studies Association Conference, and at the Red Clay Writers Conference in the fall. This spring, he won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award by the Office of Instruction and Centre for Teaching and Learning. The Unserious Collective that he co-founded recently opened a call for the 4th edition of their annual fellowship. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Language and Literacy (UGA) and got his hands dirty in Athens-Clarke local school gardens through community volunteering with Serve UGA.

Daniel Barnum attended the 2025 Sewanee Writers' Conference as a nonfiction scholar, where they worked with the writers Eula Biss and Amy Leach as part of a small workshop group over a period of two weeks. They also had poems published in coveted literary journals such as the Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review. the New England Review. 

Colin Bishoff presented the paper "“Kinship, Adoption, Displacement, and Post-memory in Mary Kim Arnold’s and Justin Chon’s Films", at SAMLA Conference in Atlanta. 

Ellen Boyette at the Punch Bucket Literary Festival in Asheville, presented creative works centered on the question of horizons, while also providing a critical overview of the use of this theme within their work. She presented alongside UGA CWP Graduate Students Maxime Berclaz and Christina Wood as well as UGA CWP Graduate Dr. Hannah V. Warren.

Erik Brown's poem “Imperial county fair” was published by Zócalo Public Square, selected by guest curator Anthony Sutton. He also has another poem "West" forthcoming in Poetry Online.

With support from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, CWP Graduate Student Anindit Dutta attended the Tin House Autumn Workshop. Established in 2003 with its flagship summer conference, the Tin House Workshop is a premier creative writing program offering in-person and online classes, seminars, and residencies in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Anindit worked with Megan Giddings, whose novel, Lakewood, was published by Amistad in 2020.

Braiden Ellis attended the 2025 Pop Culture / American Culture Association in the South Conference, where he co-led a roundtable discussion of the film Sinners (2025) and key topics of race, religion, and gender.

Priyadarshini Oshin Gogoi's book Have You Ever Climbed a Tree? was featured in India’s Parag Honour List 2025, an annual list of outstanding Indian children’s books. This was her third year on the prestigious list, with her picture books previously being featured in the Parag Honour List 2024 and 2023 as well. Over the summer, Oshin was a 2025 Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Fellow. She also conducted a week-long children's creative writing camp for UGA's Torrance Center for 3rd to 5th Graders, and did guest readings and assisted a children's book-making workshop conducted by her friend Saja Yim, PhD in Art Education from the University of Georgia Mary Frances Early College of Education at the Athens-Clarke County Public Library. In 2025, she presented her different academic works at the 52nd Annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture in, the 56th Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference.  In 2026, she served as proposal reviewer for the 57th Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature held in March 2026, and also presented a session at the conference titled “Using Nature and Picture Books to Conduct Creative Writing Workshops. In February 2026, she presented her creative work at the BCPS Conference in Savannah as part of a graduate panel on Literature from Northeast India. Priyadarshini Gogoi presented the paper “Can the Subaltern Lie? The Native Misinformant and Self-identity in the Third Space” at SAMLA Conference in Atlanta, and another research paper "Befores: Autofiction, Memory, and Small-Town Assam" at the British, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference in Savannah, in 2026.

Holly Haworth published her latest essay, "A Downward Turn: What the Catastrophozoic is Teaching Us" in Mergoat Magazine, a record of Southern Appalachian ecologies on the cusp of catastrophe and futurity. Her story "Seeding Climate Resilience: How seed-savers across the Southeast are preparing for an uncertain future" appears in the Summer 2025 issue of Gravy magazine, a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance. In July, Haworth was the keynote speaker at this year's Culhowee Native Plant Conference, the oldest and most widely attended native plant conferences in the Southeast. Haworth taught a summer craft workshop for Orion magazine, called Writing Rhizomatically.

Sayantika Mandal's essay "Mother Tongue" was published in december magazine, 35.1, Spring/Summer 2024 and included as one of the "Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction of 2024" in The Best American Essays 2025. Sayantika spent part of her summer at the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop Fellowship in the magazine track. As an aspiring editor, she was able to gain insight on a career in the publishing industry.

Asna Nusrat was selected as a fellow for the Tamas Poetry Translation Seminar. On its 20th year now, it is based out of New York and fellows are selected and is a prestigious venue for multilingual / global south poetry. She also published an essay called "The Heat of Grief and the Catharsis of Loss in “What Remains After a Fire”, in the Southern Review of Books. She also presented the paper "“Landless ‘Lunatics’ and Cartography of Resistance in Manto’s and Mehta’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’" at the SAMLA Conference in Atlanta and at the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference 2026 in Savannah and was invited to present her work at the University of Arizona.

Sristi Ray presented at SAMLA Conference 2026 in Atlanta : “Centering the Body: Knowing and Being in Nisha Ramayya’s ‘Tantric Poetics.’” 

Javier Sandoval had poems in Best American Poetry 2025, Missouri Review, and Grist. 

Since January 2025, Abhijit Sarmah has balanced scholarship, creative work and a near-heroic commitment to exploring Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre. A Willson Center Graduate Fellow and continuing Ruth Pack Fellow, he has been teaching as an Instructor of Record since last fall. He presented his paper “How to Be Good Ancestors? Examining Native Ancestors in Miko Kings and Man Made Monsters” at the 2025 MLA Convention and another on the literary reputation of British poet Isaac Rosenberg at the 2026 SAMLA Conference. His collaborative Rock Hawk and Eagle project with Professor Emeritus Dr. Ervan Garrison, Dr. Sergio Bernardes and Mr. Jim Wilson finally reached national audiences, including the American Geophysical Union’s 2026 Annual Meeting. The alliance was featured in Horizon & Tradition, Southeastern Archaeological Conference’s newsletter, and WUGA’s Athens News Matters. Additionally, Sarmah served in the planning committee for CWP’s Graduate Reading Series for two consecutive years (2025 and 2026), did a public presentation on the Rock Hawk and Eagle project at Park Hall as well as participated in a public reading at ATHICA with CWP alumnus Dr. Nate Dixon, author of Radical Red (BOA, 2025). Having dealt with his own mental health struggles, Sarmah also brought a deeply personal perspective to his collaboration with Hugh Hodgson School of Music as part of Because of You: Healing Mental Health Issues Through Music. Sarmah continued serving as a Guest Editor of poetry for The Headlight Review, a publication of Kennesaw State University. His poem “Perennial” was a finalist for the 2025 Steven R. Guthrie Memorial Writers’ Festival Contest. Abhijit Served as the guest editor for a special issue of the Headlight Review, a journal published by the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University, presented the paper "Isaac Rosenberg’s Literary Reputation" at SAMLA 2025, 

Sayantika Mandal pictured with her committee members Aruni Kashyap, LeAnne Howe and Esra Santesso 

Dr. Sayantika Mandal

Christina Wood pictured at right

Dr. Christina Wood

Christina Wood's short stories appear in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Sewanee Review, Virgina Quarterly Review and other journals. Her story “The Astronaut” won a Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction and her nonfiction appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and studied women's climate fiction and place-focused fiction at UGA. In the past, she worked as the assistant editor of Dorothy. Currently, she's a graduate editor for The Georgia Review and an Editor at Brink Books.