Jeanne Carstensen (’18) is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The World on NPR, The Intercept, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. She covered the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey and has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and Mesa Refuge. Previously, she was managing editor of Salon and The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times. Her book, “A Greek Tragedy: One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis,” was published by Simon & Schuster / One Signal in 2025.
2026 Published Alumni Readers
Vishwas Gaitonde (’14/’22) spent his formative years in India, has lived in England, and now resides in the United States. His short story collection On Earth As It Is In Heaven won the 2023 Orison Fiction Prize and has been published by Orison Books. Distinctions include two writing residencies at The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (Minnesota) and two fellowships at The Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat (Scotland). He was a finalist in The George Floyd Short Story Competition conducted by the Nottingham Writers Studio, Nottingham, England, and his story was published in the anthology Black Lives, in Britain. He was a finalist for The Chautauqua Institution’s Janus Prize “ for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.” vishwasgaitonde.com
Photo Credit: Robert Filksic via Headshots & Corporate Photography
AnnElise Hatjakes (’25) is the author of the short story collection, Matter Out of Place. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Missouri and an MFA in fiction from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she currently works as a teaching assistant professor. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction and the Curt Johnson Prize. Her work has also appeared in journals including Wigleaf, Juked, Bull, Tahoma Literary Review, and Typehouse, among others. annelisehatjakes.com
Photo credit: Laura Reaney
Daniel Pope (’19, ’21) is a writer and musician from Seattle. He is the author of Go Help Yourself (2026), the winner of the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in the UK, where he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.
Photo Credit: Nick Marchant
A.M. Sosa (’22) is a queer Mexican-American writer from Stockton, CA, and a graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA Programs in Writing where they were awarded the 2022 Henfield Prize. Their debut novel, And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes, is being published by Algonquin, and their fiction has been published in ZYZZYVA and the Santa Monica Review. amsosa.net