Rahad Abir was named the Georgia Author of the Year, in the Literary Fiction and Short Story Collection category for his book Bengal Hound.

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin was a writer in residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts “Asset for Artists” program in North Adams, Massachusetts to work on his manuscript in progress. He also won a writing residency at the Good Hart Artist Residency program in Michigan, and was selected as the recipient of the Fine Arts Work Center Scholarship, awarded annually to a member of the Georgia Writers Association. His manuscript in progress Aporia was a finalist for the Acre Books open submission. Alongside Daniel Barnum, Maxime Berclaz, Colin Bishoff, Erik Brown, and Abhijit Saramh, he hosted Joy Priest and Mikhayla Smith (Athens Poet Laureate) for the 2025 Graduate Reading Series. His review of Hussain Ahmed’s Blue Exodus was published in The Rumpus. An essay by Vivian Poley, his former 1102 student, won the Donald E. Barnett Essay Award. He was also interviewed by Emma Auer on WUGA Radio, Njoku Nonso on Afapinen, and Aishat Babatunde on Mid American Review.

Maxime Berclaz organized a creative symposium for graduate students on the moving image at the Atheneaum. He presented on The Waste Land as utopian horror at SAMLA and on the horror of poetic contradiction at the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Colin Bishoff’s article on adaptations of Alice in Wonderland was published in the fall issue of Literature/Film Quarterly, and his short story “Five Minutes of Pure Cinema” appeared in the magazine failbetter in February 2025. An entry on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth is set to appear in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare later this summer. In January, Colin presented at the 2025 MLA National Convention. Following a recommendation from UGA Professor Emerita Elizabeth Kraft, Colin also taught a class for UGA’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in February. In March, Colin worked alongside fellow CW students O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, Daniel Barnum, Maxime Berclaz, Erik Brown, and Abhijit Sarmah in hosting the poet Joy Priest for a graduate-led reading event.  In April, he gave a reading at Café Apollinaire, an Athens event hosted by the Georgia Fine Arts Academy. In June of this year, he (along with his wife) will participate in the Michigan Studies Summer Institute—a weeklong, funded residency on Korean literature that will take place in June of 2025.  

Chelsea Cobb successfully defended her dissertation, The Shape of Things Unknown, a hybrid collection of short stories that reimagines Greek mythology through the lens of Black feminist poetics, Afrosurrealism, and folklore. She graduated on May 8, 2025 with her PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and was honored with the Alice Langdale Award for excellence as a graduate student in English. Chelsea gave a public reading from her dissertation as part of the Sentimental Touring Club, the Creative Writing Program’s graduate exit reading held at Authentic Brewing Company. She has accepted a full-time position as Assistant Director of the Writing Center at the University of North Georgia.

Braiden Ellis was awarded a doctoral grant from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation for Spring 2025.

Presidential Fellow Priyadarshini Oshin Gogoi's children's book When We Are Home won the 2024 FICCI Children’s Book of the Year in English Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 Neev Book Award. In February 2025, she presented her writing at the 52nd Louisville Conference at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. In March 2025, she presented at the 56th Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature with her session “Creating Their Own Mirrors: Using Picture Books to Encourage Agency in Young Writers”. In November 2024, she presented her writing at the Georgia Review Graduate Symposium. 

Under their pen name, Genevieve Guzmán published a poem, “Heliocentric” in Blue Flame Review and a review of Leah Nieboer’s Soft Apocalypse in Annulet. They also published a history of the Liverpool botanic garden in Hidden Compass under the title “The Glamor & Tragedy of Orchids” based on research they undertook at the University of Liverpool in May 2023 sponsored by the UGA Office of Global Engagement. They made semifinalist for the Fulbright US Student research-arts award to France and the poetry shortlist for the 2025 Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival and the Disquiet Literary Prize. They will graduate with their PhD in August.

Holly Haworth published "Write While Lying Down," an essay about the labor and work of writing, at Literary Hub. She published “Plain Art” in the Oxford American’s Southern Art Issue, an essay about the folk artist Annie Wellborn and a meditation on art as a rich and nourishing sustenance for regular people and plain lives. She published "The Longest Shortcut" in Orion magazine’s issue Swimming Lessons: Staying Afloat in Our Flooded Future, an essay about the past, present, and future of the Panamá Canal, on the shore of which she found herself as she worked on her forthcoming book. She published "Woman in the Woods,” an essay about violence against women, at The Bitter Southerner. It was included as a Top 5 Longreads of the Week by Longreads, which wrote that, “The juxtaposition in the opening paragraph between natural beauty and a horrific, needless death stopped me short. As [Haworth] considers what it means to be a woman in the woods—a place where she sought refuge from the men and boys in her life who exerted ‘verbal, psychological, sexual, and physical violence’ against her—she knows she has less to fear from venomous snakes, bears, and mountain lions than from encountering a man, a different kind of predator altogether.” Haworth also taught a 6-week nonfiction course for Orion magazine called Writing Rhizomatically. She published her first book of poetry, The Way the Moon, at Mercer University Press and made appearances this fall at the Decatur Book Festival and the Southern Festival of Books to read from the book.

Sayantika Mandal published an essay “Mother Tongue” in december Magazine last May, and was interviewed by the same journal as a featured writer in September. She also published a poem “Hemispheres” in West Trade Review which was anthologized in Ecobloomspaces Anthology published by Iron Oak Editions. Her paper “Temporal Refusal as a Narrative Strategy in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria” was awarded the Wertheim Prize for being the best paper by a grad student at the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Annual Conference in May 2025. She received the Summer Research Grant in 2024, and conducted extensive research for her novel in the Bodleian Library and British Museum, as part of the UGA at Oxford Program in Summer and Fall 2024. 

Nik Moore’s poem, “To the Blacknose Dace”, appeared this past fall in A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, an anthology from UGA Press and a cousin to their 2019 publication, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. With the kind support of the UGA CWP program, Nik travelled in March to Los Angeles for AWP ‘25, reading with West Trade Review and Iron Oak Editions in celebration of the spring release of Ecobloomspaces: Poetry at the Intersection of Social Identity and Nature, Environment, and Place. This beautiful anthology opens with Nik’s poem, “Mapping”.

Asna Nusrat’s translation of Tehzeeb Hafi’s poem “Nazm” was published in Lakeer magazine’s Poetic Renditions Column 5 in December 2024. She also received the Los Angeles Review of Books fellowship in 2025 and will be working as a fellow with LARB this summer.  

2024 was a tremendously productive year for Abhijit Sarmah. The year started with Sarmah going to Kansas City, Missouri to take part in a panel titled “(F)unemployment: Rethinking Graduate Education in the Age of Gen Z and ChatGPT” at the 2024 AWP Conference and ended with an invited reading by Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) at Knoxville, Tennessee. Sarmah also took part in the Creative Arts & Scholarly Engagement Festival at Jackson State University, Mississippi where he presented his paper titled “James Weldon Johnson and the Harlem Renaissance”. Additionally, six of his poems were published in various reputed journals including Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, Welter and Meniscus. The magazine Many Nice Donkeys nominated his poem “Perennial” for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Sarmah was also a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship for the second consecutive year (fyi: he is the only poet to have been nominated twice) as well as for Georgia’s longest running literary contest: The Steven R. Guthrie Memorial Writers’ Festival Contest organised by Agnes Scott College, GA. He was also a finalist for the 2024 Sundress Broadside Contest. Sarmah was awarded a Ruth Pack Scholarship by the Institute of Native American Studies at UGA to further his research on Native American women memoirists. The English department at UGA awarded him a Michael G. Moran Graduate Student Award. Furthermore, Sarmah served as a Guest Editor of Poetry for The Headlight Review, a publication of Kennesaw State University. He was also featured on the popular MFA Writers podcast and WUGA’s Athens News Matters. His conversation with Suchitra Vijayan was published in the Mukoli Magazine. Since Spring 2024, he has been working with a team of researchers from UGA that is studying effigy mounds in Putnam county, GA.

Christina Wood was accepted to Los Angeles Review of Books’ Summer Publishing Workshop and published an essay, “Our Ambassadors to the Future” in the winter issue of their print journal. Her novel-in-progress was a finalist for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund’s Money for Women grant and McNeese review nominated her essay, “Craft as Contradiction” for a Pushcart Prize. This year, she is working as a graduate editor for The Georgia Review and in the new year, she’ll begin a role as an editor for Brink Books.

This Summer, three CWP students earned the 2025 Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Fellowship. Priyadarshini Oshin Gogoi and Asna Nusrat were on the book track while Sayantika Mandal was on the magazine track.