Meet our Editors ('22-23)!
It’s a new graduate term at ASU, and that means we have new genre editors to introduce! Learn more about them from their bios below.
Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. She is the recipient of The American Poetry Review’s 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The American Poetry Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her poetry is often interested in the body: how geography, history, and trauma leave markers, both visible and invisible. Her hobbies, beyond reading and writing, include photography, zinemaking, hiking, and otherwise being outdoors. She started her position as Senior Editor of Hayden's Ferry Review last October.
Christie Louie is a writer from the Bronx, New York. She is a third-year fiction student in the MFA program at Arizona State University, where she also serves as Managing Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a recent attendee of the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Aída Esmeralda is a Salvi poet born & raised in the DMV. Her work mainly focuses on memory keeping/making. She loves to imagine eating, cackling, and dancing cumbia with all her grandmothers. Easily enthused and constantly curious, she yearns to try new art forms and is currently experimenting with printmaking. Her work has appeared in La Horchata Zine, Álastor, SWWIM, and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast.
Frankie Concepcion is a writer from the Philippines and Boston, MA. She is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University and an associate editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is also the founder of the Boston Immigrant Writers Salon, and her fiction and poetry have been published in Joyland, HYPHEN, and Rappler, amongst others. Her writing is a haunted house where the ghosts are every person and place you’ve ever loved.
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is an Anishinaabe writer, beader, fencer, and Jingle Dress Dancer from White Earth Nation in Minnesota. A current MFA Candidate in Fiction at Arizona State University, her writing is forthcoming from CRAFT and has appeared in Ruminate Magazine, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, Jet Fuel Review, and others. Her short story, "Deer Women" was a semifinalist for the 44th Nimrod Literary Awards, and she is a former fiction fellow for the Women’s National Book Association Authentic Voices Program. Her work often explores Indigenous identity, intergenerational trauma, and the MMIWG2S crisis.
Nicole Arocho Hernández was raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. Her poems have been featured in The Acentos Review, The Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, I Have No Ocean, is available online with Sundress Publications. Her second chapbook is forthcoming with Glass Poetry Press. She is the Translations Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review and an MFA candidate at Arizona State University.
Christina D’Antoni is a writer born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Arizona State University, and Web Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is at work on a collection of short stories about the lives of people from the Gulf Coast post-Katrina.
Winslow Schmelling is a third year MFA candidate in fiction. As an ex-professional-pizza-tosser and a current content marketer, she feels lucky to also call herself a writer and a teacher in the desert she grew up in. Her creative work grapples with patterns of the desert, of addiction, and the survival that exists within those spaces.