UW Castalia MFA Program Presents: Monthly Readings
Join Hugo House in welcoming back Castalia—University of Washington MFA program's monthly reading series featuring graduate students, faculty, and alumni. Showcasing published and unpublished drafts of work by authors from a variety of disciplines, professional backgrounds, and age demographics, Castalia offers authors a platform for community reading while putting their work in conversation with other voices, styles, concerns, and identities. The first half of the reading features three student authors, and the second half one alum and one faculty member.
The House bar will be open to serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.Nicole McCarthy
NICOLE MCCARTHY is an experimental writer and artist based outside of Tacoma. Her work has appeared in [PANK], The Offing, Redivider, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, and others. A Summoning is her first nonfiction collection, published by Heavy Feather Review. Find Nicole at nicolemccarthypoet.com.
Sarah Wheeler
SARAH WHEELER is a writer who trekked her way from Rhode Island to Washington, where she is a nontraditional English undergraduate at the University of Washington, with intentions of joining the Creative Writing option. Once finished with her degree, she will pursue MFA candidacy in prose. Her focus tends toward the visceral and the internal, with emphasis on familial relationships as seen through the lens of the body itself.
Laurel Wilkinson
LAUREL WILKINSON is a poet from Davis, California. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Washington, Seattle and a recipient of the Grace Milliman Pollock Scholarship and Nelson Bentley MFA Award in Creative Writing. Her recent work explores the subject of indeterminacy by drawing upon traditions of ecopoetry and the Asian American avant-garde. When not teaching or writing, she enjoys dancing, hiking, and drinking tea. You can find her on instagram @laurel__wilkinson
Emily Giangiulio
EMILY GIANGIULIO is a writer from Philadelphia currently working toward an MFA in prose at the University of Washington. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Bennington Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and has recently been nominated for the 2023 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and the Pushcart Prize. When not writing, she frequents the tide pools along the Washington coast and tends to her growing family of plants. You can find her at https://emilygiangiulio.com.
Derek Engen
DEREK ENGEN is a first-year MFA student at UW-Seattle. He is an amateur poet and an amateurer fly fisher. His poetry manuscript, Thus We Bow, was a finalist for the 2022 Emelia Ferrara Honors Thesis Award at Georgetown University. He was published in Young Writers of America in 2011, although it was likely not his best work.
