Graduate Students - MFA

Oluyemisi Bolonduro

Email Address: obolonduro@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2023 

B.A. in Africana Studies, minor in English — Pomona College

Writing/Research Interests: African self-consciousness theory, Pentecostal Christianity, (a)sexuality

Fun Facts: Adores alliteration, lucid dreams, favors water Pokémon

Sims 4 Traits: Active, Bookworm, Geek

Website: OAB Shares

Oluyemisi Ayoyinka Bolonduro (she/they) is a Christian, Nigerian American writer with a background in autofiction and blogging. Her writing often explores magical universes, friendship trios, and distorted truths. They tend to borrow too many library books at once and cannot resist running in circles around a track. In the future, Oluyemisi hopes for a 5-star island in “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” and opportunities in video game writing to create more playable Black characters.

Lucia Herrmann Benitez

Email Address: lherrmann@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022

Lucia Herrmann Benitez is an artist and educator from Miami, FL. She spent eight years in Philadelphia, PA prior to joining the MFA program at UC San Diego, teaching high school English, then Spanish for nursery to sixth grade students. Lucia is primarily a poet and performer, with experience in dance, comedy, devised and improvised theater. Writing interests include the environment (ocean, the impending climate apocalypse, inspiring flora & fauna of Florida), Miami in all its port city eccentricities, cultural hybridity, Caribbean diaspora, linguistic tensions, and deciphering home. Find her scribbling in her notebook and sunbathing in the sand or a nearby expanse of verdant land.

Kimaya Kulkarni

Rebecca Lane

Fiona Martinez

Sarah Mullen

Ricardo Novaes De Oliveira

Rose Pacult

Email Address: spacult@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022 

I like to complicate through removal.… Perpetually intensive, I find, initially, theoretics best ignored; instead primary sources, character and prose should be explored. 

First navigating the full-force application of the self on my surroundings merges the lines distinguishing the individual from society into a consistent renewal. Every interaction offers a moment to fill space with a multi-layered event via deliberate, location-dependent, and precise action. Inevitably, my baseline mode arrives forcibly, also: free-spirited, spontaneous, fluid. Every interaction is the teacher that tidies previous understandings and the one I strongly grab hold of, and allow to lead me to the next.

Then, at that junction, there is a sense of being stranded, until the next involvement — the stacking impact of moments — guiding craft into my absolute limitless research and application. This approach leads to a permanent fuel for productivity, outside of prevailing limitations, stipulations, and conditions. At this place, my mode of being is akin to a primal tooth held in humanity’s jawbone, where the stories of us find an interlude for entrance and exit.

Today, I follow the movement. 

You may find me where life intersects with the propulsion forward to the next newest thing. Or at rose@queen.house :)

Isadora Petrovsky

Email Address: ipetrovsky@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022 

Isadora H. Petrovsky is a speculative fiction author, who aims to draw forth the inherent queerness of the SFF, fairytale, historical, and gothic horror genres. Her current project explores the ecological ramifications of monopolistic capitalism and its inherrent colonialism on a pre-apocalyptic planet with a fractured crystal core. Isadora finds a Jim Henson’s the Labyrinth sort of humor in the macabre and the weird, which makes the almost apocalypse, dare she say, fun. She is currently attending the MFA Writing program at UC San Diego. When not writing, she can be found teaching it, reading, playing Dungeons and Dragons, watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and snuggling with her cat Basil. Isadora was awarded the Ron L. Hubbard Writers of the Future Honorable Mention for her short fiction “Red”, published in Gingerbread House Lit Mag. A reprint of her queer gothic fiction “I AM STRUCK DEAD AT THE CLASP OF HER HAND” can be found in KALEIDOSCOPED’s Winter 2023 issue Ghosts & Gossip. To keep up with Isadora’s work follow her @izzypetrovsky on Instagram or visit her website https://isadorahpetrovsky.wordpress.com/.

Bailey Sneed

Email Address: bsneed@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2023 

Bailey Sneed is a mythweaver, a bookbinder and a papermaker with a belief that the tactile elevates the reading of a text.  Interested in the overlap of art and writing, many of Bailey’s pieces focus on conversing with art history and the visual archive, particularly the deceptions of historical women and mythical scenes. This highlights her research interests in feminine spirituality, queer expressions, and womanly embodiment.

She is fascinated with water, goddesses, and the women of antiquity. She keeps Sappho, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Carson by her bedside. 

Gin To

Georgia Wright

Klytie Xu