This event is virtual-only (via Zoom) and is open to Helen Zell Writers' Program MFA students, Zell Fellows, and alumni, as well as U-M graduate and undergraduate students. It is not open to the general public. Please email Ashley Bates (asbates@umich.edu) for login instructions.

Our alumni panelists include:

Talin Tahajian (Class of 2019) is a PhD student in English at Yale. She also earned an MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from Trinity College, Cambridge, where she was funded by a Gould Studentship in English Literature. You can find her poems in POETRY, Narrative, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and TriQuarterly. She’s an assistant editor of the Yale Review.

Bryan Byrdlong (Class of 2020) is a Black writer from Chicago, Illinois. He has been published in Guernica Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Magazine. Most recently Bryan received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Bryan is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles.

Jenny Tomscha (Class of 2011) is a fiction writer and teacher of writing, as well as a PhD student in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters (Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand). Most recently, she directed the Writing Program at New York University Shanghai, where she was also a founding faculty member. During her tenure at NYU Shanghai, she developed the university's creative writing minor and helped to establish a robust creative writing community. Her career as a university teacher of writing also includes positions at the University of Michigan and the New England Literature Program (NELP). Jennifer also has a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School.