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

Peter LaBerge founded The Adroit Journal as a high school sophomore in November 2010 and he hasn’t slowed down since. The winner of a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, Peter graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude with his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New York University as a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks — Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017) and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015) — and his poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Pleiades, and ZYZZYVA. Currently, Peter is at work on his debut poetry collection, Century Flower.

Through The Adroit Journal, Peter has provided early editorial recognition to such luminaries as K-Ming Chang, Chen Chen, Richie Hofmann, Talin Tahajian, Ocean Vuong, Phillip B. Williams, and Shelley Wong, among many others. Peter also founded the online Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, which connects high school writers from around the world with established poets, fiction writers, and memoirists, as well as three annual prize opportunities for emerging writers: the Adroit Prizes for Poetry & Prose, the Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program in Poetry, and the Anthony Veasna So Scholars Program in Fiction. Peter has also previously taught creative writing to undergraduates at New York University and to middle school students at a public school in Queens, New York.

In addition to his continued leadership of The Adroit Journal, Peter is ever expanding his work with promising, tenacious students as founder of Ellipsis Writing, an online creative writing tutoring and college advising company. Through Ellipsis, Peter has independently mentored emerging student writers who have subsequently been recognized as Best American Poetry contributors, U.S. Presidential Scholars, and National Student Poets, as well as students recognized by BBC News, The Boston Globe, Disney Channel, the Kennedy Center, the United Nations, The Wall Street Journal, the White House, and beyond. He lives in Philadelphia.