BMI PhD Fellows Reading

Join the Black Mountain Institute PhD Fellows as they share excerpts from their creative work in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction at the Cornish Pasty. Organized and co-moderated by BMI Graduate Student Assistants Jordan Forest and Arel Wiederholt Kassar, this will be a great program by student-writers, for student-writers.

RSVP in advance to receive a free drink ticket!

About the PhD Fellows:

Dominque Demetrea Conway is a Baltimore-based activist and author who writes non-fiction that embodies her lived experience as a person of African descent in the United States, and a resident of West Baltimore. Born in Evanston, Illinois and raised in the nation’s rustbelt, she is the mother of four adult children. As an activist, Dominque has engaged in work addressing mass incarceration and political imprisonment in the United States. Her work with men in prisons resulted in the creation of Friend of a Friend, a Pr*son-based mentoring program designed to teach critical thinking skills to young prisoners. Dominque has a BA from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and received an MFA from Goucher College in Baltimore in May 2021. She is the co-author of Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, the memoir of Black Panther political prisoner Eddie Conway. Her current project, Far From The Tree, is a genealogical memoir examining the impact of racism and trauma on consecutive generations of her family spanning three centuries in America.

Tanya Shirazi Galvez is from Lynwood, California. She completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA, and received an MS in Counseling Psychology from Mount St. Mary’s University and an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. She is Senior Editor at Aster(ix) Journal and is working on her first novel.

Heather Wells Peterson earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida. Since then, she has worked as an adjunct writing instructor, a book doula, an editor, and in tech. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Rumpus, Subtropics, Lucky Peach (RIP), Wigleaf, and Lit Hub, among others. You can learn more about her on her website.

Xiaoqiu Qiu is a Chinese poet. He is dedicated to preserving his mother tongue, Wu Chinese, and the environment around us. 

Host or Publisher Black Mountain Institute