Poems in Progress: A Reading by Vanderbilt MFA Students

ABOUT THE POETS:

Ayesha Asad (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Waveborne (Bottlecap Press, 2022). Her poetry has been included in the 2020 Best of the Net Anthology, and her work appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Boulevard, Mid-American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, PANK, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, and elsewhere. Her writing has been recognized by awards from UC Berkeley and UT Dallas. She is currently taking an academic leave from UC Berkeley School of Law to pursue an MFA in Poetry at Vanderbilt University. In her free time, she likes to dream.

Danielle Shandiin Emerson (she/her) is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). Her maternal grandfather is Ashííhí (Salt People Clan), and her paternal grandfather is Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her writing centers on Diné healing, kinship, language-learning, and memory. She is currently an MFA Fiction graduate student at Vanderbilt University.

Noa Greenspan is a writer from southeastern Virginia and a first-year fiction MFA student at Vanderbilt University. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories about coming of age and our relationships to place in the first part of the 21st century. Before Vanderbilt, Noa studied English, creative writing, and environmental studies at Princeton University and worked at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Lana Reeves is a poet and composer from O'ahu, Hawai'i. Winner of the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry and finalist for the 2025 Iowa Review Award, her work is published or forthcoming in Beloit, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Poetry Online, Southern Humanities Review, Meridian, Denver Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received her B.A. from Harvard University with a dual degree from the Berklee College of Music, and she is currently a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Rick Hilles is an award-winning poet and teacher whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Missouri Review, and many other leading literary journals. He is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and A Map of the Lost World, a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award.

Hilles is a former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and has received numerous honors and fellowships in support of his work. He is currently a professor of literature and creative writing at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry and writing.

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