The UGA Creative Writing Program presents their first in-person new student reading and welcome reception since 2019,  celebrating the work of six Ph.D. students: Nneoma Ike-Njuko and Sayantika Mandal, who matriculated in 2020; Maxime Bercalz, who matriculated in 2021; and their newest Ph.D. students, Ellen Boyette, D. T. Lumpkin, and Abhijit Sarmah.  Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. and the reading will start at 7 p.m.  Refreshments will be provided.

About the Readers

Maxime Berclaz is a PhD Student in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where he writes poetry and thinks about horror. He has published poems in Burning House, Prelude, and Deluge, and reviews in Pank and Tarpaulin Sky.

Ellen Boyette is a poet from Asheville, NC. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was an Alberta Kelley fellow and a Teaching-Writing fellow. Her poems appear or are forthcoming from Action Books Focus feature, the Columbia Review, the Bennington Review, jubilat, and elsewhere.

Nneoma Ike-Njuko is a doctoral student in English & Creative Writing at UGA. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University. Her work has been published in Winter Tangerine, Transition 119, and elsewhere.

D. T. Lumpkin grew in rural east Alabama before attending the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He has a Master’s in Literature from the University of Alabama and a Master of Fine Arts from the Ohio State University. His recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Five Points, The Sun, and–just this month–The Oxford American.

Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. She completed her MFA in Writing (Fiction) from the University of San Francisco where she was awarded the Jan Zivic Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Indian Literature, Ooligan Press, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, and others. She is currently working on her first novel.

Abhijit Sarmah (he/him) is a poet and researcher of global indigenous writing, with particular focus on Native American women writers and literatures from Northeast India. His work is published or forthcoming in The Margins, Lunch Ticket, The Lincoln Review, Chapter House Journal, The Albion Review, Glassworks Magazine, GASHER Journal, Rigorous Magazine, South 85 Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Roadrunner Review and elsewhere. Follow him on Instagram: @abhijitsarmahwritespoetry