Simpson Fellows

Simpson Fellows are extraordinary creative writing teachers who are graduate students in the University of California, Berkeley, English Department and the California College of the Arts MFA program. They are selected in consultation with the New Literary Project and assigned to conduct workshops for traditionally underserved fledgling teenage and younger authors in a variety of school and afterschool settings. The workshops are subsidized by the New Literary Project in partnership with Berkeley and CCA and offered free of charge.

One of these settings is Girls Inc. of Alameda County, where 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize winner Danielle Evans recently spoke.

Workshop students and Simpson Fellows are often published in the annual, internationally distributed anthology of Project-related authors: Simpsonistas. These writers appear alongside distinguished award-winning authors affiliated with the Project.

Spring 2023

Simpson Fellows

Uttara Chaudhuri (Girls Inc. Alameda County)

Originally from New Delhi, India, Uttara Chintamani Chaudhuri is a second-year graduate student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. When she is not reading, writing or teaching, she likes to daydream, take long walks, exchange bad puns, listen to music, cook and, occasionally, sing.

Mehak Faisal Khan (Northgate High School)

Mehak Faisal Khan is a PhD Candidate in English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation, Strange Houses: Ajeeb Aesthetics in Contemporary Pakistani Media, mobilizes a theory of strangeness as an aesthetic and affective category for contemporary Pakistani literature and media. She is a Co-Chief Editor at Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences and an editor for Tasavvur.

Naima Karczmar (Girls Inc. Alameda County)

Naima Karczmar is a PhD candidate in English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, where she works on racial epistemologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She serves on the editorial board for Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences and Ki, where she is managing editor. She has been a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award and the Disquiet International Literary Prize in nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Autofocus, The Iowa Review, and Gramma Poetry.

Andrew David King (Mt. McKinley High School; Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall)

Andrew David King (they/he) is a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley, where they study the intersection of disability, class, and literature, especially as manifested in American poetic traditions. Originally from the East Bay, they attended Berkeley as an undergraduate, earning a BA in Philosophy and English; they've since earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in Philosophy from Central European University, and have served as Provost’s Visiting Writer and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s Department of English and Research Assistant at the Walt Whitman Archive. They’re the author of the artist’s chapbook Fire Sonnets (published through Clepsydra Press, their indie micropress imprint) and the co-founder of Diptych: A Book Artists' and Writers' Reading Series. Their critical and creative work appears in ZYZZYVA, Best New Poets 2018 and 2020, The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, Designing for Care, and elsewhere.

Ryan Lackey (Aspire Richmond College Preparatory Academy/CalPrep)

Ryan Lackey is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he specializes in contemporary Anglophone fiction. His criticism and reviews have appeared in Public Books, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Commonweal, and elsewhere. His story “A Few Perfect Innings” was runner-up for Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Prize in Fiction. His academic work includes contributions to studies of contemporary fiction and masculinity, religion in the millennial novel, and heteropessimism. Originally from southern Oregon, he lives in the East Bay.