Meet Our Fellows

COURSE and MARKETING COORDINATOR

Fatima B. Jalloh is a writer, editor, and poet from Jacksonville, Florida, whose work moves between journalism, cultural criticism, and creative writing. Their reporting and essays explore Black life, labor, politics, art, and the strange cultural realities of the present, with work published in The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, The Creative Independent, and elsewhere.

A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Jalloh studied journalism, Black Studies, and creative writing. They are particularly interested in the intersections of Black liberation, queer life, political imagination, and the arts, and in journalism as a practice of community, accountability, and collective memory. Fatima is an associate editor for The Progressive, and is currently based in Brooklyn.

MARKETING ASSISTANT

atarah lael is a word-dancer at heart, who loves to pair vivid images with emotionally resonant language to create poetry as delicate yet deadly as a spider's web. She deeply identifies with her Aquarius sun — independent, free-spirited and profoundly one of a kind. Their work is one-part gentle recollection, two-parts ardent lyric, and entirely Black. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in Helicon, Ebony Tomatoes Collective, The Rebis, and Lucky Jefferson. You can read their latest musings on their Substack blog, Be(Longings).

COURSE FELLOW

Olivia (Liv) is a writer and performance artist from Tamaqua, Pennsylvania now based in Brooklyn, New York where she creates one-on-one audio experiences that use telephonic intimacy to induce alternate realities. Recently, she co-created the telephonic epic “Lennox Mutual” with Candle House, which has been featured in the New Yorker and New York Times. This collaboration inspired her solo rom-com thriller “LUCKY SHOT”, covered by NoProscenium and Voidspace’s online “Surfing the Void” festival. In-person, she’s performed with Whisperlodge for their tenth anniversary ASMR experience. 

Her work is driven by obsessive, near-constant observation, with the goal of awakening paranoia, inspiring love, facilitating release, and unraveling the present moment into its constituent pieces for examination and surprising reconstitution.

“Lennox Mutual” has been praised by the 2026 World Experience Awards and Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab. Independently, she was awarded the Edwin L. Schuman Award at Northwestern University for her creative writing thesis under the advising of video-essayist John Bresland. While most of her work involves responsive, live performance, her newly minted Patreon experiments with pre-recorded soundscapes and narratives. She credits Rachel for helping her maintain an intensely present writing practice.

COURSE FELLOW

Melissa Blount is an artist, writer, and licensed clinical psychologist practicing her craft in Evanston, Illinois. She is an experienced clinician and lecturer presenting throughout the country on Black health, wellness, trauma, and the opportunities for healing and community building through the visual arts. Her textile pieces explore notions of Black womanhood, trauma, and white supremacy in America, often utilizing antique household linens as a canvas to reshape and reimagine the narratives around Black women and domesticity. Her recent work has been focusing on menopause and the lack of conversation, education and exploration of this life-changing phase of a woman’s life.

COURSE FELLOW

Delores Edwards is an Emmy and multiple award-winning executive producer, consultant, writer, strategic advisor, and media and story coach with over 20 years of experience in network news, entertainment, and documentary programming. She was the producer of Basic Black, the longest running Black news show on PBS. Today, she helps ambitious women develop their ideas, own their narrative, and walk into any room calm, self-assured, and impossible to overlook.

COURSE FELLOW

Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is a Brazilian writer (plays, poetry, prose); cultural strategist; and theatre artist. A Northwestern University alum and current guest lecturer, she has spent the past three years as an editor of ‘American Theatre’ magazine (approximately 70 publications of her own in print and online). This year, she was a semi-finalist playwright in the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Previous new-work experience includes collaborations with The Kennedy Center, Emmy’s/Television Academy and CloudCo Entertainment, Lookingglass Theatre, and more. Gabriela is a past fellow of the Fornés Playwriting Workshop and O’Neill National Critics Institute. 

COURSE FELLOW

ANDREA GOODMAN, priestess, vocalist/composer, sound-healer, mythic astrologer, poet, spiritual teacher and counselor, has been part of a groundswell of innovative women’s creative and spiritual emergence. She was an original member of the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble, performing, recording and touring worldwide, 1974-1991, singing without words in the universal, timeless language of sound. Andrea is a co-founder, with Rev. Mother Ione and Pauline Oliveros, of the Ministry of Maåt in 1997, and holds the title of High Priestess of the Double Maåti. She lives on an island on the Maine coast, where she offers teaching and counseling in person or remotely, and hosts circles, retreats, blessings and ceremonies. Andrea’s recordings include Divine Doorways, The Moon’s Daughter & Other Song-Stories, and Songs of Sappho. Her book is called Lightning Holds My Hand, A Woman’s Journal of Guidance. For more: www.rubythroatedspirit.com

COURSE FELLOW

Brittany N. Jaekel is a Minnesota-based poet and writer. Her work has appeared in RHINO, The MacGuffin, Mom Egg Review, $ Poetry is Currency, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, The Witch's Mouth, was selected for the 2024 Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series and published by Midwest Writing Center Press in 2026. She serves as the creative nonfiction editor at Great Lakes Review. Learn more at www.brittanynjaekel.com 

COURSE FELLOW

Diane Macklin has been on a unique pilgrimage for the past ten months, steeped in renewal and re-visioning her spiritual and creative walk in this wonder-rich, gravity world. As an artist, she is a storyteller in the tradition; teaching artist for ages zero to seniors; an advocate (who recently served on the Maryland Governor’s Arts Incubator Workgroup investigating statewide, artist sustainability); a published poet, editor, and writer.

COURSE FELLOW

Maggie Munday Odom is a writer, community builder, & recent graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied Theatre, Religious Studies, Environmental Policy & Culture, and Creative Writing (under Professor Webster’s tutelage!). 

Maggie Munday writes plays and essays; her recent work includes book & lyrics for Walk Along, a new musical about siblings seeking healing through pilgrimage, which was workshopped and produced at Northwestern.

Maggie Munday builds community through museum education and is currently interning at the Art Institute of Chicago. She also creates community through facilitating contemplative practices; she has taught yoga and meditation at various community spaces and worked as Northwestern’s Student Program Coordinator for Mindfulness & Spiritual Wellness Initiatives.

Maggie Munday has called many places home, notably North Carolina and currently Chicago. She believes in long walks, public libraries, and intergenerational friendship. www.maggiemundayodom.com

COURSE FELLOW

Illinois Arts Council recipient, four-time Ragdale fellow, and Emmy nominee for narration of the PBS documentary “From Schoolboy to Showgirl,” cin salach has collaborated with musicians, artists, and most recently chefs and scientists, for over 40 years. Inaugural Poet Laureate of Covenant Farm in Sawyer, Michigan, her two books of poetry are housed there in the Porch Swing Poetry Box. 

cin leads circles of women writers in a monthly workshop, Splitting the World Open, as well as poetry experiences for humans with dementia which celebrate the power of living in the moment—something people with dementia do better than anyone.

COURSE FELLOW

Kaleiheana Stormcrow (they/them) is a queer Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet, writer, ritualist, artist, hair wizard, and dreamer. They live off-grid with their partner, three dogs, chickens and a collection of endangered native plants on the slopes of Kīlauea in the illegally occupied sovereign Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. They have a B.S. in Wildlife Sciences from Oregon State University and an M.S. from UH Mānoa in Natural Resources and Environmental Management—and they think calling more-than-human ancestors "resources" is gross. Currently Kaleiheana is writing a biocultural memoir, making feather lei, and searching for portals.

COURSE FELLOW

Julianna Nelson Vermeys is an

integrative somatic

psychotherapist and writer in

Portland, Oregon. Julianna’s

writing intersects genres as essay,

poetry, memoir, fiction and non-

fiction. She is curious about how

modern culture, urban life and

systemic issues can be healed

through art, nature, movement and

being seen. She weaves together

stories from her incredibly lucid

memory, societal inquiry and

embodied presence. Her memoir,

A Complicated Gestalt, is under

revision. She shares poetry and

essays on Substack as

@nonlinearjournals, and is

currently working on a novel about

three generations of women,

inheritance and healing, set in Los

Angeles, Northern California and

Oregon as the planet is

transformed by human chaos and

climate disaster. Her hope is that

everyone can find transformation

in the cracks of their pain by

sharing beautiful words about

terrible things.

COURSE FELLOW

Roy Zhu (they/them) graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in environmental science and creative writing. Their honors thesis under Professor Rachel Webster explored themes of toxicity, ancestry, and environmental remediation. A recipient of Northwestern’s 2025 Jean Meyer Aloe Academy of American Poets Prize, Roy has worked as a museum educator and program facilitator at the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art. Passionate about transformative ecology, eco-poetics, and ethnobotany, Roy’s creative work has taken many forms, including producing leading a mural project on the Neponset River Greenway trail in Boston, Massachusetts. Roy was born in Boston, Massachusetts and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.