Ramona Ausubel, Hugh Ryan, and Alumni Fellows
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novels Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One Is Here Except All of Us. Her new novel, The Last Animal is forthcoming from Riverhead. She is the winner of the PEN Center USA Fiction Award, the VCU Cabell First Novel Award and finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She is also the author of two story collections, A Guide to Being Born and Awayland has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, and Best American Fantasy.
Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors' Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. His second book, The Women's House of Detention, explores the forgotten history of the maximum security prison that once dominated life in Greenwich Village. He has curated exhibits for NYU, The Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Visual AIDS. In 2020, he was honored with the Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association for his curatorial work. He has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the New York Public Library, The Watermill Center, and Yaddo. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
About the Alumni Fellows:
Albert Abonado MFA '10 is the author of the poetry collection Jaw (Sundress Publications 2020). He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Colorado Review, Hobart, Poetry Northwest, Zone 3 and others. He lives in Rochester, NY where he teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and RIT.
Ruth Mukwana MFA '14 is a fiction writer from Uganda. She is also an aid worker currently working for the United Nations in New York. She’s a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA) and a 2020 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil NYC Emerging Fellow. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines including Solstice, Consequence, and Black Warriors Review (BWR where her story, “Taboo” was a runner-up in the BWR 2017 fiction contest. She lives with her daughter in New York and co-produces a podcast, Stories and Humanitarian Action that investigates how storytelling can raise awareness and galvanize action to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg MFA '12 is the author of Kin, a debut memoir deemed “essential reading” by the Washington Post and “gorgeously gritty” by Oprah Daily. Her essays have appeared in Salon, the Village Voice, and Elle. In 2016, Shawna was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, and in 2017 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A registered nurse for retired nuns, mother of five, and grandmother of two, she lives on a hobby goat farm in southern Indiana.