MFA Alumni reading with Dario Diofebi, Emma Hine, Silvina López Medin, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Natasha Rao, and Clare Sestanovich.
MFA Alumni Reading

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Dario Diofebi was born in Rome, Italy in 1987. After a BA and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Rome, he was a professional online poker player from ages 22 to 26. After that, he was a traveling high-stakes live poker player for another three years, mostly based in Las Vegas. He quit the game to pursue writing, and received an MFA from the NYU Creative Writing Program. Paradise, Nevada (Bloomsbury, 2021) is his first novel. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Rome.
Emma Hine is the author of the debut poetry collection Stay Safe, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was published by Sarabande Books in January 2021. Poems from this collection have appeared in The Offing, The Paris Review, and The Southern Review, among other publications, and her essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Poets & Writers. Hine received an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New York University, and in 2020 she co-founded Debut Revue, a virtual reading series celebrating debut poetry collections. She currently serves as the Communications Manager at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Croton on Hudson, New York. She has published five books of poetry including Excursion (Oversound Chapbook Prize, 2020), and That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (translated by Jasmine V. Bailey, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021). Her hybrid book Poem That Never Ends (2021) was a winner of the Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell Contest. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet into Spanish. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Harriet Books/Poetry Foundation, and MoMA/post, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the author of peluda (Button Poetry 2017) and Dreaming of You (Astra House 2021). Her work has been featured in The Yale Review, Harper's Bazaar, Breakbeat Poets, Redivider Magazine, Audible and more. She co-hosts a podcast called Say More and lives in Brooklyn.
Natasha Rao is a poet and educator from New Jersey. Her debut collection, Latitude, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, she has received support from Bread Loaf, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and she was named a 2021 Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal. Her work appears or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently a managing editor of American Chordata and lives in Brooklyn.