Ethan Knox

Recent publications from Binghamton University’s Creative Writing and English program alumni

By Ethan Knox ’20 on JUNE 08, 2026 @BingUNews

Binghamton’s creative scholars are extraordinary in their field. Whether recent alumni, long graduated, or current students, Binghamton’s Creative Writing (CW) and English programs contribute to the literary landscape every year with new publications.

To celebrate the programs, the individuals who comprise them, and their works — many of which began at Binghamton — here is a roundup of 2025-27 CW and English publications and, in their own words, how the University helped them achieve these creative milestones.

Student publications

Paranoid citi(opens in a new window), by Shannon Hearn (Tabloid Press, 2026)  Image Credit: Tabloid Press.

“Who doesn’t like to post ethereal lightly? Who isn’t a citizenry draped in lilac ethics? Are you a froth? In Shannon Hearn’s PARANOID CITI, an interrogative story is shaping up. She’s uploading music for grace in crisis. She’s writing poems for you, citizen, and kindly so.”  —Nick Sturm 

Hearn is a poet and teacher in the Hudson Valley. She wrote the chapbook tracing circles in dirt (2021), and her work has appeared with Bruiser, cream city review, Fugue, Ghost City Press, and more. Her poem “WHAT MARRIAGE IS / TENDER CARE” was an Academy of American Poets Prize honorable mention, selected by Leah Umansky.

The Want Monster, by Suzanne Richardson (Northwestern University Press(opens in a new window), forthcoming in fall 2027)

Richardson’s debut collection is highly confessional, confronting addiction, sex, codependency, desire, anger, grief, domestic abuse, childhood sexual abuse, obsession, the erotic, limerence, depression, and longing. At turns sarcastic, dark, and even raunchy, the work is inspired by nontraditional and non-canonical sources like fairy tales, childhood rhymes, and riddles.

Richardson earned her Master of Fine Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the University of New Mexico. She is the co-editor of the anthology Roll with Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons (Play Story Press, 2025). The Want Monster was named a finalist for the 2024 Saturnalia Press Book Awards; her nonfiction, poetry, and fiction have appeared in New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, and more. More about Richardson and her writing can be found here(opens in a new window).

“In moments of extreme self-doubt about my writing journey, it was my cohort who helped to guide me and encourage the risks I was taking… Secondly, workshops in the program challenged me to write in forms I might have resisted on my own,” Richardson said. “Concrete support from the University allowed me enough stability to invest deeply in my studies and writings, and teaching bright students allowed for a co-discovery of the essentials of creative writing. Finally, some critical advice from Tina Chang at important junctures in my publication process helped me navigate some of the complexities of what publishing a book looks like.”

Blue Loop: Poems(opens in a new window), by AJ White (University of Georgia Press, 2025)  Image Credit: University of Georgia Press.

Selected by Chelsea Dingman for The National Poetry Series, this poetry collection focuses on addiction and recovery, using the concept of meditation to process and accept loss and harm. It seeks to prioritize the present moment, avoiding “future tripping”: the desire to visit things that haven’t occurred yet through the mode of anxious attachment.

White is a poet and educator from north Georgia. He is the winner of the 2023 Fugue Poetry Prize and a 2023 Academy of American Poets University Prize. His poems have also appeared in The Account, Best New Poets, Overheard, and West Trade Review. He teaches creative writing and lives in New York.

“I came to Binghamton five years ago, amidst a global pandemic, with somewhat-strange goals: I wanted space to write. I wanted exceptional peers to practice art alongside,” White said. “Binghamton University worked like a strange, intricate, complex, and, at times, unexplainable device to allow and afford all these opportunities and more. I have been transformed. I am grateful and astounded at how this happened here, alongside peers I deeply respect and appreciate. The art this community is producing is meaningful and of value.”

Alumni publications

Lovers, Friends, and Other Strangers by Rhonda Branca, MA ‘03, PhD ’10 (forthcoming from Third Rail Press(opens in a new window), February 2027)

A hybrid collection of fiction and memoir, this collection revolves around a cast of Gen X misfits from small-town Indiana who wrestle with intense love and disillusionment from youth into middle age, who ask: where do our own stories end, and others’ begin?

Branca(opens in a new window) is a writer, editor, and educator. Originally from Indiana, she now serves as the director of Lyceum and the editor-in-chief of Eleventh Hour Literary. She is also the author of the novella Gods and Doctors (forthcoming from Running Wild Press, 2027). Her work has appeared in december, Orca, Cagibi, Harpur Palate, and American Drama, among others. 

“This book would not be possible if it weren’t for two gifts Binghamton University gave me: the workshop experience with Jaimee Wriston Colbert, who has been an excellent mentor and a dear friend; and the Binghamton University Writers’ Circle via the Professional Staff Senate, which has provided me with a community of fellow writers around campus,” said Branca. “These talented people helped me shape the book and provided support during the revision and submission process. I am forever grateful to my Binghamton family.”

What to Wear Out(opens in a new window), by Jen DeGregorio, PhD ’21 (Get Fresh, 2025)  Image Credit: Get Fresh.

Framed by a sequence about the COVID-19 pandemic, DeGregorio’s debut poetry collection witnesses a woman chafing at the seams of her life. From an “eager to please” youth hemmed in by white femininity, patriarchy, and consumerism to a mid-life urge to shed these constraints, the speaker tangles with family dynamics, romantic relationships, social class, and a planet wracked by crises.

DeGregorio’s writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly), and elsewhere. A former senior editor of Poets & Writers, she is now the associate director of creative writing at Binghamton University.

The Widowing Radiance(opens in a new window) (Bordighera Press, 2025) and Heartland Errata (forthcoming from Etruscan Press(opens in a new window), November 2026) by Dante Di Stefano ‘01, MA ’04, MAT ‘06, PhD ’15  Image Credit: Etruscan Press.

Dedicated to three professors from Binghamton and to three poet-friends Di Stefano met during his studies, Heartland Errata is a love note forged in the griefs and joys of family life to the damaged world and to those who live in poems. Drawing unity from his experience of suburban fatherhood, Di Stefano celebrates artists from Ruth Stone to John Coltrane and more, grounding the collection in the everyday textures of a life. Together, these moments form the broken, capacious, and sincere country of the human heart.

Di Stefano is the author of six poetry collections and a chapbook. His writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2018, Poem-a-Day, and Prairie Schooner, and he has won the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the On Teaching Poem Prize, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, among others. He has worked in various positions for several literary journals and now teaches high school English in Endicott, New York.

“My truest education took place wandering the stacks of the poetry section of Bartle Library, where I would encounter poets whose work would sustain me on and off the page,” Di Stefano said. “My professors allowed me to alchemize the knowledge that the poets and writers I loved would always be fountaining into me and flowing out of me. I met so many friends at Binghamton over the years, and I am so proud to be an alumnus.”

Maybe the Body(opens in a new window) (Tin House/Zando, 2026) and Beauty Talk (forthcoming from Noemi Press(opens in a new window), October 2026), by Asa Drake ’10  Image Credit: Tin House/Zando.

In her debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, Drake witnesses firsthand the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. She reaches for the lush landscapes of the Philippines and the American South as she traces the lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance. Threaded together with a six-part sequence, these poems are a conversation between grandmothers, mothers, and aunts through a range of forms. With its imagery and lyrical perspective, Maybe the Body reconsiders the natural transactions of work, intimacy, and the poem itself.

Intimate, wry, and a little sour, Beauty Talk addresses the (im)possibility of talking about beauty in America without addressing whiteness. Here is a personal history of who gets to be beautiful. While pulling from the autobiographical, the collection is shaped by the illegibility, omission, and ekphrasis of the personal archive. Embracing a fractal telling, these poems explore an inheritance of mixed aesthetics and what it means to partake in a lineage that is both colonial and immigrant.

Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, and Sewanee Review, among others. Drake earned her first poetry accolades from Binghamton — the Andrew Bergman Award in Creative Writing and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.

“Binghamton is where I first started to think of myself as a poet, but it wasn’t just work within the classroom that made being a writer possible. It’s the many ways professors emphasized building community with other writers,” Drake said. “I learned to think about poetry as a conversation between real people, one that I could be a part of. The Creative Writing program at Binghamton introduced me to a version of contemporary poetry where there was room for me.”

make it to the end (of the movie), by Jordan Franklin, PhD ’25 (forthcoming from BOA Editions(opens in a new window), September 2027)

make it to the end (of the movie) explores the difference between living and surviving, and how mental health, trauma, race, gender, and survivor’s guilt compound these struggles. Inspired by zombie films and media, the collection tells the story of a protagonist known only as “poet,” a troubled graduate student who finds herself in a zombie apocalypse.

Franklin is the author of the poetry collections when the signals come home, and the chapbook boys in the electric age. Her works have appeared in Frontier Poetry Journal, Cagibi, the North American Review, and the Eastern Iowa Review, among others. She has worked as a poetry editor for Harpur Palate and co-edited the Women of Color Writers’ Boundaries and Borders Anthology. She has taught at Binghamton University, Stony Brook University, Writopia, the Women of Color Writers, and the Young Artists and Writers Program.

“make it to the end (of the movie) was my creative dissertation. I wouldn’t have been able to complete it without the time and resources granted to me via Binghamton University,” said Franklin, who particularly thanked Professors Joe Weil, Alexandra Moore, and Claire Luchette for their support. “The Clifford D. Clark fellowship was a major contributor on both accounts, as well as the feedback my fellow Creative Writing peers provided me on my work.”

Almanac: A Murmuration(opens in a new window), by Christine Gelineau, MA ‘90, PhD ’94 (SUNY Press, 2025)  Image Credit: SUNY Press.

Decades into life on a horse farm in upstate New York, Almanac focuses on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and one another, the planet we all share, and how these narratives shape our identities, communities, attitudes, and actions toward the environment. Framed by the seasons, Almanac combines observations of iced-in alligators and newborn foals with prose poems evoking the natural world, gardening techniques learned from the Haudenosaunee, personal resilience in the face of long COVID and brain surgery, and urban versus rural perspectives on water rights and wind-turbine siting. It charts one person’s journey into the inner and external worlds, resonating with all readers dealing with these life-changing times.

Gelineau is a former associate director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University and now teaches creative nonfiction and poetry in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, a program she helped found. She is the prize-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Crave, and editor, with Jack B. Bedell, of the anthology French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets.

“The time and imperative to write, along with the insight and encouragement of the terrific faculty here during your years in the program at Binghamton are crucial, of course, but as time goes by and you progress in your career, you find that the support and inspiration of the writers you meet here and make a long-term connection with — not just faculty but your fellow grad students and writers who come here to read — that web of support and information will itself become an enduring influence and help,” Gelineau said.

The Quarter Queen(opens in a new window), by Kayla Hardy, PhD ’20 (Ballantine Books, 2026)  Image Credit: 2026 Penguin Random House.

In 1843 New Orleans, Voodoo queen Marie Laveau is feared by all. Her daughter Ree defies her mother at every turn, until she finds Marie under a curse cast by exiled Voodoo king Jon the Conjurer — Marie’s former teacher, lover, and greatest enemy. As Ree uncovers secrets and faces enemies, she must confront her mother’s past and her own destiny — or die trying. Told in alternating timelines, this debut novel is an epic tale of love, family, power, and the deadly cost of correcting the sins of the past.

A mythology expert, author, and screenwriter of Louisiana Creole descent, Hardy is an adjunct professor at Binghamton University and is a scholar of Black folklore, mythology, and Voodoo.

“Being a part of The CW Program during my graduate studies was such an immense blessing. Amazing professors like Alexi Zentner and Jaimee Wriston Colbert supported the evolution of my work with sound craft advice and mentorship. Having successful writers model the writer’s life in real time gave me the confidence that I could follow in their footsteps to publication,” Hardy said. “I was also a Clifford D. Clark Fellow during my time in the program, which provided me with the generous support to write uninterrupted during semesters and the summers and allowed me an incredible creative springboard into the cultivation of my writing portfolio.”

Behold(opens in a new window), by Shara M. McCallum, PhD ’99 (forthcoming from Alice James Books, September 2026)  Image Credit: Alice James Books.

While working on this book, McCallum traveled to museums in the U.S. and abroad with the explicit goal of visiting art by contemporary Caribbean, Black, and women artists. The resulting collection works to untangle what it means to imagine belonging by entering the scene. These poems explore fulfillment and connection, the labor of seeking, the ache of loss, and the histories carried within the self.

Born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and served as the Penn State Laureate from 2021-22.

Recovery Commands(opens in a new window), by Abby Murray, PhD ’15 (Ex Ophidia Press, 2025)  Image Credit: Ex Ophidia Press.

Focusing on the collision of military and civilian life found inside one loving, long-term, and contradictory marriage, this book of poems follows the impacts of violent conflict and deployment on a family through one pacifist, nonbinary poet’s perspective. Speaking to a universal sense of inner conflict that so many humans experience while trying to love each other in a violent, unjust world, this collection is an instruction manual for how to love despite the practical reasons not to.

Murray (they/them) has moved around the U.S. teaching writing. They served as the 2019-21 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington. Their first book won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; Recovery Commands won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Prize and has been nominated for the National Book Award. In 2024, their poem “Self Portrait as Coriander Seed” won a Pushcart Prize. In 2016, they launched Collateral, a literary journal publishing work concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone.

Patrimonium, by Aggeliki Pelekidis, MA ’08, PhD ’12 (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press(opens in a new window), September 2027)

Pelekidis is the author of Unlucky Mel (Cornell University Press, 2024), an IPPY gold medal winner for best debut in fiction. Her collection of short stories, Patrimonium, won Binghamton University’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Confrontation, andThe Hopkins Review, among others. She’s currently the associate director of first-year writing in Binghamton’s Writing Institute.

“Taking so many great creative writing workshops and literature classes while in graduate school at Binghamton spurred my creativity to write the short stories for my forthcoming collection,” Pelekidis said.

Lesbian Dinosaur / Dinosaur Lesbian(opens in a new window), by Nicole Santalucia ’02, PhD ’14 (Bordighera Press, 2026)  Image Credit: Bordighera Press.

Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt, Spoiled Meat, and Because I Did Not Die. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Rumpus, The Florida Review, Out Magazine, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. She works at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and has led poetry workshops in the Cumberland County Prison, Shippensburg Public Library, Boys & Girls Club, and nursing homes. She founded The Binghamton Poetry Project in 2011.

Delicate Machine, by Leah Umansky ’02 (forthcoming with Dzanc Books(opens in a new window), 2027)

A hybrid work about the journey of a single woman trying to keep her head up despite a global pandemic, isolation, and the personal struggle of infertility through the ups and downs of IVF and a statistics game of chance and fate, who finds her way past personal devastation into a life of optimism and acceptance.

Umansky is the author of three poetry collections. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted the COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work has been featured on PBS, The Slowdown, The New York Times, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, among others.