Fiction Students

Emma Cairns Watson grew up in Los Angeles and studied English and neuroscience at Smith College. Since moving back to California, she’s taught creative writing workshops for kids, stocked shelves at the Container Store, and coordinated conferences on Judaism and Egyptology at UCLA. She likes noodles, folk ballads, baking, queer lit, and neat bugs.

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Miami-born Salvadoran-American writer who calls California home. Her work takes up gender, ethnicity, and how we persist in view of inexorable personal tragedy—but, you know, with the ha-ha’s.

Daniela was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She spent her undergrad years writing in San Francisco. She then moved to Massachusetts, where she taught for a while, only to move back to sunny California. Some of her favorite things include free parking, cherry coke and new papermate flare pens. She will beat you in useless movie trivia; don't test the validity of that claim. Here she is with a big chair.

Jake Comer is from Baltimore, Maryland, and has spent much of the last several years researching and developing management plans for World Heritage Sites in Africa, Oceania, and South America. He comes to UC Irvine with degrees from Brown University and the University of Cambridge, untold frequent flyer miles, and an affinity for black espresso that could be diagnosable. He likes archaeology, remote sensing, Billie Holiday, and intense humidity.

Christie Craig is a queer French-American writer. She grew up in Connecticut and has spent all of her adult life (until now) in Paris, studying literature at the Sorbonne and teaching ESL. She's come to Irvine to work on a mystery novel / novel of consciousness set in and around a big box superstore. Some of her other interests include great apes, installation art, the Middle Ages, early Cher and DIY dentistry. She makes a mean gin cocktail.

Lee is the result of a flawed experiment in which a scientist attempted to create a person who is exactly 50% gym bro, 50% literature geek. He definitely didn't steal that description of himself from his own Tinder bio. In 2016, Lee graduated from the University of Miami (in Florida, not the fake one in Ohio) with a degree in Creative Writing. He has since worked as a production assistant on the ABC television show The Goldbergs, taught for an academic support program at Palos Verdes High School in Los Angeles, and led creative writing workshops for a nonprofit organization called Writopia.

William Eng is a Trinidadian Chinese American Brooklynite who was born in Southern California but was raised in New York City and South Florida. He loves traveling as much as his parents and grandparents. He, also, loves horticulture, astronomy and dismantling white supremacy. When he was 18, he got a half-sleeve tattoo and a mohawk and swore he’d never change. lol. He and his partner raise a Shidoodle named Ashby.

Hallie grew up in Hurst, Texas. She earned a degree in English from Whittier College and has spent most of her twenties living abroad and writing on really wobbly desks.

Lily is interested in the intellectualization of joy through the work of fiction, and in written language as incantation. She is writing a collection of short stories about her five and a half years in Seoul and would like to further study medieval literature in the UK in the future.

Jacob grew up in Mid-Coast Maine, which is about as beautiful and bizarre a place as Stephen King says it is. Since very little ever happens there, he quickly turned to reading and writing as a form of adventuring. He graduated from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where he was Head Tutor of General Operations for the Colby College Farnham Writers' Center and a member of the Film Society. He has been an emergency department registrar and the intern for Writing Workshops in Greece.

Maggie is from Charlotte, North Carolina. Before moving to Irvine, she lived in New York City for five years and worked, most recently, as a web developer.

Michael grew up in Seattle, studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, then moved back to Seattle and worked in a small grocery store for six years. He is working on a novel.

Born and raised in Riverside, CA, Dan writes toward his roots: the intersections of poverty and queer identity. When he’s not working on literary aspirations, he’s running an unhinged game of D&D, which is very close to the same thing

Derek Moseley is from Milan, Tennessee. He has worked as a paralegal and taught college writing courses for many years. His bingo troll rode with him to Irvine.

is from Stockton and likes to talk shit.

Charlie Wren grew up in Indiana and New Zealand. He has a background in international development, nonprofit communications, social work, technical writing, and general avoidance of the thing he was meant to be doing, which is writing fiction. He is working on a story collection and a novel.

James holds degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Physics and doesn't really know how he ended up here. He enjoys junk food and spends his leisure time screaming at humanities majors about the impending heat death of the universe.