Workshop Staff

A shoulders-up photo of Nino Cipri. They are wearing black-rimmed glasses and a red scarf, and smiling at the camera.

Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and earned their MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas in 2019. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. Nino’s 2019 story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize, and their novella Finna—about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes—was published by Tor.com.

Black and white shoulders-up photo of Lara Elena Donnelly, who is smiling at the camera and wearing large earrings in the shape of fish skeletons.

Lara Elena Donnelly is the author of the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated trilogy The Amberlough Dossier, as well as short fiction and poetry appearing in venues including Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny. She has taught in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the Catapult Workshop in New York.

Close head-and-shoulders photo of a white woman with glasses and curly brown hair in an asymmetrical haircut. She is wearing a gray scarf with a lot of white text printed on it; the text is too small to read.

Rachel Halpern writes children’s books by day and sci-fi/fantasy by night. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Liminal Stories, and she’s a graduate of the Alpha Workshop and Stonecoast MFA. She likes strange magic, smart monsters, and introspective robots.

A shoulders-up photo of Julie Holderman, a white woman who is smiling and wearing glasses.

Julie Holderman is an Alpha grad (’03/’04) who grew up telling stories in the frozen wastelands of Minnesotan suburbia. Over the past few years, she served as primary coordinating author on Tortall: A Spy’s Guide, a collection of in-character documents set in the bestselling Tortall universe by Tamora Pierce (available now via Random House Children’s Books). She spends her free time herding cats, watching ten-year-old scifi shows, and caring entirely too much about fictional people.

A shoulders-up photo of a white woman wearing glasses and purple shirt, smiling at the camera. She has a tattoo of stars around her collarbones.

Sarah Hollowell is a graduate of Alpha (2009/2010) who works in a university office by day and writes books by night. Her debut YA contemporary fantasy novel, A Dark and Starless Forest, will come out Fall 2021. Her work has appeared on The NoSleep Podcast, Fireside Magazine, Huffington Post, and in The (Other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat and the Fierce. She has two cats, and spends a lot of her non-writing time listening to podcasts and replaying the same five video games.

A shoulders-up photo of Andrew Keahey, a black man with glasses and a beard. He is smiling at the camera.

Andrew Keahey is a blogger, horror analyst, and fiction writer from Austin, Texas whose work has been featured in Afropunk and The Black Youth Project. His current focus is on short stories while also working on his first full-length novel.

AJ Lucy is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies the eggs of tiny fish. Someday she hopes to teach scientific researchers to write up their findings in a way that is pleasant to read. Her fiction can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

Shoulders up picture of Patrick Ropp smiling. Patrick is a white man in a gray jacket.

Patrick J. Ropp is an alumnus of the Clarion UCSD workshop, has a Master of Science in computational biology from Carnegie Mellon University, and works as a cybersecurity engineer in Pittsburgh. He likes cactuses, cats, and the things dredged up from the lightless depths.

Interested in volunteering with Alpha?