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Workshop Staff

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

Patrick J. Ropp Patrick J. Ropp is a Detroit transplant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania living with a very hungry cat and very hungry plants. He works as a computational biologist and software engineer.

Nino Cipri - Workshop Staff 2022

Nino Cipri is a queer and transgender writer, editor, and educator. A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and University of Kansas’s MFA, Nino’s fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, Lambda, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. As 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. One time, an angry person on the internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny.

Marie Vibbert - Workshop Staff 2022

Marie Vibbert has sold over 80 short stories to magazines such as Nature, F&SF, Vice, and Analog. Her debut novel Galactic Hellcats was long-listed by the British Science Fiction Association for 2021. Her second novel, The Gods Awoke, will come out in September 2022. She is a Clarion graduate, parent to an awesome teenager, and by day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio.

Andrew Keahey headshot

Andrew Keaheyis a Black, bisexual pop culture analyst and horror writer whose work has appeared in The Black Youth Project and Afropunk. He currently resides in Austin, Texas where he’s burning alive, and he’s currently doing copywriting for a marketing firm and working on his first dramatic horror podcast to be released later this year. He has no idea what he’s doing, but he’s giving it his all.

Lara Elena Donnelly - Workshop Staff 2022

Lara Elena Donnelly is the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated author of The Amberlough Dossier trilogy and Base Notes. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny. She is a graduate of the Clarion and Alpha workshops, and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the Catapult Workshop in New York.

Tiera DiGiorgio - Workshop Staff 2022

Tiera DiGiorgio is originally from Georgia and currently lives in northern Utah with her husband and two chaos cats, where she works as a credential evaluator. She is a coffee-loving Halloween enthusiast and dancer with a healthy appreciation for farmers’ markets. She is a graduate of the Alpha and VONA workshops, and her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons.

Kammerud - alpha writers workshop onsite staff headshot

Chris Kammerud is a writer, photographer, and performer. Their stories have been short-listed for the Calvino Prize and appeared in, among other places, Strange Horizons, Passages North, and Bourbon Penn. They are a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and received their MFA from the University of Mississippi, where they studied as a Grisham Fellow. They live in Brooklyn with a mysterious amalgamation of terror and hope. Find them online at @cuvols or kammerud.photography.

Jackson Eflin of Muncie, Indiana, works in marketing and graphic design at the local food bank, then comes home to tend their victory garden and try new bread recipes. They routinely get called “A Forest Goblin” by people who just met them.

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