Workshop Staff 2024 (Subject to update & change)

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

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.

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 robots searching for self-determination. Also milkshakes. Milkshakes are pretty great.

AJ Lucy is the proud owner of a PhD in fun fish facts and a BA in drawing cool pictures. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife and hopes to someday teach scientists that writing is an important skill too. Her fiction can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

Morgan Suity is a Library Manager in Pittsburgh, PA with a decade of experience offering engaging programming and enthusiastic reader’s advisory to teens and readers of all ages. She has presented at the YALSA Young Adult Services Symposium, and written articles and book reviews for VOYA Magazine and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has also been active in visual media and literary fandom communities for over 15 years. She writes original stories and fanfiction about finding love, family, and self-acceptance.

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.

Aliza. T. Greenblatt, by day, is a mechanical engineer who works for a vertical farming company. By night, she is a Nebula award winning writer of short fiction. Her work has been nominated for a Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other great publications. At all times, she lives in New York City where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. You can find her online at https://atgreenblatt.com

Kaitlin Rose Jencks is a writer, actor, and musician. She holds a degree in Vocal Performance from Berklee College of Music where she specialized in musical theater performance and writing. She is a two-time graduate of Alpha and was an assistant editor on Triangulation’s Dark Skies and Extinction anthologies. When she isn’t singing, acting, or writing short fiction, she writes musicals. When she isn’t doing that she works for far too many Boston historical organizations and hoards history facts like a tiny trivia dragon.

Rebekah White is a journalist and editor from Auckland, New Zealand. She’s a graduate of Alpha and nowadays writes non-fiction stories for magazines about science and the natural world. Her byline is in New Zealand Geographic, The Guardian and The Washington Post, and she’s given lectures on narrative non-fiction at AUT University and the University of Canterbury. The only place her fiction has appeared so far is in an English exam, in one of those horrible questions requiring students to tell a simile from a metaphor

Andrew Keahey – is 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 author of the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated Amberlough Dossier trilogy, the contemporary thriller Base Notes, and short fiction and poetry appearing in venues including Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny.

Lara has taught in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the Catapult Workshop in New York. She is a graduate of the Clarion and Alpha writers’ workshops, and has often serves as onsite staff at the latter, mentoring amazing teens who will someday take over the world of SFF.

Katie McRury was born in Atlanta, Georgia, grew up and went to college in Pennsylvania, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a 2018 and 2019 graduate of the Alpha Workshop. She reads everything from Austen to Asimov and is also interested in cryptography, watercolors, linguistics, cooking, history, fiber arts, and dinosaurs. Accordingly, she has a Bachelor of Architecture.

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.

Ray Stevens lives in Troy, New York with her family and three cats. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts and an MS in Library and Information Science, and is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop. Her work has appeared in Mothership Zeta and the Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2018. She works as a software developer.

Lauren Burke is a writer, editor, and podcaster from Chicago, Illinois. She began her career in
publishing as an editor and organizer for the annual Ladies’ Night Comics Anthology before
joining PIKids, where she edited licensed children’s books for Disney, Hasbro, and Mattel.
Lauren is passionate about women’s history and classic literature and is the producer and co-host of the Bonnets at Dawn podcast, which explores the lives and works of women writers from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Her book, Why She Wrote (Chronicle Books), won an Excellence in Graphic Literature Readers’ Choice Award in 2022. Other notable publications include A Stitch Through Time (Sunbird Books), Casting Mr. Collins from Austen After 200 (Palgrave), and It’s Her Story: Rosa Parks (Sunbird Books), which was a runner-up for a Teach Primary award.

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.

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.

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