UGA Creative Writing Program

Braiden Ellis is a fiction writer who grew up in Oklahoma before moving to Georgia at the age of 19. He is a doctoral student in the English Department at UGA, where he studies creative writing and specializes in Southern and Indigenous Gothic Fiction, emphasizing themes of religion, sexuality, and place.

During his time at UGA, Braiden has taught both English Composition and Creative Writing and has worked as a writing consultant in the university’s writing center. As an undergraduate student, he studied Creative Writing and French at Georgia College & State University, where he was an active French tutor for other GCSU students and a volunteer Creative Writing teacher for middle schoolers in the GCSU Early College program. He spent the 2023-2024 academic year teaching English to French high school students in the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).

When asked what he's looking forward to at LARB:

"One session I’m really excited for is "A Day in the Life of an Agent and Reading Queries” with Noelle Flacks Math, an associate agent at Transatlantic Literary Agency. As a writer, I’m interested in learning more about what querying might look like from an agent’s perspective, so that I might learn more about how to query agents more effectively."

His poem "Call Me Amalekite" will be published in the LARB Publishing Workshop's magazine, PubLab.

Erik B. Brown (he/they) is a writer and PhD candidate in English at the University of Georgia with nearly a decade of experience in the nonprofit world. Erik’s poetry has appeared in Red Wheelbarrow, Zócalo Public Square, and Poetry Online. Erik is currently a graduate editor at The Georgia Review and formerly the digital editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature & Fine Arts.

In his own words:

"In general, I find myself at this juncture of the PhD thinking about my future career, and academia seems less and less sustainable. The LARB publishing workshop excites me because it offers me insight into ways I might connect my interest in books and literature with my extensive history of working in the nonprofit industry. I’m on the book track for the workshop mainly because I already have experience working with literary journals and find the idea of book publishing—the labor and care that goes into manifesting this thing that someone has spent years writing—not only fascinating but important.

There are a few sessions and people I am interested in, mainly because they represent either an editorial ethos that is compelling or they represent a specific press whose books interest me. Because of the extreme professionalization and commercialization of creative writing and publishing, I find that we don’t have literary communities or movements as we might have thought of them decades ago. The closest equivalent we might have now are specific independent or small presses. While there are an appreciable number of workshop speakers who represent large publishing houses, I’m most interested in connecting with some of those from smaller presses, like Daniel Owen from Ugly Duckling Presse or Tobi Harper Petrie who edits Quill, a q***r publishing series as part of Red Hen Press."

Make some time this Friday to join the Translation Research Cluster for a presentation of a translation in progress from Lisa Dillman.
Request preview of the PDF before the event by emailing Magdalena Zurawski, [email protected]

Lisa Dillman studied Spanish at the UCSD before completing an M.A. in Spanish Literature at Emory and a second M.A. in Literary Translation from Middlesex University in London. Professor Dillman is a renowned literary translator of Spanish and Latin American literature and has translated over thirty novels. She is a recipient of the Emory Language Center’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and has twice received the Winship Award for Senior Lecturers, and has created several courses on translation at Emory. In the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, she teaches multiple translation seminars (both beginning and advanced), as well as courses on contemporary literature and language.