The Hughes Fellowships in Creative Writing
Past / Current Fellows
Sarah Mullens ( 2026 - Present, Prose)
Sarah Mullens joined SMU's English Department as the Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing in August 2026. Her creative work often set in Appalachia and the American South, layers personal narrative againist archival research to represent complex truths and belief systems. Before joining SMU English, Mullens receieved her MFA from Colorado State University, where she was a Hammond-Schwartz Fellow, Leslee Beeker Memorial Fellow, and associate editor of the Colorado Review. Her writing has received support from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Oxford American, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.
J.D Debris (2025 - Present, Poetry)
J.D. Debris is a poet, fiction writer, and musician from Salem, Massachusetts, known for his unique live performances incorporating poetry, live music, and storytelling. His debut book, The Scorpion's Question Mark, was selected by Cornelius Eady for the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He has been a Goldwater Fellow at New York University, a Luso-American Fellow at DISQUIET, and a Mass Poetry Teaching Artist Fellow. His work has recently appeared in Poems.com's Poem-a-Day and The Kenyon Review, and has been commended by Narrative's 30 Below 30 List and Ploughshares' Emerging Writers Prize. He currently serves as a Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing at Southern Methodist University.
L.A. Johnson (2025 - Present, Poetry)
L.A. Johnson is the author of Nobody Brings Flowers (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2027) and, alongside David St. John, is an associate editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf Press, 2026). She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from University of Southern California, where through academic years 2023-26 she was a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, her poems appears in the The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and she was awarded the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association/Gwenn A Nussbaum Prize for Poets Under 35. She is currently the interim Director of SMU English's Project Poetica and co-curates First Rodeo: A Poetry Reading Series.
Afsheen Farhadi (2022 - 2025, Prose)
Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Witness, The Rumpus, The Millions, Catapult, Bright Lights Film Journal, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Provost Graduate Fellow. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Samyak Shertok (2022 - 2024, Poetry)
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series) in 2025. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University and is currently an Assistant Professor of English-Creative Writing at Hendrix College.
Events
A Craft Conversation with Victoria Chang & L.A. Johnson, Hughes Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry
Thursday, September 3, 2026
A Craft Conversation with Mohsin Hamid and Afsheen Farhadi, Hughes Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction
Monday, March 10, 2025
A Craft Conversation with Valzhyna Mort and Samyak Shertok, Hughes Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
A Craft Conversation with Laura van den Berg and Afsheen Farhadi, Hughes Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Monday, March 10, 2025