exploring social justice and the environment in the borderlands

creative writing rooted in collaborative research and reciprocal learning

 

Amplifying voices and expanding dialogue since 2017.

Each summer, the University of Arizona MFA program in Creative Writing offers its graduate students a two-week residency in Patagonia, AZ. These students also lead storytelling workshops and engage in hands-on environmental restoration projects with high school students from underserved border communities in collaboration with the Borderlands Restoration Network’s Borderlands Earth Care Youth Program.

MEET OUR 2023 FELLOWS

  • Dure Ahmed

    Dure Ahmed is an immigrant, Muslim writer. A 2023 recipient of the Monique Wittig Scholarship, their work has been published or is forthcoming in Guernica, ANMLY, Black Warrior Review, Autofocus, and Berkeley Poetry Review among others. Dure lives in New Jersey.

  • Jo Blair Cipriano

    Jo Blair Cipriano is originally from Hyattsville, Maryland. For their poetry, Jo has received support from Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and was a 2021 finalist for both Frontier Magazine’s New Voices Contest and its Industry Prize. Formerly a college dropout, they are now an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. Jo lives in Tucson with her partner and the street cat they accidentally adopted.

  • Claire Taylor

    Claire Taylor is currently an MFA student in Illustration & Design and a University Fellow at the University of Arizona. Her work conveys the intelligence and agency of non-human animals, plants and abiotic entities, and questions the binary of what is and is not nature. The media she works with includes watercolor, relief printmaking, book art and creative writing. She has held artist residencies at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. She holds an MS in Environmental Humanities and a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Utah. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Snail Snake City,” was held at the Utah State Capitol.

  • Dillon Clark

    Dillon Clark is a Queer writer from New Jersey. They are a first-year MFA student at the University of Arizona, and are Managing Editor of Sonora Review. You can read some of their work in the most recent issue of the tiny. Outside of writing, they love listening to live music around Tucson and hunting for the best restaurants in town. 

LEARN ABOUT OUR COLLABORATORS

  • Borderlands Earth Care Youth

    The Borderlands Earth Care Youth (BECY) inspires and trains the next generation of land stewards by hiring culturally diverse youth living on the US/Mexico borderlands to restore the trans-national watersheds they call home. Youth work with rock, wood, seeds, hands, and hearts to return flowing waters and riverside ecosystems to the arid borderlands.

  • Salvavision

    Salvavision helps refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers navigate a global migration crisis by providing aid & resources, while building stronger communities in Arizona and abroad. We also have partnerships to support returnees who have been deported to their home countries.

  • Kino Border Initiative

    The Kino Border Initiative (KBI) is a binational organization that works in the area of migration and is located in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The KBI’s vision is to help make humane, just, workable migration between the U.S. and Mexico a reality. Its mission is to promote US/Mexico border and immigration policies that affirm the dignity of the human person and a spirit of bi-national solidarity.