Meet Our Team

Noah Buckley is a third-year MFA candidate in Fiction at Emerson College. He hails from the twilit forests of the Pacific Northwest and splits his time between Boston and the feywild. In-between DnD games and a continual quest to find the dumbest possible pun, Noah writes genre-bending stories that use fabulist elements as a lens to explore grief and love. He has a particular fondness for the works of Emily St. John Mandel, Michael Chabon, Zora Neale Hurston, Becky Chambers, Kurt Vonnegut, and the lyrics of George Quibuyen. Noah believes that storytelling is a form of agency and looks forward to helping students find their voice as they write themselves into the world.

Nate DeChambeau is a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction at Emerson College. In both reading and writing, he finds himself drawn to stories that use the comedic, the fantastical, and the strange to explore the idea of human connection. Outside of this all-consuming literary obsession, he enjoys cooking, hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and hiding rubber ducks around his apartment for his roommates to find. A firm believer in quantity producing quality, he looks forward to helping students find their creative identity to tell stories only they can.
 

Aubrie Dickson is starting her second year as a MFA poetry candidate at Emerson College. While her studies focus on poetry, she also enjoys writing fiction and nonfiction, and tries to read a variety of authors and genres from all areas of the globe. Inspired by worlds both concrete and fantastical, she looks towards finding new ways to interpret and navigate the things we face in our modern world. When she is not reading or writing, she loves to visit the harbor, find movies she has never seen, learn new languages, and watch birds at the window with her cat, Bandit. She wants to help students find new ways to express their interests and themselves through their creative writing, as she believes writing is an invaluable tool of discovery.
 

Aniaha Ortiz is embarking on her second year at Emerson College as an MFA candidate with a concentration in poetry. With her Bachelor’s of Arts in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies, Aniaha’s poetry centers around incorporating languages (and translations) along with the blending of multicultural philosophies. Coming from a more theatrical-spoken word background, Aniaha caters the majority of her poetry to be read, heard, and performed. It is because of this mentality that she flips between the structure and the freedom of poetry; deliberately focusing on amplifying her voice in whatever medium it stands in. Loudly, clearly, and emotionally. Through EmersonWRITES, she hopes to continue building on her foundation to go into higher education in hopes of becoming a professor in Creative Writing. Reminding students, and herself, that they would never be “too much” or “too difficult” for an audience that deeply craves to hear whatever they have to say.

Kelsey West is a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction at Emerson College, as well as an alumna of their undergraduate Creative Writing BFA program. Kelsey prefers to read and write realistic fiction short prose pieces, but believes that everyone should have the opportunity to read and write what most excites them! When she is not writing or attending class, you can find her enjoying trivia night with her friends, rewatching her favorite show, swimming, attempting to cook and bake, doing arts & crafts, and picking flowers. Kelsey is thrilled to be teaching EmersonWRITES, and hopes her students will leave feeling more comfortable in their literary voice and confident in their ability to effectively translate any story onto the page.
 

Mary Kovaleski Byrnes is the co-founder and Curriculum Director for EmersonWRITES and a senior lecturer in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Department. Her debut collection of poetry, "So Long the Sky" was published in 2018 by Platypus Press. She is a recipient of the 2015 Alumni Award for Teaching Innovation.

Alayne Fiore oversees the College Pathway Programs as Executive Director of HIVE in the Social Justice Collaborative. She has been part of EmersonWRITES since 2016 through the EmersonPUBLISHES workshop and the editing and design of the annual EmersonWRITES anthology SPINE (Student Produced Interconnected Narratives at Emerson). Alayne has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Certificate in Literary Publishing. Her work has appeared in Gravel Magazine and ROAR, and published by Haunted Waters Press.

Crystal M. Gómez coordinates the College Pathway Programs as Program Manager for HIVE in the Social Justice Collaborative. Her role includes support and coordination of the college pathway programs. Crystal helps with recruitment, student engagement, professional development for EmersonWRITES Ambassadors, and lunch programming. Crystal has a MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from Emerson College.