USC MPW students read from their work

Please join us this afternoon as students in the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing program read from their work. Readers include Autumn McAlpin, Stephanie Abraham, Brianna J.L. Smyk, Annalouise Carter, and Mellinda Hensley. They will be joined by faculty member Dinah Lenney.

Hailing from Memphis, TN, Autumn McAlpin is now a writer, director, and producer working in LA as she completes her MPW degree at USC. Autumn has worked as a freelance columnist for The Orange County Register for nine years, and she is the author of Real World 101: A Survival Guide to Life After High School, Amazon's top-selling graduation gift book in 2011 and 2012. An award-winning filmmaker, Autumn is the writer and producer of the upcoming feature film Waffle Street, starring James Lafferty, Danny Glover, and Julie Gonzalo. She has two other features in development. Stephanie Abraham is an essayist, media critic, blogger and business writer. Her writings have appeared in Bitch, Role Reboot and Mizna. She is currently working on her first memoir. Visit her at StephanieAbraham.com. Brianna J.L. Smyk is the nonfiction editor of the Southern California Review and a student in USC’s Master of Professional Writing program. A fiction and nonfiction writer, Brianna holds a master's in art history and was the lead arts writer for NolaVie in New Orleans. 

AnnaLouise Carter is a prose and poetry writer living in South Los Angeles. Originally from Oregon, she graduated with a degree in English from Stanford University, and has also studied at Oxford and the University of Salamanca. She has been published in xoJane and Christianity Today, and shares a home with her husband, two housemates, and an overweight black cat.

Mellinda Hensley is a fiction writer at MPW and the Editor-in-Chief of the Southern California Review. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in Writing and Journalism at the University of Evansville in Indiana, and has been published in The Boiler Journal, LA Magazine, the Review Review, The Ohio River Review, and also currently contributes to the blog Smash Cut Culture.

Dinah Lenney is the author of a collection of essays, The Object Parade (Counterpoint Press), and Bigger Than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, published as part of the American Lives series at the University of Nebraska Press. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a wide range of publications and anthologies including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, AGNI, Creative Nonfiction, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Brevity.com. Dinah is the senior nonfiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and serves as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars, the Rainier Writing Workshop, and in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. www.dinahlenney.com (@dinahlenney on Twitter).