Please join us for an evening with this year’s BMI Ph.D. fellows! At this reading, each fellow will share a piece of their original creative work.

Our Fellows

Jumi Bello

Jumi Bello is an MFA graduate in fiction from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is currently a Black Mountain Institute Ph.D. fellow in literary nonfiction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work has been supported by attending various literary conferences: Lighthouse Writer's Workshop, StoryStudio Chicago, Tin House, Corporeal Writing, and Writing x Writers. She is currently at work on a memoir which examines a personal history of madness for her creative doctoral dissertation.

Dominque Demetrea Conway

Dominque Demetrea Conway is a writer, mother, and wife who is struggling with grief after recently losing her beloved husband, Eddie Conway. She is currently a first year Ph.D. student, and is working on her memoir, Far From The Tree.

Tanya Shirazi Galvez

Tanya Shirazi Galvez is from Lynwood, California. She is senior editor of Aster(ix) Journal and fiction co-editor of Witness Magazine. She has received support from Tin House, Catapult, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Valparaiso Fundación. She holds a B.A. in history from UCLA, an M.S. in counseling psychology from Mount St. Mary’s University, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. She writes about girlhood, the blessings and curses that comes with it. At UNLV, Tanya is working on hybrid-genre projects that center Salvadoran women and girls.

Miranda Hannasch

Miranda Hannasch is a writer and teacher who grew up in Las Vegas. Her work focuses on early modern and 18th-century drama and its intertexts, and she’s especially fascinated by magic, genderbending, unruly women, and modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare. She has a B.A. in English from Amherst College, where she was awarded fellowships by the Folger Shakespeare Library and Doshisha University. Outside of writing, she loves travel and languages. She has lived and worked in Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, and several cities in Spain.

Xiaoqiu Qiu

Xiaoqiu Qiu is a part-time poet, or at least he strives to be one. His chapbook Other Side of Sea is coming out this May by Etchings Press. His poetry has won Meridian Editors Prize and Goldilocks zone poetry prize finalist. His novel The Man with a Camera Eye is a semi-finalist of the Autumn House fiction prize. His poems are published in Meridian, Sunspot, REED, Ghost City Press, Beyond World Literary Magazine, and more. His translated poems have been published in Lunch Ticket, Antonym, and DEFUNCT.

Areej Quraishi

Areej Quraishi's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Indiana Review, The Normal School, Parentheses Journal, Identity Theory, Cola Literary Review, JMWW, and Reservoir Road Literary Review. It has received accolades and finalist spots from Glimmer Train Press, CRAFT Literary, Salamander Magazine, and New Millennium Writings. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington-Seattle and is a third year Ph.D. fellow at UNLV. She is the editor of Witness Magazine.

Dorothy Allred Solomon

Dorothy Allred Solomon is a middle kid, the twenty-eighth of her father’s forty-eight children, and the only daughter of his fourth wife. Descended from Mormon polygamists, Dorothy was destined to be a plural wife, but willfulness drove her to monogamy and education at the University of Utah and UNLV. Solomon has taught literature, creative writing, and life skills to people throughout the world, has published several books, has written for various journals and magazines, and has appeared on Oprah, Today, Larry King, Live, and on podcasts about polygamous families, the violence of fundamentalism, and the impact of war. Her writing has received various awards. Currently, she is working on Homefires about her late husband, a PTSD-afflicted veteran who transformed his illness to make a positive difference. They share four children and several grandchildren. She married writer Christopher G. Jones in 2022.

Parking and Directions

Parking on UNLV’s campus is free and open to all after 7 p.m, but please note that handicapped and reserved parking spaces are enforced 24 hours, seven days a week.

Turn onto East Harmon Ave. and take it as far as you can into campus. The Barrick Museum of Art is just past the Lied Library, on the right-hand side of Parking Lot I.