Iris Starn Workshops & Fellowship
Starn Fellows are current MFA candidates in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Starn Workshops are subsidized by New Literary Project in partnership the Starn Family in honor of their beloved mother, Iris Starn.
In Spring of 2025, four Starn Workshops will take place. Meet our 2025 Starn Fellows who will teach these workshops below.
Spring 2025
Iris Starn Fellows
Isa Maloof (LPS, Hayward )
Isa Maloof is a poet, teacher, and mother. She holds an MA in Theological Studies from Harvard University and is currently an MFA Candidate and Teaching Fellow at Saint Mary’s College of CA.
Genay Markham (East Bay School of Performing Arts)
Genay Markham is a passionate leader, writer, and advocate with over 20 years of experience in leadership development, youth empowerment, and social justice. With a strong background in community engagement, policy advocacy, and program development, she has successfully designed and led initiatives that empower young people and mobilize communities for systemic change.
She has held key roles at organizations such as RYSE Youth Center and Urban Habitat, where she developed leadership institutes, managed advocacy campaigns, and facilitated programs centered on political education and civic engagement. Genay has extensive experience mentoring young writers from diverse backgrounds, having worked as a writing tutor, leadership coach, and public speaking mentor. She has taught writing structure, persuasive techniques, and storytelling to middle and high school students, young professionals, and aspiring civic leaders.
Beyond her community work, Genay is a dedicated writer with a passion for creative nonfiction, playwrighting and poetry. She seeks to merge her advocacy experience with her love for writing, using narrative as a tool for social impact. With a strong commitment to equity, empowerment, and innovation, she continues to foster leadership, amplify marginalized voices, and create lasting change through both activism and storytelling.
Courtney Pazin (Concord High School)
Courtney Pazin grew up on the Northern California coast; She is a writer, poet, and educator. She earned a BA in Modern Literary Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in Education from Notre Dame de Namur University. In May, she will confer a dual MFA in the genres of CNF and Poetry. She's been awarded the Iris Starn Fellowship 2023-2024, Saint Mary's College Teaching Fellowship, CGEP's Global Teacher Fellowship, and an Outstanding Thesis Award from NDNU. Her prose and poetry are anchored in place—usually coastal—and study the relationship between bodies, love, and grief. Her work is featured in issue 28 of ZAUM, The New Overland Review, and the upcoming Black Bird Books anthology.
Rayjon Briscoe Young (Emery High School)
Rayjon Briscoe Young is a student, visual artist, civil servant, educator, and writer. After graduating with a degree in Digital Media Studies with a Creative Writing Minor & Certificate from the University at Buffalo in New York, he does Media Marketing for the City of Oakland. Growing up in Oakland, California & Brooklyn, New York, heavily informs his worldview when crafting a story. Rayjon’s writing is consistent with horror framed within socio-political commentaries, magical and techno realism, afrofuturism, fantasy, and bizarre science fiction. Because of that, genre-bending stories are his forte. He is currently an MFA candidate and teaching fellow at Saint Mary’s College of California and a recipient of the Iris Starn Fellowship.
Starn Fellow Alumni
Camila Elizabet Aguirre Aguilar (Emery High)
Camila Elizabet Aguirre Aguilar is a Xicana warrior, educator, student, and poet. Born in Sacramento, and raised in San Diego, she has performed and workshopped spoken word poetry and storytelling with underserved youth for over fifteen years. After graduating with a degree in Sociology from UC Berkeley, Camila taught poetry throughout the Bay area for Bay Area Creative, a local nonprofit organization. In her own work, she explores power, politics, family incarceration, addiction, mental illness, intergenerational trauma, sexism, settler colonialism, and racism. Camila is currently a first-year graduate student and fellow in the MFA Creative Writing program at St. Mary's College of California.
Carly Blackwell (Emery High)
Born in San Diego and raised in Florida, Carly Blackwell holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California where she specialized in fiction. For her first year and a half, she served as a teaching fellow, creating her own freshman English course in the fall of 2022. Some of her work has appeared in the online literary journal Write Now Lit—most recently, her short story “I Shouldn’t Have Smiled at Him.” She is currently working on a young adult novel and short story horror collection. She was a 2023 Starn Fellow.
Allie Silvas (Hayward High School)
Allie Silvas is a book artist and storyteller from Southern California. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction writing at Saint Mary’s College and a recipient of the Iris Starn Fellowship.
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