Deepa Rajagopalan – Organizer, Host, Curator
Deepa Rajagopalan is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, and a graduate of the Creative Writing program from the University of Toronto. She won the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices award for her short story, “Peacocks of Instagram.” She is an editor of Held magazine, and co-host and curator of the Emerging Writers Reading Series in Toronto. She is working on her first book, a collection of short fiction.
She has worked in Information Technology and Management Consulting at Deloitte and Accenture. Before moving to Canada, Deepa lived in Saudi Arabia, India and the US. She currently resides in Guelph, Ontario.
You can follow her on Twitter @derajagopalan & Instagram at @deerajagopalan
Anna Lee-Popham – Organizer, Host, Curator
Anna Lee-Popham is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, and a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Education Creative Writing Certificate, where she was a recipient of the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Anna has been schooled by social movement elders and organizers in the US South and Canada, and is an editor at HELD Magazine and a mum who often writes before the sun rises. You can find some of her recent writing in Canthius and Autostraddle.
Mechelle Wu – Promotions and Social Media Coordinator
Mechelle Wu is a Linguistics and Psychology student at the University of Toronto. She gravitates
toward the dark and the gray and works within the field of fiction. Mechelle is committed to finding
and crafting complex and inclusive “villains,” clever but seamless plot twists, and shocking or
bittersweet endings.
Apart from school, she is a Lab Assistant and the Social Events Coordinator of the Society of
Undergraduate Linguistics Students (SLUGS). Her love for storytelling and community-building
stems, in part, from her ever-changing environment as she grew up in over six locations, including
the United States and Singapore.
You can find her on Instagram at @m.chelle02
Ana Rodriguez Machado – Curator, Occasional Host
Ana Rodriguez Machado lives and writes in Toronto. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. In 2016, her poem “Conversations about home in Havana” was shortlisted for the PEN Canada New Voices Award and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.
Learn more about Ana at https://anaro.ca/.
Emerging Writers Reading Series 