People
Our team brings together writers, artists, activists, and academics from Detroit. Together, we’re participating in a dynamic conversation about how to support creative work that supports our community.
Laura Kraftowitz | Founder & Co-Director
Laura Kraftowitz’s writing appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Evergreen Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Forward, and elsewhere. She was the Campaign Coordinator of Right to Enter, a translator for the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, and a coordinator for the International Solidarity Movement, using nonviolent direct action to oppose military occupation in Gaza.
Edward Salem | Founder & Co-Director
Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (Nightboat Books, 2025). The winner of the BOMB Magazine Fiction Contest, selected by Ottessa Moshfegh, his writing appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, Image, The Columbia Review and elsewhere.
Aya Krisht | Board Member
Aya Krisht is a Detroit-based Lebanese designer, artist and printmaker whose creative interests are at the junction of visual storytelling and the exploration/representation of the human condition. She holds a BFA in graphic design (2015) from the American University of Beirut, where her senior thesis focused on design in comics. Her work has been exhibited in Detroit, Beirut, Cairo and the UAE. She is the Media Designer at the Arab American National Museum, where she also sits on several arts committees, and co-founder of Maamoul Press, a multi-disciplinary collective for the creation, curation, and dissemination of art by marginalized creators at the intersection of comics, printmaking, and book arts.
Mary Fuller | Board Member
Mary Fuller is a Commercial Director for Microsoft’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Enterprise Operating Unit. Previously, she managed a sales and support team co-located in Brooklyn and Jaipur at SmartSign. She holds a BA from Smith College and an MBA from Johnson School of Management at Cornell University. She lives between Detroit and Brooklyn, and enjoys music, collecting art, independent cinema, reading, and traveling in her spare time.
Donovan Hohn | Board Member
Donovan Hohn is the author of Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/E O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His essays have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn teaches nonfiction at Wayne State University in Detroit. His second book, The Inner Coast: Essays, was published by W. W. Norton in 2020.
Robert Laidler | Assistant Program Manager
Robert Laidler is an African American poet who was born in Detroit. He is the recipient of three Hopwood Awards, including a Meader Family Award for poetry manuscripts and a Theodore Roethke Award for long poems. He was the inaugural Daniel Keyes Fellow in poetry and Wayne State University and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. At City of Asylum/Detroit, he is developing public programs that approach exile from a broad lens and bring our local community into our global mission.
Sara Dassanayake | Assistant Program Manager
Sara Dassanayake is an MA candidate in English Literature at Wayne State University, where she also studied psychology and Russian. A Russian Scholar Laureate, she strongly believes in using foreign language education to teach students how to build community and advocate for positive social change. Her research explores literary representations of intergenerational trauma and family languages of traumatic inheritance. At City of Asylum/Detroit, she is developing best practices for building a flexible and supportive community around our fellows.
“The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.”
— Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate and former resident of the Gothenburg City of Refuge, exiled for her criticism of the Belarusian regime
Creative Writing Internship
Creative writing students at Wayne State University connect our grassroots efforts to Detroit’s academic life. Our internship provides professional development and networking for students who aspire to a literary career.
Jasmine Pruitt
Jasmine Pruitt received her MA in creative writing from Wayne State University. Her work has been published in several anthologies. She hopes to one day work for a publishing company dedicated to uplifting marginalized voices.
Elsa Nilaj
Elsa Nilaj is a graduate of Wayne State University’s creative writing program. She is also a filmmaker and the founder of CreateCreatives, bringing to life student visions by supplying the tools and connections that can make their projects flourish.
Emily Podwoiski
Emily Podwoiski practices “écriture féminine” by placing women at the heart of her narratives. Born and raised in Metro Detroit, Emily holds her BFA in English from University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is currently earning her MA in Creative Writing at Wayne State University. In 2020, her essays received the Tompkins Nonfiction Award. Along with studying literature, Emily works as an Assistant Honors Program Coordinator and Amnesty International Faculty Advisor at Schoolcraft College.
Megan Alexandra Jones
Megan Alexandra Jones is a graduate student in Creative Writing and Rhetoric at Wayne State University, where she is a Daniel Keyes poet. While earning her BA at Oakland University, she taught creative writing to youth at the Baldwin Center in Pontiac. Megan’s poetry is lyric in nature and preoccupied with the imposition of the exterior upon the interior, and her scholarly work is concerned with equitable opportunity for success in writing classes.