Come hear from this year's graduating Ph.D. students, Sayantika Mandal and Christina Wood! Sayantika Mandal is a writer, editor, and PhD candidate in English at the University of Georgia, where she serves as the inaugural Arts Lab Graduate Fellow. She holds an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco, where she was awarded the Jan Zivic Fellowship. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in december, Glassworks, West Trade Review, Indian Literature, The Citron Review, Southern Review of Books, and others. Her essay "Mother Tongue" was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2025. Her work explores borders, belonging, and the afterlives of history. Christina Wood's short stories appear in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Sewanee Review, Virgina Quarterly Review and other journals. Her story “The Astronaut” won a Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction and her nonfiction appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and studied women's climate fiction and place-focused fiction at UGA. In the past, she worked as the assistant editor of Dorothy. Currently, she's a graduate editor for The Georgia Review and an Editor at Brink Books.