Since 2017, members of the WLT Student Advisory Board have served as the editorial board and creative team for The Aster Review, providing University of Oklahoma students the opportunity to create and contribute to an independent literary and arts annual that is distributed for free throughout the campus community. Here, past editors and art directors reflect on what the SAB experience, working on the Review, and being connected to the WLT cause have meant to them.

Carson Schatzman (BA 2016)

An aster is a small flower that, once recognized, seems to be everywhere, and is beautiful both for its scope and, to my eyes, sense of honesty, immediacy. The name was chosen as a gesture toward the abundant creative work blossoming across the OU campus—and as a reminder about the rewards of careful attention.

I am grateful for the opportunity to help amplify and collect the imagination and efforts of brilliant OU students. The original vision was to identify, to connect, to enjoy and celebrate, in a form that made the most of both creative and editorial interests. The ongoing publication is a testament to the talent and passion that has always beautified Oklahoma.

The WLT Student Advisory Board is a rare chance for world-class guidance and learning, along with the greatest reading recommendations and a source of enduring inspiration.

Carson Schatzman is a writer and editor in Philadelphia, where he moved for an English MA at Villanova University after his time at OU, graduating in 2016 with a BA in philosophy and minors in classics and English. His professional work is focused on marketing consulting, nonprofits, and higher education.

Taylor Hickney (BA 2017)

The first time my writing was ever published was in the first edition of The Aster. I then joined WLT’s Student Advisory Board the following year and spent long nights in the spring huddled with peers around InDesign, mulling over choices as simple as the weight of a stroke or a particular adjective, only to change our minds and start over. I remember getting the final copies back for the first time and marveling that all of our sometimes-abstract work created the very tangible thing in my hands. The staff at WLT—especially Michelle, Rob, and Daniel—creates a supportive, secure environment in which it’s okay to try new things and grow. I look back on my time at WLT and The Aster very fondly.

Taylor Hickney is a writer and teacher in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in fiction from the New School; her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, D Magazine, Boyd Street, Fiction Southeast, and RoundUpZine. She has a complicated relationship to her Texas roots and loves her Siberian husky named Jagger.

Ethan Holaday (BA 2017)

My internships at WLT were an honor and a pleasure. While a member of the Student Advisory Board, getting the first edition of The Aster up and running was very important to me, because I felt that OU students deserved a publication to showcase and stimulate their art. It is intensely gratifying that ten years after we experienced the delight of receiving our first contributions, editors and artists are still working to celebrate and cultivate the creativity in their midst.

So much in our environment is built to shrink our souls into cramped confines, to make us see ourselves as inadequate fragments of an ineffable aggregate. I give thanks, then, for World Literature Today and for what The Aster Review has become. May we always build each other homes capacious enough to accommodate who we can be and what we can create.

Ethan Holaday, class of 2017 WLT intern and founding member of The Aster editorial team, lives and works in Brest, France.

Hannah Grip (BA 2018)

I have only fond memories from my time on The Aster’s editorial board in the journal’s first two years. I recall conversations with my fellow editors about what we wanted to accomplish with the magazine, how we wanted the physical thing to look and feel, about our editorial standards and values. And all this happened within the beloved Monnett Hall—I don’t think any other building in the world smells quite so literary. It was fun and important work. Equally fun and important were a few very memorable parties. The Aster brought people together, and it makes me happy to know it continues to do so and that it continues to house the best art and writing of the OU student body. Here’s to ten more years!

Hannah Grip is on the communications team at the Iowa Environmental Council. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oklahoma and a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Des Moines with her partner.

Grant Schatzman (BA 2018)

Helping create The Aster remains to this day one of my favorite team experiences. The kind of hands-on, passionate, collaborative work WLT helped foster remains my litmus test for a healthy team ten years and too many jobs later.

That sense of being at a table with people whose skills and smarts stretch your own? Of feeling lucky as heck to work with such talented creatives? Grapple it to thy heart with hoops of steel. WLT and The Aster are special places, and good polestars by which to chart your path in publishing and well beyond. Arguably, it’s what prepared me for the kind of small-team entrepreneurship I’m trying now.

WLT and Asterites are good people. Our orbits are wide, but the conjunctions are joyous. It brings me great satisfaction to see The Aster growing and thriving all these years later.

Grant Schatzman is a writer, educator, and online learning designer based in Philadelphia. Currently, they’re building My Pixel Academy, a world- and story-based platform to help K–12 teachers gamify their classrooms. Since leaving OU, Grant has worked in publishing, education, and technology, and earned their master’s in education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reid Bartholomew (BA 2019)

Working with World Literature Today and The Aster Review registers among the most formative experiences of my life thus far. Getting to read and subsequently meet some of the most talented writers from all over the world through WLT cracked open the horizon for a fresh-faced kid from Arkansas. Spending my days talking about art and literature with my peers as we worked together to carve out a new space for student expression on campus with The Aster was a magical process of co-creation. But more than anything, I remember being faced with the sublime terror and freedom of having the rails of assignments taken off and, for the first time, being entrusted by my mentors at WLT with the question: “What do you want to put out into the world?” I reckon that I’ll continue to ask myself this question for many years to come.

Reid Bartholomew currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he works in nonprofit development in the conservation sector for the Prairie Enthusiasts and serves as vice-chair of the board of directors for the Wisconsin Prescribed Fire Council. He’s grateful to be able to combine his passions for storytelling and ecology.

Kayla E. Ciardi (BA 2019)

I stumbled into the budding community of The Aster Review in its second year of publication, at the tail end of my undergraduate career. I deeply treasure the two years I spent working collaboratively with like-minded peers to cultivate and showcase the brilliant work being done by writers and artists on campus.

Serving on WLT’s Student Advisory Board and promoting Neustadt/Puterbaugh events each year put me in the sphere of a stellar team of publishing professionals and international writers, such as Edwidge Danticat and Jenny Erpenbeck. As a twentysomething aspiring writer, this proximity to talent was something I never expected to find in a Midwestern college town. 

In my current position working with undergraduates at OU, I have had the immense joy of watching The Aster Review continue to propagate each year both in numbers and in scope (much like a field of asters), and witness students gain the same invaluable experience and confidence that comes from being in community with those who champion literature and the arts.

Kayla E. Ciardi reads and writes from Norman, Oklahoma. After completing an MA in modern and contemporary writing at the University of East Anglia, she began working in higher education at the University of Oklahoma. She spends her free time wrangling two cats and two dogs.

James Farner (BA 2019)

There’s a straight line from the work I did for and skills I gained from World Literature Today to where I am in the publishing world today. That’s in the nitty-gritty tangibles of when to use an em dash versus an en dash, or my preference for curly apostrophes, but it’s just as much in the intangibles of living and breathing literature daily. I read translated short fiction before publication, practiced copyediting on real articles, and even published a meaningful piece of my own: my city profile on Prince’s Minneapolis. And all of that barely scratches the surface of the hours we all spent together working on The Aster, evaluating submissions, perfecting the layout of every spread, and having the best time as we brought our peers’ creativity to the rest of campus. I still have my copies of The Aster on my bookshelf.

James Farner (he/him) is an associate agent for JABberwocky Literary Agency, which he joined as an intern in 2019. He grew up in the Midwest and studied at the University of Oklahoma and the New School for Social Research. He primarily represents projects in the mystery/thriller/crime genres.

Alex Crayon (BA 2020 / MA 2022)

In August of 2017 I stepped into a wood-paneled conference room in Monnet Hall and discovered something then unknown to me: a dedicated literary and arts community. The Aster Review, which doubles as the WLT Student Advisory Board, was full of like-minded creatives whose passions both mirrored and encouraged my own—and WLT exemplified the true breadth of international creativity, so different from my shuttered, Steinbeck-and-Hemingway reading list in high school. Over the years I helped with Neustadt Lit Fests; I wrote book reviews for WLT (and still do); and I served as editor-in-chief of the magazine and president of the board from 2020 to 2022. These were formative opportunities for me, certainly, but the legacy of this organization is not experiences but the people who, phonically similar to the magazine’s namesake flower, are asterisms: clusters of stars who mapped the possible, and who guide me still.

Alex Crayon (he/him) is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas and a graduate research fellow at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. His fiction explores family, addiction, religion, and exile through fantastical and slipstream genres.

Julie Bahr (BA 2021)

Being involved with WLT was a highlight of my undergraduate career. Serving on the SAB allowed me to connect with world-class writers visiting campus and eventually spurred me to take both the Neustadt and Puterbaugh courses, which had two of my favorite reading lists of my English degree. And then, of course, there’s The Aster. To this day, I am so incredibly proud of the work we did not only to produce the journal itself, but to grow our audience and help creatives across campus see that their art was worthy of publication. Above all, I am grateful to the team at WLT for nurturing our vision for The Aster and providing a space (both literally and figuratively) where I was able to meet such wonderful and brilliant mentors, peers, and friends. 

Julie Bahr is a fluvial geomorphologist based in Colorado who spends her days mapping floodplains and her weekends figure-skating and rock-climbing. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2021 and was editor-in-chief of The Aster from 2019 to 2020.

Hannah Morris-Voth (BA 2024)

Working with World Literature Today and serving as the president of The Aster was the highlight of my time at the University of Oklahoma. It was wonderful to be involved in the artistic community and see all the amazing work students create and contribute. The Aster Review is such an important organization and has done the essential work of creating a space for student artists to get publishing and editorial opportunities. I’m delighted to see the growth of The Aster, and I look forward to seeing it continue to inspire and assist the writers, artists, and photographers on the OU campus.

Hannah Morris-Voth is now a K–12 educator. She has had work published in Voices, Honey Fire Literature, Juniper, Imposter, and Chasing Shadows magazines. Recently, she has focused her creative endeavors toward writing music.

Kaitlyn Denton (BA 2025)

I have had the privilege to be involved with World Literature Today for several years now in various capacities. I began as an intern, which not only gave me the opportunity to write my first published work (a book review) but also helped expose me to alternate forms of publishing—a topic that has now become the research interest for my master’s thesis. Outside of my internship, I worked on The Aster Review, which was an immensely rewarding process. We reviewed hundreds of submissions each year, which led to late and oftentimes hungry nights in Monnet Hall. But the work was important. Our entirely student-run magazine gave, and continues to give, students the opportunity to see their poems, short stories, art, and photographs in print. I appreciated the opportunity to develop my editorial senses, but what I truly loved about this organization was the community we built to celebrate art and literature.

Kaitlyn Denton is a master’s student studying English at the University of Oklahoma. She is currently researching her thesis project, which navigates multiculturalism in contemporary publishing. In addition to her coursework, she is an instructor in OU’s First-Year Composition and technical writing programs.

Amber Mae Durst (BA 2025)

I was on The Aster Review editorial team for three wonderful years. During that time, The Aster transformed from a small magazine put together by four or five students into a thriving club with public events and thirty regular members. My time as a senior editor and editor-in-chief was full of late-night editing and stressed-out penny pinching, but also so much love and passion. I developed into a better artist, critic, and leader, hand-in-hand with some of my best friends.

Hundreds of hands have molded The Aster Review into the magazine it is today. Their names are left behind in the masthead and the table of contents, overlapping year after year. I can’t wait to read the 2026–2027 issue. And above all, I am so eager to see how The Aster evolves during its next ten years. Ad astra!

Amber Mae Durst is a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oklahoma currently studying rhetoric and writing. Her passions include horror media, science writing, and her dog, Ax. Postgraduation, she hopes to start a career as an author and science communicator.

Madeline Meyers (BA 2025)

I had the opportunity to meet WLT’s executive director, RC Davis-Undiano, while touring the University of Oklahoma’s campus as a high school student and aspiring editor. Our conversation helped me decide to attend OU, where I joined the Student Advisory Board and The Aster Review, eventually serving as editor-in-chief. My time with these organizations and as a WLT intern taught me a great deal about editing, copyediting, design, leadership, and building literary community. A special highlight was my trip to a student journal symposium at George Washington University, which Daniel Simon encouraged me to attend. Funded in part by WLT’s student grants, that trip connected me with both peers and publishing professionals, and I left DC with newfound confidence in my career aspirations. To me, that trip also affirmed the importance of literary publications to arts, culture, and democracy—values I’m proud to have contributed to through WLT.

Madeline Meyers is a master’s student in English literary and cultural studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she also teaches first-year composition. Her research interests include postcolonial and environmental literature, zines and DIY publishing, and hiking memoirs. After graduating, she hopes to work in the publishing industry.