Loft Mentor Series: Angela Pelster

The Loft Literary Center Presents a 2018-2019 Loft Mentor Series Reading with mentor Angela Pelster and fellows Brianna Flavin and Molly Olguín. Book sales provided by Milkweed Books. Learn more.

Angela Pelster won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the PEN Award for the art of the essay for her essay collection ​Limber (Sarabande, 2014). Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in ​Ploughshares​, ​Tin House​, ​Granta, The Kenyon Review ​and ​The Gettysburg Review ​amongst others. Her children’s novel ​The Curious Adventures of India Sophia​ (River Books, 2005) won the Golden Eagle Children’s Choice award. ​War Prayer,​ her essay film collaboration with her husband Richard Wiebe, won Best of Festival in Iowa City, premièred in Rotterdam and played nationally and internationally in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Marseilles, Syros, and Scotland amongst others. She’s been awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and is the founder and director of the screening series ​Writers Go to the Movies​. Her MFA is from the University of Iowa, and she teaches in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in Saint Paul.

Brianna Flavin (poetry) is a poet from Saint Paul who holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. She works as a content writer, adjunct professor, and volunteer prison writing mentor. She spends the rest of her time hanging out with her family and gardening.

Molly Olguín (fiction) received her MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Redivider, Fugue, The Normal School, River Styx, Quarterly West, Betwixt, and others. She was a finalist for the 2017 F(r)iction Winter Literary Competition, the 2016 Fugue Prose Contest, and was awarded the 2015 AWP Intro Awards Prize in fiction. She currently resides in the Twin Cities, where she teaches English and creative writing to high school students.