McNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY

Master of Fine Arts student Gauri Awasthi is receiving valuable hands-on writing experience through a two-week residency at the prestigious Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) at Firefly Farms, a 45-acre working farm outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.
From Kanpur, India, Gauri is the second McNeese student to receive a SAFTA residency, which regularly hosts well-known and emerging writers, filmmakers, composers and visual artists. She is currently a third-year poetry student at McNeese working on her poetry thesis, tentatively titled “The Mother Wound.”