Kyla Walker, MFA
International Justice Poetry Fellow
International Justice Poetry Fellow
Kyla Walker is the international justice poetry fellow at the Institute for Social Concerns. Her work at the institute includes researching and writing a prose-poetry book that examines the power of language on the page. As part of her fellowship, she is collaborating with the Notre Dame English Department and the institute to teach a poetry workshop at the St. Joseph County Jail, the first workshop of its kind for women at the jail.
A Turkish American writer, Kyla has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and Threepenny Review. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been selected as a Tin House Workshop Scholar, Periplus Fellow, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow. She has been a reader for the literary magazine One Story and has held internships at Electric Literature, Penguin Random House, and Atlantic Records.
Kyla also brings her work off the page by connecting Notre Dame students with programs in the community, including the Refugee RESET program at United Religious Community in South Bend.
Kyla holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. in English from Pomona College. Throughout college, she worked as the research assistant to the New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Lethem and was under the tutelage of Mary Gaitskill.