Project: Board of Directors

Board of Directors

Headshot of Rujuta Paradkar

Rujuta Paradkar

Project: Board of Directors
Role: Director
Rujuta Paradkar (M.A, M.F.A, MPhil.) is a writer, editor, and content specialist. Currently, she works as Editorial Director for Packt Publishing. She has worked in the media and communications industry for over 22 years across India, Australia, and the U.S. As a journalist, she reported for news organizations such as the BBC, CNN, Channel 4, Newsweek, Observer Business and Politics, Rediff.com, and India Abroad, among others. She worked as Managing Editor for Encyclopedia Britannica and Head of Arts, North India, at the British Council. As a book editor, she edited fiction and nonfiction manuscripts and mentored several authors. She serves on the Board of Directors at Newfound and was the Executive Editor of Newfound Journal. She was awarded the W. Morgan and Lou Claire Rose Endowed Fellowship in Creative Writing at Texas State University, where she earned an MFA in writing. She holds an MA in Literature from the University of Mumbai and an MPhil in Media Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia. She loves both imaginative as well as across-the-border travels.

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The photo depicts a white woman with shoulder-length light brown hair and is wearing a soft blue sweater and cream scarf.

Gwynne Middleton

Project: Board of Directors
Role: Director
Gwynne serves on Newfound’s Board of Directors. She co-founded Newfound in 2009 while in graduate school and has served as a managing editor, reviews editor, fiction editor, and blog editor for the publication. She holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University-San Marcos; an M.A. in Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno; and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Gwynne is a writer, editor, and photographer based in Colorado where she spends as much time as possible outdoors in her ever-expanding garden and exploring Rockies and Great Plains.

Website

Photo of poet Rodney Gomezz, a bearded Mexican American, wearing black glasses and a light purple button-down shirt facing camera with hands in his slacks leaning against a wooden fence post.

Rodney Gomez

Project: Board of Directors
Role: Director
Rodney Gomez is a poet and urbanist whose recent collections include Arsenal with Praise Song, recipient of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for best poetry book from the Texas Institute of Letters, and Geographic Tongue, winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series. His work appears in Poetry, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, North American Review, and other journals. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Gomez was an Academy of American Poets Fellow, a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at Yale, and 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of McAllen, Texas.

Instagram • Website • Poets.org

White trans woman with black bangs in black T-shirt and clear framed glasses against a corner of white apartment walls.

Crystal Odelle

Project: Board of Directors, Chapbooks
Role: Director, Editor
Crystal Odelle (they/she) is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast, bedfellows, beestung, Passages North, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Tin House Scholar and Lambda Literary fellow, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. She writes RPGs at Feverdream Games and serves as academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

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