About Westwind
Westwind is UCLA’s only literary arts publication dedicated solely to publishing writing written by UCLA students, faculty and alumni. In addition, Westwind is also completely staffed by UCLA students. Westwind has been published annually at UCLA for nearly thirty years and will soon be available as an online quarterly. Although we do not subscribe to a particular style or point of view, Westwind is known for publishing cutting-edge, contemporary poetry and prose, and we at Westwind are proud of our commitment to publishing new, challenging and unconventional forms of creative writing. Westwind is a fresh, intelligent and uniquely personal magazine on the forefront of the diverse literary culture that exists at UCLA.
Print journals are currently available in A334 Murphy Hall and will shortly be made available in the English Department Office and the English Undergraduate Counseling Office.
Westwind is funded and published by Dr. Reed Wilson and the Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
Meet the staff
Anna Chen
Anna is a first-year neuroscience major with interests in music and writing. She is the composer, lyricist, and librettist of The Author: A “Novel” Musical. Some of her hobbies include figure skating, writing music and lyrics, watching movies, and biking along the beach.
Angelica Lai
Angelica Lai is a third-year English major from Guam. She has a soft side for Mark Twain quotes, Dr. Seuss rhymes and Shakespearean insults. Her creativity is expressed through post-it notes and alphabet cereal.
Her two great loves: writing and food.
Angelica is a slot editor for the Daily Bruin and internal vice president for the Writer's Den.
Brian Armstrong
Brian may be an English major, but he is interested in expression across a myriad of media. He believes in the unification of text and visuals, which explains his passion for visual art, graphic design, and film. In addition to Westwind, he serves as President of the Film and Photography Society and does freelance multimedia work through CRUXimaging. You can visit his personal site here.
Ben Mesirow
Now with 20% more bio!
Camren Crose
Camren is a first year English major and potential Art History minor hailing from the small town of Oakdale, California. She does not consider herself passionate about many things, although discussions about books, television, and hot wings certainly work her into a tizzy. She is also a horrible story teller, a caffeine addict, a typical Harry Potter fanatic, and a scary story lover. Camren hopes to be a book editor some day, and thus is very excited to discover the skills that Westwind has to teach her.
Chelsea Cummings
Chelsea is a fourth year English major and Scandinavian Studies minor. She spends most of days dividing her thinking time evenly between buying used books on the internet, subversive cross-stitching, stress baking, libertines and Otis Redding. Chelsea's immediate plans after graduation are as follows, in decreasing order of importance: 1. Learn a thing or two about red wine, 2. Learn Danish, and 3. Transition gracefully into the world of alternative medicine that her Native American ancestors left for her to explore. Sadly, no one ever wants to talk about M*A*S*H as much as she does.
Daniel Boden
Web Editor
Daniel Boden is a political science and French double-major who enjoys reading and writing poetry, watching New Wave cinema, playing tennis, and the beach. He is an American and French dual citizen. He has lived in France, Québec, Utah, and Los Angeles, but he calls the San Francisco Bay Area his home. Daniel was born in 1987.
Danielle Matlin
Danielle is a 4th year English major pursuing the emphasis in creative writing. She's taken 3 workshops in poetry so far and she absolutely loves it. Most of her poetry centers on relationships and love, but not in a cliche way of course! Her other interests include dance and working red carpets! Danielle hopes to one day have her own literary journal & write a novel! :)
Erin Riley
A third year English major who enjoys reading instruction manuals.
James Kelvin
A native of sunny San Diego, James is a senior Biophysics major with an affinity towards science and technology. He has always had a fascination with classical literature, but he also enjoys heavy metal music, film, playing guitar, traveling at any opportunity, and competitive exercise of any form.
Jacob Klein
Jacob Klein is a second year English major with a Creative Writing concentration. Originally from San Diego, he cannot imagine living more than an hour from the beach--yet finds himself rarely making it to beach. He finds little pleasure in reading Science-Fiction, but enjoys watching Science-Fiction Television shows and movies. He enjoys both tea and coffee, preferring them without any additions (and also believes this speaks of his character, modestly). He wants to travel the world and has an overabundance of giraffe-related items.
Jennifer Lee
Publicity/Marketing
Jennifer Lee is a senior English major and Art History minor. A few of her interests include candy, detoxing, vitamins, and traveling.
Josh Wasbin
Graduating from UCLA with a degree in Creative Writing, Wasbin actively functions as a PR Consultant with an obsession for cooking. He enjoys comedy writing, climbing, terrible coffee from vending machines, and has an immense appreciation for graduation ceremonies.
Krista Lauder
Krista is from Moorpark, CA-- a very small town wedged in-between LA and Santa Barbara. Born and raised near the beach, she enjoys everything much more when it takes place outdoors. Her favorite activities include running, swimming, anything involving exercise, reading (good literature and lame magazines), having movie marathons, playing musical instruments (she's trained on clarinet and piano, but is slowly learning drums and guitar), hanging out with her family (her brother is her best friend), cooking and baking, spending time with her friends, and having a good time. She's not a girly-girl and has a weird, at times witty sense of humor. If you can make everyday references to Seinfeld and Family Guy, you will automatically be in her good graces.
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Kristine Miller
Kristine is a Santa Barbara resident who loves sunshine, good quotes, and reggae music. When she grows up she wants to be a professional beach-goer, and if all else fails, a full-time traveler. "Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea" and never pass up an adventure...
Kevin Mosby
Kevin Mosby is a second-year American Literature major. He enjoys reading and writing short stories and poems. He counts Anton Chekov, Raymond Carver, Alfred Hitchcock and Johnny Cash among his strongest influences. He considers clarity and brevity the most important characteristics of good writing.
Kelsey Sharpe
Executive Prose Editor
Kelsey Sharpe is a senior English major originally from San Diego. Repeated viewings of The Empire Strikes Back as a preschooler left her with an interest in thwarted hopes and unsatisfying endings, which eventually developed into an appreciation for postmodern literature. She enjoys amassing and displaying items pertaining to her interests, including comic books, sci-fi and fantasy novels, DVD box sets, vinyl figures, and framed glamour shots of Han Solo. In addition to her work with Westwind she is also copy editor and a staff writer for FEM, UCLA’s feminist news magazine, and an employee of the UCLA Office of Media Relations and Public Outreach.
Laura Estrada
Laura is a third year English major/ Spanish minor with an interest in writing poetry. Her recent new interests include art, classical music, and theater, and hopes to develop further her knowledge in these areas. She aspires to become a bilingual poet and an educator and is currently involved with the student group 'Shakespeare at UCLA'.
Latoya Raveneau
Senior Arts Editor
Michelle Boyers
Michelle Boyers is a second-year English major from Los Altos, California. Her favorite pastimes include choreographing modern dances, listening to live music, and spending time in the Sierras. She loves dresses from the 20s and 40s, classic movies and cartoons, and writing short stories. She hopes to write children's literature.
Megan Brickwood
Megan is an English major from Redding, California. She hopes to be a writer of some kind. The kind has not yet been determined. She also writes music for fun, or possibly a future career, and loves to travel. Except for the plane rides, and the airports, and other passengers... in this particular instance she thinks it is definitely about the destination, not the journey.
Marissa Clifford
Marissa Clifford was born in Starkville, Mississippi. She takes interest in words, revolutions, and sustenance farming.
Michael Fong
Michael Fong is a third year English major. Raised in Melbourne, Australia, he spent seven years chomping away on Vegemite toasts and chugging Big M chocolate milk before moving back to Hong Kong, where his parents are originally from. Michael is also an avid lover of food and movies. His literary interests primarily lie within the Classics, medieval literature, as well as aesthetic and critical theory.
Matthew Murkidjanian
Matthew Murkidjanian is a second year Neuroscience major. He enjoys browsing celebrity news websites, listening to music (especially by Adele and Florence + the Machine), reading good literature, running, and shopping. He hopes to become a physician and writer.
Michelle Soave
Michelle is a second year English major (and an, as of yet, unknown double major) who would be perfectly content spending all her time drinking coffee on the benches behind Powell while listening to music and reading poetry and/or inspiration books about saving Haiti.
Maggie Su
Maggie is a first-year English major who hopes to one day become a writer of fictional novels and children's stories. When she is not reading books, she can be found playing the acoustic guitar, scribbling in her diary, wasting her time on tumblr, or humming randomly to herself. Her loves include Peter Pan, British accents, classical literature, Nikita on The CW, Harry Potter, selkies, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, Disneyland, frozen cheesecake, and God.
Natalie Delgadillo
Natalie is a first year English major and an as-of-yet undecided minor. Her highest hopes for the future include travel, laughter and lots and lots of books (and also probably coffee, as she has a habit of staying up into the wee hours of the morning for no particular reason at all). She is learning very slowly to live a life full of gratitude and joy, and she is excited for the remainder of her UCLA career.
Pauline Aguayo
Pauline is a third year English major with a creative writing concentration in fiction. Her time is spent in a secluded cottage on the beach front of a North Carolina town, where she writes all of her award winning novels and--just kidding, she's not famous yet. But although she wishes her life was so, it is in fact filled with papers and deadlines. She likes to write shorts stories, long narratives and screenplays and hopes to one day win an Oscar so that she can stand next to Johnny Depp. Her stories revolve around things like circus kings and the typical awkward high school romance. She has plans for grad school or a year abroad, but that's all still up in the air.
Paula Massingill
Paula is a third year English major. She enjoys literature, poetry and art as any aspiring writer should, but her true passion lies in media's most dismissed areas: video games, television, cartoons, comics. In other words, she loves internet culture and gets along surprisingly well with the pale and near-sighted.
Rebecca Roycroft
Web Editor
I'm a third year physics major from the SF bay area. I'm in charge of content management on the Westwind site, so if you see anything that needs changing, just send me an email!
Rory Thost
An Austin, Texas native who is most happy reading Joan Didion or watching Law and Order: SVU.
Sarah Baker
Sarah Baker is a fourth-year anthropology major with minors in linguistics and English. She likes to walk across islands and identify bones.
Sean Campbell
A Fourth Year English major and a Chinese minor, Sean spends large amounts of time on things (namely reading all kinds of fiction and dramatic works) that do not help towards either of those things. His educational literary interests mostly dwell in the Renaissance and Restoration, but really he will spend time with just about anything and is an avid fan of the surreal and "geeky" fantasy novels as well.
Srbui Karapetian
Assistant Prose Editor
Srbui Karapetian is a third year English major and Political Science and Film minor. Born in a small town in Armenia, she moved to Los Angeles with her family at the age of five, where she has lived since. For the moment, she enjoys writing poetry (especially when plagued with a terrible bout of procrastination), dancing for exercise, listening to Spanish radio stations, reading up on Greek myths, and watching Jeopardy, Jeopardy, Jeopardy! She currently works as an English composition peer learning facilitator with the Academic Advancement Program, and hopes to go to graduate school in literature in the near future.
Stefan Karlsson
Senior Poetry Editor
Stefan Karlsson is a third-year English major from Highland, California. He writes poetry and fiction, takes pictures, and makes music and short films.
Seth Newmeyer
is a first year ROTC Major. He was an ROTC minor until his 18th birthday. He has a rare skin disease that makes him appear purple to people who read his autobiographical information.
Tina Tseng
Tina Tseng is a fourth year English major with a minor in Education. Originally from Taiwan, she now lives in the Bay Area. In her free time, she enjoys reading speculative fiction, writing speculative fiction, being regularly beaten by her roommates in Pokemon Puzzle League, sewing elaborate outfits, and baking not-so elaborate desserts. Sometimes she dreams of finding books before they’re published. Her stories are inevitably about recurrence.
Uri Blumstein
Uri Blumstein is a fourth-year English major. He enjoys writing and cooking. Until he transferred to UCLA in 2009, he had pursued a career as a glass artist, which led him to study abroad in Sweden for over a year at the National School of Glass in Orrefors and to work with various glassmakers around the San Francisco Bay Area.