About Kellina

Kellina Moore (she/they) was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and moved to Newark, Delaware at age 13. She obtained a Bachelor’s from Skidmore College with a double major in English and Religious Studies. After spending a few years managing a hair salon in Philadelphia, Kellina moved to New York to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University, which they obtained in May of 2023. Kellina now works as a News Assistant at The New York Times.

Kellina is an experienced writer and teacher, beginning with positions interning at No Tokens and Cosmonauts Avenue, and building to their tenure as Nonfiction Print Editor of Columbia Journal Issue 60. During the 2022-2023 academic year, they created and taught their own workshop class in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program. As an editor and teacher, they believe in equal parts rigor and encouragement, a generosity of attention.

Kellina is working on her debut essay collection, inspired by their profound love of horror films, their staunch belief that in the films’ exaggerated language, they tell us something true about human experience, about the inherent horror of inhabiting a body. To illustrate this, each essay combines film criticism and personal narrative to study a specific aspect of experience— intimacy (platonic and romantic), puberty, violence, identity, and suffering. This manuscript is represented by Aurora Fernandez.