Autumn Mitchell

Professional Bio

Autumn Mitchell graduated magna cum laude from the Pennsylvania State University in May 2026. With distinction from the Schreyer Honors College, she earned her B.A. in English (with a Technical Writing minor and Creative Writing concentration). She will continue to pursue her M.A. in English as a member of Penn State’s B.A./M.A. Graduate Creative Writing Program and as a Steven Fisher Family Fellow. Her intended graduation date is May 2027. 

In addition to a rigorous honors course load and extracurriculars, Autumn worked as a peer tutor at the campus Writing Center and cashier at the Penn State Student Bookstore during her undergrad. She also worked as the New England Review’s 2025-2026 Nonfiction Literary Publishing Intern under Elizabeth Kadetsky and published a Behind the Byline Interview with essayist Ranbir Sidhu. 

Autumn’s lifelong passion for creative writing and developmental editing informed her 2024-2026 participation in the fiction committee for Kalliope (Penn State’s undergraduate literary journal). In 2025, she was elected Kalliope’s fiction editor and employed grammatical, structural, and thematic critiques to evaluate submissions according to the literary journal’s mission.  

In total, she has published four short fiction pieces, one flash fiction piece, two creative nonfiction pieces, and nine poems between Kalliope, its fall chapbook Folio, its online sister publication KLIO, and in Josaih Policard’s zine Perseverance is Poetry. Her short story “Untethered” won the Katey Lehman Award in Fiction and her essay “Déjà Vu” placed second for the Katey Lehman Award for Journalism/Nonfiction. Her 63,000-word honors thesis, What We Can: A Novel, is archived in the Penn State University Libraries Electronic Theses for Schreyer Honors College database. Recently, she won an Apes Valentes Student Award, which supports student-led summer projects in pollinator biology and health and offers the option for students with non-biology backgrounds to develop artistic works related to pollinators to be disseminated to the public. She produced a two-part short story from the perspective of two honey bees suffering from the effects of a varroa mite (Varroa destructor) infestation. The short stories will be published on the Center for Pollinator Research website and produced as printed chapbooks (via the Multimedia and Print Center) for Frost Entomology Museum and Penn State Arboretum visitors by December 2026. Currently, she is working on conceptualizing her master’s thesis, studying writers such as Tamsyn Muir, Franz Kafka, Laline Paull, and Micah Muldowney.  

In her free time, Autumn enjoys reading horror novels, spending time with her loved ones, and studying entomology.