Baala Shakya, Staff Photographer

Throughout their time at Yale, three students — Lillie Lainoff ’18, Dur e Aziz Amna ’15 and Rachel Kauffman ’19 — cultivated the skills that would lead them to professionally publish works of creative writing. The News talked to them about how Yale shaped their literary careers and the lessons they learned along the way.

Lillie Lainoff: Advocacy and the fulfillment of childhood dreams

When she was an undergraduate, Lillie Lainoff ’18 could be found writing energetically on her bed or the floor of a friend’s common room. When the Jonathan Edwards College resident wasn’t writing, she was most likely at fencing practice training for the NCAA championships. 

Despite being an active member in many niche Yale communities, Lainoff was anything but exploratory when it came to her vision for her future. Since the age of five, she knew she wanted to be a writer. 

“There’s an incredible privilege in knowing what you want to do from a very young age, but it’s also incredibly scary,” said Lainoff. “If you work for that, you don’t really have a lot to fall back upon in terms of what your dream is.”

By the time she arrived at Yale, the young author had a strong foundation in fiction writing, had taken summer writing workshops and had a pool of passion to draw from.

But she was not immune to the selectivity of the English department. While the literature courses in the English department are first-come, first-served, the creative writing courses often require instructor permission. The creative writing concentration requires an application and three prerequisite courses in addition to the 14 courses required for the English major. 

Lainoff was rejected twice from the course “Advanced Fiction” with Caryl Phillips and once from the creative writing concentration itself. Rather than letting these rejections discourage her, she saw them as redirection: being shut out from higher-level writing classes allowed Lainoff to pursue introductory courses she might otherwise have glossed over, she said. 

She said “Introduction to Creative Writing” with Richard Deming,“Introduction to Fiction” with Leslie Jamison and “Reading Fiction for Craft” with Adam Sexton proved to be instrumental in shaping her writing and creative processes. 

It was Deming who ended up becoming her biggest advocate and mentor at the University. Deming described his former student as a “disciplined” and “focused” individual. 

Lainoff was recruited to Yale to join the fencing team. While athletics and writing might seem like strange combinations, the two have always been intertwined for Lainoff. More than helping her create accurate fight scenes, the quick interplay of swords also helped her craft quick and rhythmic dialogue. 

When writing her debut novel “One for All” — a young adult reimagining of the Three Musketeers — Lainoff could not disentangle the action of fencing from the experience of her disability. 

Diagnosed with POTS at age 14, the author spent her young adult years acutely aware of the lack of representation in literature for chronically ill individuals. Her writing reflected this gap. Her protagonists were able-bodied, and if disability was present, it was tangential to the plot. It was not until the summer before her sophomore year at Yale that she wrote explicitly about her experience living with chronic illness. 

The piece is a vulnerable exposition of her life in contrast with the happy-go-lucky attitudes of characters in the “Red Band Society.” The opinion piece was picked up by the Washington Post. It was not until this moment that Lainoff realized she was part of a larger community of individuals who shared her experience and longed to be heard.  

“One for All” thus became a genderbent re-imagining of the Three Musketeers featuring a protagonist with a chronic illness. The novel is Lainoff’s way to give her younger self the stories she wishes she had access to growing up. 

“To have a book with disabled main characters would have changed my life,” Lainoff said. “I think I would have identified as disabled much earlier. I would have felt less alone. I would have been happier in my own skin. I want to make sure that no other teenager has the same experience.”

Lainoff’s time at Yale allowed her to discover her unique voice and define what she wanted to write about. Her work has grown to become a more specific reflection of her values and hopes for the future of the literary industry.

Deming said that the author’s writing is “specific, vivid, and vital. It always was, but now there is more control.” He added that Lainoff “trusts the language at every turn—or so it seems—and so a reader is patient and willing to trust the story itself.”

Dur e Aziz Amna: Exploration and the triumph of passion 

In the cozy alcoves of the L&B reading room or the tranquil tables of the Berkeley Lazarus Library, one could find Dur e Aziz Amna ’15 in the early 2010s. She was probably writing a paper for an English class or an article for the News. The young writer could also be found wandering the galleries of the Yale Center for British Art, where she worked as an intern and researcher. 

An international student from Pakistan, Aziz Amna found at Yale an opportunity to discover new interests and explore academically. She entered Yale as an “EP&E hopeful” but instead took many classes in the Art History and English departments. 

The young writer was initially enrolled in the Directed Studies program but found herself overwhelmed by the intellectual gap between herself and the literary “canon” she was studying.

“I was around all these students who had clearly read these books before, and I’d never been exposed to them,” said Aziz Amna. “I do think it’s important to rebel at some stage, against these ideas. I also have realized over time that you need a shared lexicon to be able to be in an intellectual conversation. Those texts, perhaps, need to be a little more diverse.”

Aziz Amna made the most of Yale’s intellectual freedom. She was an active member of the cultural and political committees within the International Student Association. Further drawn into writing, she co-founded the literary magazine Kalliope. The magazine offered more imaginative outlets to writers and was active until 2019.

Aziz Amna’s intellectually curious mindset landed her the eventual distinction as an English major. She already had more than half the credits by the time she officially declared her major. However, she still doubted the feasibility of pursuing writing after graduation.

“What I was going to do immediately after [Yale] had to be dictated by an entirely different, very practical set of concerns,” said Aziz Amna. “There was no way that I was just going to get an internship at a newspaper anywhere because they weren’t going to sponsor my visa. I knew what I would do right after college would have to be a different field.”

After graduation, Aziz Amna moved to New York, where her future husband also happened to be moving. The pair met through mutual friends in their senior year and went on their first date at 116 Crown. Their mutual move to New York City proved serendipitous. The couple has been together ever since and now has two children.

In New York, Aziz Amna worked as a marketing consultant. While she enjoyed this more than her previous job at a hedge fund, she still found herself drawn to writing. She took writing workshops in the evenings and occasionally submitted her work to magazines and journals. However, it was not until her acceptance to an MFA program that she “gave [herself] the permission” to be a writer. 

Her debut novel, “American Fever,” follows an exchange student in rural America as she navigates coming-of-age and the immigrant experience. The novel won several awards, and was named best book of the summer by Vogue India. 

Her work is intimate and character-driven. Inspired by her lessons from Professor Caryl Phillips, she made sure the lives and nuances of each character were mapped out in her head. While her adherence to such detailed guidelines has waned over the years, the sentiment of specificity remains true. 

“When I was writing ‘American Fever’ I wanted each of my characters to be very specific and very differentiated,” said Aziz Amna. “But with other projects, it’s almost to your benefit not to. ‘Will they have oatmeal?’ Or ‘will they have cereal in the morning?’ is not as relevant as what that character represents overall in the story.”

Aziz Amna has recently announced her second novel “A Splintering.” The book will be available for purchase Spring of 2026 in the US. The story traces the struggles of a young Pakistani woman as her ambition clashes with societal expectations of motherhood and marriage. 

As a consultant-turned-celebrated writer, Aziz Amna’s journey to authorship was anything but smooth, she said. While her literary journey had its detours, the intellectual freedom provided by Yale planted a powerful and creative voice Aziz Amna could not ignore. 

Rachel Kauffman: Poetry and the amplification of silent voices

Poet, historian and Trumbullian, Rachel Kauffman ’19 was never quite able to disentangle poetry and writing. In the lower floors of the Beinecke library, she couldn’t help but find beauty in the sources she analyzed. 

Kauffman’s poetic thinking is in part due to her background as an opera singer. The vocalist was planning on training in Yale’s Baroque Opera program. However, she found herself drawn to the written word.

While she continued performing, her main craft became writing. The author considers herself a poet first. It wasn’t until she took courses with professors Peter Cole and Jennifer Allen that Kauffman became interested in cultural memory and poetic understanding of history.

Sitting in the dark and dusty archives, Kauffman listened to the rhythm held within transcripts and historical documents. She became attuned to the nuances of quotes and how something as simple as grammar could divulge information about someone’s personality and history.

“I was sitting in the archive writing poems because I was trying to capture the materialities of the archive —  the sensory experience of sitting in the archive,” said Kauffman. “The rhythms of how we speak to each other show our personalities… If you pay attention to the rhythm of your sources, you’ll learn more about the history.”

Kauffman also found rhythm in the connective aspect of history. Being led from one source to the next, the threads of connection created a rhythm she could follow to untangle and understand the history she was studying.

This rhythm led the young historian to assist in developing the exhibition “Female American Poets” in the Beinecke, where she worked as a research assistant. 

These experiences fueled Kauffman’s senior thesis for her double major in History and English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her thesis project became her first published poetry anthology, “Many to Remember.” 

Kauffman’s work is also heavily influenced by her teaching experience. The poet began teaching fifth graders while she was a high school student. During her time at Yale, she taught in the Ulysses S. Grant summer programs and started creative writing workshops for students in New Haven. She also worked in the Yale Children’s Theater, where she ran theater workshops for preschoolers. 

Kauffman is currently a PhD candidate at UCLA, where she teaches first year undergraduates. As a member of the organization Diversifying the Classics, she translates works of Commedia and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She is also developing these Spanish classics into children’s books. 

“Often what my students are doing is reminding me of the stakes of this work, which is why teaching feels so important,” said Kauffman. “If you jump into that act of creation together, what comes to the surface are the very present material stakes of a lot of this work, which is sometimes easy to forget.” 

The practice of poetic interpretation has the power to confront the violence involved in silencing the voices of the past. From the horrific experiences of women taken along the Middle Passage to the domestic lives of 15th century Spanish women, Kauffman’s work confronts the gaps in the archive. 

Her research builds off a lineage of historians like Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes. This community of researchers shed light on the overshadowed and dark histories often overlooked by archivists. For Kauffman, this work is inextricably linked to poetry.

“The tools of the poet and the world of poetics can and should serve as useful and necessary for the historian, especially the historian who is confronting archives that hold silence as well as sound,” said Kauffman.

As a historian of poetry, Kauffman views poetry as a tool of interpretation and a means of accessibility. Analyzing the archive through a poetic lens takes the dense historical sources of the archive and transforms them. The transformed material gives voice to silenced individuals and makes convoluted language more accessible.

She found herself part of a larger community of writers, within Yale and beyond.

There is no correct way to achieve a dream, the writers agreed. Plans fall through, life presents challenges and single opportunities could alter the course of your life. 

What unites these stories is a unique passion that was honed and developed on Yale’s campus. A passion that took the form of youth fiction, literary fiction or historical poetry. A passion that was tested by health, visas or academia. A passion that was solidified, discovered or evolved.