Ashley Bates

Ashley manages the Zell Visiting Writers Series, leads monthly career planning workshops and events for Zell Fellows, and facilitates the campus visits of more than a dozen agents and editors who review the manuscripts of Zell MFA students each year. She finds it quite rewarding to support MFA students whose creative work, individually and collectively, demonstrates the power of poetry and literature to sow compassion and understanding across differences.

Previously, Ashley coordinated human rights-focused events for the University of Michigan's International Institute, taught professional development courses for undergraduate students, and worked as an investigative journalist in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and the United States. She also served for eight years as the program director, and then the executive director, of an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and social justice advocacy organization called Hands of Peace.

Ashley's articles have been published in Mother Jones, the Nation, Ha'aretz, Global Post, the East Bay Express, Tikkun, Jerusalem Post Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review. NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof promoted her 2010 blog, Dispatches from Gaza, as "a model for filling in gaps in news coverage." Ashley received a "Best News Reporting of 2012" award from the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club for her in-depth articles concerning radioactive contamination on San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

Outside of work, Ashley and her family enjoy many Ann Arbor outdoor activities-- biking the B2B Trail, hiking in the Arb, swimming at Pickerel Lake, kayaking down the Huron River, picnicking at Summerfest, and befriending the kangaroos at the Creature Conservancy. Alas, Ashley has never attended a University of Michigan football game.