Drake Facchinello

Drake earned his bachelor's in Creative Writing with minors in Italian Studies and Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2025, he was a recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the Center for Global Studies. In 2026, he was named a finalist in the Department of English's Creative Writing contest for poetry. He has had poems published in Green Observer, Beyond Queer Words, Poets Choice, Montage Arts Journal and written for The Daily Illini. As an undergraduate, he studied how identities, like gender and sexuality, shape language acquisition. He is currently a teaching assistant for the Department of French and Italian.