Maleah Stephens is an Atlanta-based undergraduate student in Savannah College of Art and Design’s (SCAD) B.F.A. Writing program. She currently works as a freelance writer and editor for fiction and nonfiction works, journalistic articles, and screenplays. She primarily writes existentialist, mythological, and psychological fiction, as well as poetry. Her stories primarily explore the mechanics of human thought and emotion, and the consequences that result from living in the abstract rather than reality.

Stephens began writing at an early age, developing short songs and poems when she was five years old. She continued writing flash pieces through the years, utilizing creative storytelling as a means of exploring a world outside her own. When she reached the third grade, she began writing her first serialized narrative for her class, and it was later adapted to a stage show performed by her peers. She wrote her first playscript in the fifth grade, casting and directing the show herself. She was exposed to Edgar Allan Poe in the sixth grade and quickly latched onto his darkly lyrical prose and content. She developed an astute affinity for the baseless paranoia present in the human mind and began integrating such themes into her own work for years to come. She was later exposed to existentialist fiction through Dostoevsky and began exploring the idea of how individual perception shapes reality in her writing. As the years progressed, writing became more of a hobby than an intended profession, but her love for the craft lingered nonetheless.

During her final year of high school in 2021, she decided to attend Mississippi State University to obtain a degree in Criminal Justice, hoping to intertwine the love she had for writing about the human mind to exploring it in the most immersive, darkest sense possible. Though what she studied intrigued her, her love for writing seeped through everything she did in college. In 2023, she decided to transfer to SCAD to receive a B.F.A in Writing, finally solidifying her choice to devote her life to writing. 

She is currently a part of two upcoming film projects as a research assistant, and has worked on two film sets as a co-writer, with one script receiving an award nomination for “Best Writing” for the global 48 Hour Film Project. In 2024, she began exploring journalism and was published as a feature writer for Savannah Magazine in 2025. She is also the current editor for SCAD’s literary publication, Honeycomb, which showcases an array of student storytelling through written or visual mediums. 

She graduates in the Spring of 2026 and plans to continue her work in editing outside of school, along with developing her first novel and a collection of assorted poems.