Ariel Mandel (nee Lewis) is a writer and educator whose short prose has appeared in Echoverse, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Millions, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the M.F.A. program in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis, where she was also the Third Year Fellow. In 2025, she was named to the honorable mention list for the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships in Prose for her second novel manuscript. Among other honors, her work has been selected as the winner of The Gordon Square Review’s Fall 2018 Prose Contest, awarded a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is represented by Kiele Raymond of Thompson Literary Agency and has completed a novel, set in California in the early 1990s, about the state’s mistreatment of HIV-positive people in the prison system. She is currently at work on a second novel, a gothic romp about the crumbling state of Florida’s K-12 education system.

Raised in Vacaville, California, she currently lives in Miami, Florida. Among other honors, she has been named a Gold Medal Educator by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Sue Sadler Endowed Chair for Promise in Education at Hathaway Brown School, and a Florida Department of Education High-Impact Teacher. She is a Frank H. and Eva B. Buck Foundation Scholar, as well as a Hall of Fame former two-time NCAA All-American collegiate tennis player at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.