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We are pleased to announce our July 2013 Faculty :
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Joan Aleshire received her BA from Harvard/Radcliffe and her MFA in Writing from Goddard College in 1980. She is the author of four collections of poems: Cloud Train (an Associated Writing Programs Award Series selection), This Far, The Yellow Transparents, and Litany of Thanks. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals. Her essay “Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric” was published in Poets Teaching Poets, and reprinted in After Confession, a collection of essays on poetry and autobiography published by Graywolf Press in 2001. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the Emily Clark Balch Prize from Virginia Quarterly Review, and a grant from the Vermont Council on the Arts. She served as Interim Director of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program from 1983-84 and from November 1992 to June 1993, and has been a member of the MFA Academic Board since 1982. |
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Debra Allbery received her MFA from the University of Iowa and her MA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, Walking Distance, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her collection, Fimbul-Winter, was published by Four Way Books in October 2010 and won the Grub Street National Book Prize in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, The Nation, FIELD, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has twice received fellowships from the NEA; other awards include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Hawthornden fellowship, and two grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She has taught writing and literature at Phillips Exeter Academy, Interlochen Arts Academy, Randolph College, Dickinson College, and the University of Michigan. Deb first taught in the Program in 1995; she became the director in June 2009. |
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Charles Baxter has a BA from Macalester College and a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and teaches in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He has received Guggenheim and NEA grants, and was a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1997 Award in Literature and the 2007 Award of Merit for the Short Story. He has published five novels (First Light, Shadow Play, The Feast of Love, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction, Saul and Patsy, and The Soul Thief), five short story collections (Harmony of the World, Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, Believers, and Grypon: New and Selected Stories), a book of poetry (Imaginary Paintings), and two books of essays on fiction (Burning Down the House and Beyond Plot). He is also co-editor (with Peter Turchi) of Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, a collection of essays by Warren Wilson MFA faculty. |
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Marianne Boruch has published seven books of poems, most recently The Book of Hours. Her prose includes a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, and two essay collections, Poetry’s Old Air and In the Blue Pharmacy. An eighth poetry collection—Cadaver, Speak–is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. Poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry London, American Poetry Review, The London Review of Books, Field, Poetry and elsewhere, and her awards include the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, as well as a stint as artist-in-residence at Isle Royale, our most isolated National Park. Last year she was a Fulbright/visiting professor in the U.K., at the University of Edinburgh. She has taught for the last 25 years at Purdue University where she developed the MFA program. |
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Robert Boswell’s collection of stories The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards was published by Graywolf in May of 2009. He is the author of six novels (including Century’s Son, Mystery Ride, and Crooked Hearts), three story collections, a play, a cyberpunk novel, and two nonfiction books (one about writing craft, The Half-Known World, and one about a treasure hunt, What Men Call Treasure). He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He is married to the writer, Antonya Nelson, and they have two children, Jade and Noah. Boswell and Nelson share the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. He and his family live in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. He has taught with some regularity in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for the past 20 or so years. |
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Gabrielle Calvocoressi is a poet and essayist whose most recent book Apocalyptic Swing was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her poems have been featured in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Washington Post, on Garrison Keillor’s Poet’s Almanac, and in numerous journals. She writes the Sports Desk column for The Best American Poetry blog and is on the advisory board of The Rumpus’ Poetry Book Club. She is the Senior Poetry Editor for the The Los Angeles Review of Books. In the fall of 2013 she will join the creative writing faculty in the renowned English Department at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. |
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Maud Casey is the author of the novels The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book, and Genealogy, as well as a short story collection, Drastic. Her stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Five Chapters, The Normal School and other literary journals. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, A Public Space and Literary Imagination. She received the Italo Calvino Prize for excerpts from her novel, The Man Who Walked Away, which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2014. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. |
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Christopher Castellani is the author of two novels: A Kiss from Maddalena and The Saint of Lost Things. He recently completed his third novel, Beautiful Everything. He has been twice a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and has taught fiction workshops at Swarthmore College and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University, a BA in English from Swarthmore, and is ABD in English Literature at Tufts University. He works as artistic director of Grub Street, a Boston-based non-profit literary arts center. To learn more about Christopher, visit www.christophercastellani.com. |
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Stephen Dobyns has published thirteen books of poems, twenty-one novels, a book of essays on poetry and a book of short stories. His most recent novel, The Burn Palace, was published in February by Blue Rider Press. He has received a Guggenheim and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at over ten colleges and universities including the University of New Hampshire, Boston University, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University and Sarah Lawrence College. Since 1995, he has written 30 cover articles for the San Diego Reader. He lives in Westerly, RI. |
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Brooks Haxton has published six collections of shorter poems, two book-length narratives, and three books of translations. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, the NEH, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. He lives with his wife and children in Syracuse, and teaches at Syracuse University. |
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David Haynes earned a BA from Macalester College and an MA in liberal studies from Hamline University. He is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directs the creative writing program. He has taught writing in the MFA Programs at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers’ Garret in Dallas. His sixth and most recent novel is The Full Matilda. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” He is also the author of a series for children called “The West Seventh Wildcats.” |
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Tony Hoagland has published six books of poems—most recently Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty—and a book of essays about poetry and craft, Real Sofistakashun. He’s received the Jackson Poetry Prize, the O.B. Hardison Prize for poetry and teaching, and the Mark Twain Award for humor in American poetry. |
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Caitlin Horrocks received an MFA from Arizona State University and a BA from Kenyon College. Her story collection This Is Not Your City (Sarabande) was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her stories appear in anthologies and magazines including The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize. She is fiction editor of The Kenyon Review, and an associate professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She recently completed a second story collection and is at work on a novel. |
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C.J. Hribal is the author of the novel The Company Car, which won the Anne Powers Book Award, and three other works of fiction. His collection of novellas and stories, The Clouds in Memphis, won the AWP Prize in Short Fiction. He is also the author of the novel American Beauty, the collection of stories and novellas, Matty’s Heart, and he edited the collection The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bush Foundation. His BA is from St. Norbert College and his MA from Syracuse University. He is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee. |
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A. Van Jordan is the author of four books of poetry: Rise, which won a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2002; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, for which he was awarded a 2004 Whiting Writers Award and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Quantum Lyrics, published July 2007, and The Cineaste. He also received a Pushcart Prize in 2006. He currently teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. |
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Maurice Manning received his MFA from the University of Alabama, an MA in Literature from the University of Kentucky, and a BA in English from Earlham College. His books are Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, A Companion for Owls, Bucolics, and The Common Man. He has taught at DePauw University and currently teaches literature and creative writing at Indiana University. |
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Heather McHugh has published seven collections of poems, one of essays (Broken English: Poetry and Partiality); and four of translation (most recently, with Nikolai Popov: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, and with David Konstan, Euripides’ Cyclops). McHugh has also collaborated with the British artist Tom Phillips, producing an edition of collages and verse texts. She was co-editor with Ellen Voigt of Hammer and Blaze, and her translations are among those in the McClatchy edition of Horace’s odes. Her most recent work, a collection of poems entitled Upgraded to Serious was published by Copper Canyon Press in the fall of 2009,
Heather McHugh graduated with a BA from Radcliffe College in 1969, and received her MA in literature and writing from the University of Denver. Since then, she has won grants in creative writing from the National Endowments for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship (1992-93), a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writing Award (1995-98), and in 2000 the PEN/Voelcker Prize. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs; on the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts; and on the faculties of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, UC Irvine, SUNY Binghamton, and UC Berkeley. She is Pollock Professor of Poetry at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she works for part of each year. In 1999 she was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; in 2000, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2009 a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. |
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Kevin McIlvoy is the author of The Complete History of New Mexico and Other Stories and four novels: A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, and Hyssop. His stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. In 1983 he received an NEA Fellowship. He has taught in the creative writing MFA program at New Mexico State University, where he was editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol magazine for twenty-five years. |
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Susan Neville received her MFA from Bowling Green State University and her BA from DePauw University. Her collection of stories In the House of Blue Lights is a recipient of the Sullivan Fiction Prize and was selected as one of the “Best Books of 1998” by the Chicago Tribune. Other books include The Invention of Flight, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; Indiana Winter; Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; and a collection of essays, many of them given originally as lectures at Warren Wilson, Sailing the Inland Sea. She co-edited an anthology, Rules of Thumb, with Michael Martone. Susan currently holds the Demia Butler Chair of English Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis where she is head of the MFA program. |
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Peter Orner received his JD from Northeastern University and his MFA from the University of Iowa. His first book, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001, Little, Brown, 2013), was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award, Winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and A New York Times Notable book. His novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, and been translated into French, Italian, German, and Dutch. Peter’s second novel, Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, 2011) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book and winner of a California Book Award. A new collection of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, will be out later this year. He has also edited two non-fiction books, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, both published by McSweeney’s. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. Peter has been the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. Orner has taught at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Montana, Miami University, and is a Professor at San Francisco State University. |
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Alan Shapiro, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poetry, most recently, Old War, winner of the 2009 Ambassador Book Award. He has been the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, an L.A. Times Book Award in poetry, and been a finalist in poetry and nonfiction for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In 2012, he will publish two books: Night of the Republic, a book of poems, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books. A recipient of two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shapiro teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he lives with his wife, Callie Warner, and their three children. |
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Debra Spark received her MFA from the University of Iowa and her BA from Yale University. She is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews, and the book of essays Curious Attractions. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yankee, Food and Wine, and elsewhere. She has received an NEA, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, and a Wisconsin Institute Fellowship. |
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Sarah Stone received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan and her BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written for Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares; StoryQuarterly; The Future Dictionary of America; the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers; Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope; and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, among other places. Her novel, The True Sources of the Nile, has been taught in courses on literature, ethics, and the rhetoric of human rights. She is the co-author, with Ron Nyren, of the textbook Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (trade version: The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing). She has taught in Seoul, in Bujumbura, at San Francisco State University, and at the University of California, Berkeley. She is now core faculty in the MFA in Writing and Consciousness at California Institute of Integral Studies. |
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Mary Szybist received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Granted (Alice James Books 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Incarnadine (Graywolf Press 2013). Szybist has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Great Lakes Colleges Association, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College. |
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Peter Turchi is the author of six books, including A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, forthcoming from Trinity University Press in March 2014; Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; and the catalogue for the touring exhibition Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings and Prints of Charles Ritchie. His story “Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning” has been produced as a limited-edition artist’s book with images by Ritchie. He has co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work, and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and Colorado Review, among other magazines. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, he has taught at the University of Houston, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Arizona, Northwestern University, and Appalachian State University. He served as Director of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers from 1993-2008. He currently teaches at Arizona State University, where he is Director of Creative Writing. His essays on writing workshops and annotations are posted under “Resources for Writers” at www.peterturchi.com. |
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Ellen Bryant Voigt developed and directed the country’s first low-residency writing program in the mid-seventies, at Goddard College, and helped move it to Warren Wilson in 1981. A Guggenheim, Lila-Wallace and NEA Fellow, she was Professor of Poetry at MIT for three years and has taught at the Bread Loaf, Aspen, Indiana, Napa, Catskills, Sarah Lawrence, and RopeWalk Writers’ Conferences. Voigt has published seven books of poetry: Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, Kyrie (a National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist and Teasdale Prize winner), Shadow of Heaven (a 2002 National Book Award finalist), and Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and the winner of the 2009 Poets’ Prize. She co-edited, with Gregory Orr, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, a selection of craft essays by Warren Wilson MFA faculty, and has also collected her own essays, developed from residency lectures, in The Flexible Lyric. In July 2009, Graywolf published The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. In 2002, she received the O.B. Hardison Award for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Library and the Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, where she was named a Chancellor. |
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Alan Williamson is Professor of English at the University of California at Davis. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Brandeis. His books of poems are Presence, The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, and The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems. He has also published five critical books: Introspection and Contemporary Poetry; Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell; Eloquence and Mere Life; Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification, and Westernness: A Meditation.He has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. |