Dilruba Ahmed is the author Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has taught creative writing with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and online with The Writing Lab. Website: www.dilrubaahmed.com/
is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021). The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and many other awards, he was born in Tehran, Iran. He joined the Program faculty in 2018.
Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories from Riverhead Books. Her collection was named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, LitHub, and more. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, the Caine Prize, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Arimah’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GRANTA among other publications, and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Breadloaf and others. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in the Midwest and is working on a novel about you.
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.
Mia Alvar is the author of the story collection In the Country, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Mia has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts; and has received fellowships from the Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and Sirenland Writers’ Conferences. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, One Story, The Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she also received her MFA. Born in the Philippines and raised in Bahrain and New York, she lives in southern California.
Dean Bakopoulos’ first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt, 2005), was a New York Times Notable Book; Bakopoulos co-wrote the film adaptation, which premiered last year at the Los Angeles Film Festival. His second novel, My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) was named one of the year’s best novels by The Chicago Tribune, and his latest novel Summerlong (Ecco, 2015) made the independent bookstore bestseller list. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Dean is now writer-in-residence at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he lives with his spouse, novelist Alissa Nutting, and their blended family of three kids. Dean and Alissa are now at work on a television series based on Alissa’s novel, Made For Love.
Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poems, Hold Sway, Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in Lithub, NOR, Pleiades, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in APR, Bennington, Boston, and Harvard Reviews, Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry anthology. Professor of English and director of creative writing at Arizona State University, Ball is also the associate director of Four Way Books. Her long poem “HOLD” has been made into a large-format artist’s book by the Czech printmaker Jan Vičar (2018).
Rita Banerjee is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Oliver Baez Bendorf collaborates with language to imagine new possibilities for gender and nature. He’s received fellowships from the NEA, Vermont Studio Center, CantoMundo, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and The Publishing Triangle’s Betty Berzon Award. His first book of poetry, The Spectral Wilderness, was selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and published by Kent State University Press. His second book, Advantages of Being Evergreen, won the Open Book Prize from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. His writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Best American Poetry 2022, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, New England Review, Orion, POETRY Magazine, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Previously he’s taught in the undergraduate creative writing programs at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kalamazoo College. He lives with his partner and rabbit in the Pacific Northwest.
Marianne Boruch has published ten collections of poems including The Book of Hours (2011), Cadaver, Speak (2014), and Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), and most recently The Anti-Grief (2019) all from Copper Canyon Press. Her prose includes a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011), and three essay collections, Poetry’s Old Air (Michigan’s “Poets on Poetry” series, 1993), In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005), and The Little Death of Self (again that Michigan series, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry London, American Poetry Review, Narrative, The London Review of Books, Field, Poetry, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere, and she’s been given the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, as well as stints as artist-in-residence at two national parks, Isle Royale and Denali. She was a Fulbright/visiting professor in the UK at the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and in 2019, a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Canberra in Australia, closely observing the astonishing wildlife there. Having taught for the last 34 years at Purdue University, she has now gone rogue and emeritus.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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