Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, Where the World is Made (Middlebury College Press, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), From Nothing (Four Way Books, 2016), and Blood Labors (Four Way Books, 2018), which the New York Times named one of the Best Poetry Books of the year. His suite of versions of poems from the German of Paul Celan, The Stone in the Air, also appeared in 2018. He is the author of the critical studies Awake in America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University of Kentucky Press, 1999), and On Serious Earth (Little Island Press, 2018), as well as the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge (Quale, 2007), Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Arts (University of Michigan Press, 2008, with Pimone Triplett), and To the Many: Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge (Little Island, 2018), which received a Special Commendation from the Poetry Society (U.K.) Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Laura van den Berg’s most recent novel, The Third Hotel, was an ABA IndieNext Pick, named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen outlets, and a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award. She is also the author of the novel Find Me, longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and two story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and The Isle of Youth. Both collections were finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. The title story of her debut collection is currently being adapted for the screen by writer/producer Jenny Halper and director Claire McCarthy, with Naomi Watts and Sophie Lillis attached to star. Laura’s short fiction has recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, BOMB, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard. This spring, she will be visiting faculty at the Michener Center for Writers. Laura’s next story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, is forthcoming from FSG in June 2020.
Connie Voisine is the author of the book of poems, The Bower, begun on a Fulbright Fellowship to Northern Ireland. A previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Educated at Yale University, University of California at Irvine, and University of Utah, Voisine directs the creative writing program at New Mexico State University. She was a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a de Groot Foundation Writer of Note grant, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. A former longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. A Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California, she teaches at the Sewanee Writers Conference and elsewhere. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Liam Callanan’s most recent book, When in Rome, came out in March 2023 from Dutton. His novel Paris by the Book was a national bestseller and was translated into German, Italian and Chinese. His story collection, Listen & Other Stories won George W. Hunt, SJ Prize in Arts & Letters, and his novel The Cloud Atlas was a finalist for the Edgar Award. He’s written for Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and about chasing children’s books (in France and Greece) for the Wall Street Journal. Liam was also the founder and executive producer of the nationwide Poetry Everywhere animated film project. He teaches in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was previously department chair and director of its doctoral program in creative writing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
701 Warren Wilson Rd. Swannanoa, NC 28778
[email protected] (828) 771-3715