Icon by faculty name presents a 2-minute faculty youtube reading.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti, PhD (writing for children and young adults). Newbery-Honor author Susan Campbell Bartoletti has published seventeen books ranging from picture books, novels, and nonfiction for young readers. Her latest nonfiction book is the YALSA honor-winning They Called Themselves the K.K.K: the Birth of an American Terrorist Group. (Houghton Mifflin 2010). For her body of nonfiction work, she was awarded the prestigious Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild award in 2009. Her work has received dozens of awards and honors, including the ALA Newbery Honor, ALA Robert F. Sibert Award for Nonfiction, the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Nonfiction, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, Charlotte Zolotow honor, the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction,ALA Notable Children’s Book, ALA Best Book for Young Adults, School Library Journal Best Book, and Booklist Editors’ Choice, among others. Despite writing about depressing subjects such as home-grown terrorism in They Called Themselves the K.K.K., the horror of the Third Reich in Hitler Youth and The Boy Who Dared (Scholastic 2005, 2008), famine in Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine (Houghton, 2001), and child labor in Kids on Strike! (Houghton 1999) and Growing Up in Coal Country (Houghton 1996), and the pain of arranged marriages in A Coal Miner’s Bride (Dear America, Scholastic 2000), she insists that she has a good sense of humor, no doubt a defense mechanism developed as a result of teaching eighth grade for eighteen years. Her latest novel is Down the Rabbit Hole: The Diary of Pringle Rose, 1871 (Scholastic 2013). She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University (New York). She lives with her husband near Scranton, Pennsylvania. They have two grown children. Visit her website at http://www.scbartoletti.com.  Top

 
Larry Brenner, MFA (playwriting, screenwriting). Larry Brenner is a graduate of Spalding’s MFA program, and is currently earning his PhD in Educational Theatre at NYU. In Fall 2010, Larry’s screenplay, Bethlehem, was one of the winners in the Final Draft Big Break Screenplay Competition, which is now being produced by Joe Roth Productions. It subsequently placed on the 2011 Hollywood Black List, Hit List, and Blood List. He’s also currently writing Angelology for SONY/Columbia Pictures, Overbrook Productions, and Apparatus Productions. Larry’s stage play, Saving Throw Versus Love, was produced at part of the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival. It was then selected for the Fringe Encore Series, and is currently in contract with producers for an upcoming Off-Broadway run. Most recently his children’s play, Uncle Big Bad and the Three Little Wolves, was workshopped as part of the NYU New Plays for Young Audiences development program. Larry is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America and WGAEast.

Julie Brickman, MFA, PhD (fiction). Julie Brickman holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and a PhD in psychology from the University of Manitoba. Her first novel, What Birds Can Only Whisper, was published by Turnstone Press in 1997. She is currently completing a novel called An Empty Quarter, set in Gulf Arabia, and working on a linked story collection. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The North American Review,The Barcelona Review, Fireweed, The Louisville Review, International Journal of Women’s Studies, Kinesis, Canadian Psychology and Canadian Dimension, and she has published thirty book reviews in the San Diego Union-Tribune. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has received two grants for fiction from the Canada Council for the Arts; an early draft of her memoir-in-progress, A Writer in Residence in the Yukon, was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards, and she has served as guest faculty editor of The Louisville Review in both fiction and CNF. Julie lives in Southern California with her husband, author and psychologist, Bob Hoyk. Her website is http://www.juliebrickman.com. Top

 
Louella Bryant , MFA (writing for children and young adults, creative nonfiction, fiction). Louella Bryant is the author of a collection of short stories, Full Bloom (Brown Fedora, 2010), and a creative nonfiction book, While In Darkness There Is Light: Idealism and Tragedy on an Australian Commune (Black Lawrence Press 2008), which chronicles events leading up to the 1974 death of Charlie Dean and won a Southwest Writers Creative Nonfiction Award. Her young-adult historical novels, The Black Bonnet, finalist for the Vermont Book Award, and Father By Blood, winner of the Silver Bay Children’s Literature Award, are both published by New England Press. A picture book, Two Tracks in the Snow (Jason & Nordic) tells the story of a boy learning to ski with the help of a disabled friend. Louella has won numerous prizes for her short stories and poems, which have appeared in the magazines Hunger Mountain, Fine Print, Carve, Vermont Life, The Teacher’s Voice, and Mobius, and the anthologies High Horse (Fleur de Lis Press), Tartts 2—Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers (Livingston Press), and A Cadence of Horses (Yarrow Mountain Press). Her essays are included in the anthology Far From Home (Seal Press) and the magazines Sacred Fire and Vermont Quarterly. In addition to serving on the faculty of the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program, Louella teaches writing courses at the University of Vermont and mentors young writers at the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf. Visit her website at http://louellabryant.com. Top

 Sheila Callaghan, MFA (playwriting, screenwriting). Sheila Callaghan’s plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwright’s Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, and Moving Arts, among others. Sheila is the recipient of a 2000 Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a 2001 LA Weekly Award for Best One-act, a 2001-02 Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis, a 2002 Chesley Prize for Lesbian Playwriting, a 2003 Mac Dowell Residency, a 2004 NYFA grant, a 2005 Cherry Lane Mentorship Fellow, a 2007 NYSCA grant, the 2007 Susan Smith Blackburn Award, and the prestigious 2007 Whiting Award. Her plays have been produced internationally in New Zealand, Norway, Germany, and the Czech Republic. She has been commissioned by Playwright’s Horizons, South Coast Repertory, and EST/Sloan. Her full-length plays include Scab, Crawl Fade to White, Crumble(Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), We Are Not These Hands, Dead City, Lascivious Something, Kate Crackernuts, That Pretty Pretty: Or, the Rape Play, and Fever/Dream. Several of her plays are published by Playscripts.com and Samuel French, and her monologues can be found in various anthologies. She has taught playwriting at The University of Rochester, The College of New Jersey, and Florida State University, and she is currently on the faculty at Spalding University’s MFA program in creative writing. Sheila is a member of the Obie winning playwright’s organization 13P and resident of New Dramatists. Top

Mary Clyde MFA (fiction) Mary Clyde, MFA (fiction). Mary Clyde rejoined the fiction faculty at Spalding in November 2012. She previously taught in the MFA Program from 2002-2005, before leaving to teach at Arizona State University. Mary is the author of Survival Rates. The short story collection won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Louisville Review, Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Boulevard, and New Stories from the South. At ASU, Mary taught literature and graduate creative writing. Later, she was an associate professor of English for seven years at Grand Canyon University, where she developed and taught nineteen different courses in creative writing and literature, including The Novel, The Short Story, Poetry, World Literature, and Contemporary Fiction. She earned a Master of Arts in English from the University of Utah and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. She lives in Phoenix where she is at work on a collection of shot stories.

K. L. Cook, MFA (fiction). K. L. Cook’s collection of linked stories, Last Call (Univ. of Nebraska Press 2004), won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Stories from the collection were originally published in The Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction, and Witness, among other journals and magazines.  His novel, The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow 2006, Harper Perennial 2007), won the 2007 Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was an Editor’s Choice selection by the Historical Novel Society and a Southwest Book of the Year, among other honors.  His thematically linked cycle of stories, Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions 2011), won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Stories from this book originally appeared in Glimmer Train, One Story, Harvard Review, and The Louisville Review, as well as other journals and anthologies. Several of the pieces won individual awards, including the Western Writers of America Association Award for best short story set in the American West and selection for the 2012 Best American Mystery Stories and Best of the West 2011.  Additional essays, articles, and stories have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers, Brevity, Glimmer Train Bulletin, Now Write: Fiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education, and When I Was a Loser.  Other honors include the Grand Prize from the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Arts Series, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, and residency fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, and Ucross. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona.  Website:  www.klcook.com.  Top

Leslie Daniels, MA, MFA (fiction) First novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House, was published by Simon & Schuster/Touchstone in 2011, paperback in 2012, in translation in four languages, and was recently optioned for film. Prior to the book’s publication, Leslie worked in publishing for two decades, first as an assistant, then as a literary agent in New York. Throughout her tenure as a literary agent, Leslie nurtured the work and careers of many fine writers, working closely with writers to shape and edit their work. Leslie received a B.A. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, MA in psychology from the New School for Social Research, MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. Leslie has taught writing workshops at the University of Pennsylvania writing conference, Eastern Washington University MFA program, Franklin & Marshall College, and others. She was the 2011 Walton Award visiting writer at the University of Arkansas. She is on faculty at The Squaw Valley Writers Conference. Between 2005 and 2010, Leslie served as the fiction editor for Green Mountains Review. She is currently the artistic advisor to the Finger Lakes literary festival, Spring Writes. She has published stories or essays in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Florida Review, among others.  Her one-act play was produced by The Shooting Gallery in New York City.  She has been nominated for Best American Essays, four times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Associated Writing Programs. Leslie is at work on a novel. (And a play.) She lives in Ithaca, New York. Website: http://www.lesliedaniels.com/ 

Debra Kang Dean, MFA (poetry). Debra Kang Dean has published three collections of poetry: Back to Back (North Carolina Writers’ Network, 1997), which won the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition, judged by Ruth Stone; News of Home (BOA, 1998), which was co-winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Award; and Precipitates (BOA, 2003), which was nominated for the William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, and have appeared in many journals and a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000), Yobo: Korean American Writing in Hawai’i (2003), America! What’s My Name: The “Other” Poets Unfurl the Flag (2007), and Yellow as Tumeric, Fragrant as Cloves (2008). http://www.debrakangdean.comhttp://www.debrakangdean.com Top

Gabriel Jason Dean, MFA (playwriting, screenwriting). Gabriel Jason Dean is a New York / Austin- based playwright who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. His plays have been produced or developed at Theatre Row, Hangar Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Lark, New York Stage & Film, People’s Light, ASSITEJ International, The Kennedy Center, Oregon Shakespeare, Dallas Children’s Theatre, A Red Orchid Theatre, Aurora Theatre, Dad’s Garage Theatre, Actor’s Express, Horizon Theatre, Vortex Rep, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, FronteraFest, Source Festival and Essential Theatre. Gabriel received the Kennedy Center’s ACTF 2012 Paula Vogel Prize, Theatre for Young Audience’s Award and was Runner-Up for the National Steinberg Award. In 2011, he received the Kennedy Center’s ACTF Ken Ludwig Prize for a body of work from an emerging writer and was Runner-Up for the Princess Grace Award. His script for children, The Transition of Doodle Pequeño received the 2011 New England Theatre Conference Aurand Harris Award and was selected for the 2012 Kennedy Center New Visions / New Voices Conference with People’s Light and Theatre Company. He is the recipient of the 2010 Essential Theatre New Play Prize and won the 2010 Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival. Gabriel was voted “Best Playwright” in 2009 by Creative Loafing: Atlanta. In 2005, he won the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs Playwriting Award. Other plays have been finalists or semi-finalists for the Seven Devils Conference, The O’Neill Theatre Conference, PlayPenn, JAW, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, Interact’s 20/20 Commissions, the Lark Playwright’s Week, the Page 73 Fellowship, the Julliard Wallace Fellowship, and Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project. His scripts are available through Dramatic Publishing, Playscripts and Samuel French. Gabriel’s poetry, fiction and journalism have been published in Snake Nation Review, The Tower, Eclectica Magazine, The Melic Review, and Creative Loafing. He received the Porter Fleming Prize for Fiction and the Sidney Lanier Prize for Poetry. BA: Oglethorpe University. MFA: Michener Center for Writers—UT Austin. www.GabrielJasonDean.net

Pete Duval, MA (fiction). Pete Duval’s story collection, Rear View (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the Connecticut Book Award for fiction (nominees for which included Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America), and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His work has appeared in a variety of national and international journals, most recently Alaska Quarterly Review, Meridian, Witness, and Appalachian Heritage. “Common Area,” a short story, won Grain Magazine‘s 2011 Short Grain fiction competition; his 248-word story “Still Life” was awarded first prize in Florida State University’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. A new story collection, “Strange Mercies,” was a finalist for The Hudson Prize for Fiction at Black Lawrence Press, and the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest. Twice honored with Connecticut Artist Grants and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Duval teaches writing and film studies at West Chester University. He edits and designs books for the newly re-emergent Story Line Press; and serves as technical editor for Mezzo Cammin, the online journal of formalist poetry by women. Duval holds master’s degrees in creative writing (Boston University), in literature (University of Illinois) and in film studies (New York University) and recently attended Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School in London as the sole writer (“The writer is always welcome here!”) among 68 filmmakers. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, the poet Kim Bridgford, and their son, Nick. 

Kathleen Driskell, MFA (poetry). Kathleen Driskell’s second book of poems Seed Across Snow (Red Hen Press, 2009) has been listed as a bestseller by the Poetry Foundation. She has published a full-length book of poems, Laughing Sickness (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 1999), which is in its second printing, and Place Gives Rise to Spirit: Writers on Louisville (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 2001), an anthology she edited as a fundraising project for the Kentucky Writers’ Coalition, a non-profit statewide writers’ organization she helped to found in 1996. KWC, Inc. now has over 2,000 Kentucky writers, colleges and universities, libraries, writers’ groups, bookstores and non-profit agencies in its network. Kathleen has published poems or has work forthcoming nationally in literary magazines such as The Southern Review, The American Voice, New Millennium Writings, The Connecticut Review, GulfStream, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Greensboro Review, and Mid-American Review. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was poetry editor of The Greensboro Review. Kathleen has won grants for her poetry and fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women and prizes from the Associated Writing Programs and Frankfort Arts Foundation. In 1998, Kathleen was appointed to the Kentucky Arts Council’s Poet Laureate Selection Committee. A past regular contributor to WFPL 89.3 FM, Louisville’s NPR affiliate, she also coordinated the Community Journal Project for that radio station. She is Associate Editor of The Louisville Review and has taught creative writing and literature at Spalding University, the University of Louisville, Elon College, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, as well as for many writers’ workshops and conferences. Top

Charles Gaines, MFA (nonfiction, fiction, screenwriting). Charles Gaines is a professional journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and the author of twenty-three books, three of which were made into movies. His books include the bestselling Stay Hungry, finalist for the National Book Award (1972); international bestseller Pumping Iron (1974); the biography Yours in Perfect Manhood: Charles Atlas (1982); the creative nonfiction book A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life (Grove/Atlantic Books, 1994); and the novel The Next Valley Over (Crown, 1999). He has written a number of movie-length features for PBS, including the adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Summer, recently co-authored a screenplay with Ethan Hawke, and wrote a series of books for children with Arnold Schwarzenegger called Arnold’s Fitness for Kids. He has won two Cine Gold Eagle Awards and three Emmys for television writing. His work has appeared in Town and Country, Sports Illustrated, Harpers, Esquire, Architectural Digest, Men’s Journal, GEO, Audubon, Sports Afield and many other magazines. Formerly Charles taught creative writing at New England College. He holds the MFA in Writing from the University of Iowa. Top

Kirby Gann, MFA (fiction).Kirby Gann is the author, most recently, of the novel Ghosting (May 2012), which was listed as a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly and Shelf Unbound, and is to be translated into French by Editions du Seuil. He is also the author of the novels The Barbarian Parade (2004), and Our Napoleon in Rags (2005), which was a nominee for the Kentucky Award in Literature, a finalist in the Litblog Co-Op Read This! series, and was named one of the Top Five Novels published in 2005 by Frontiers Magazine. He is also co-editor of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). The recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, Gann is also Managing Editor at Sarabande Books. Please visit www.kirbygann.net for more information, upcoming appearances, etc.Top

Rachel Harper, MA (fiction). Rachel M. Harper’s  novel Brass Ankle Blues (2006) was a finalist for the Borders Original Voices Award and selected by Target for their Breakout Books Program. Her work has been published in The Carolina Quarterly, Chicago Review, African American Review, and Prairie Schooner, as well as the anthologies Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers, and Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. Her One-Act play, “Bluffing on a Queen’s Playground,” was part of the New Black Playwrights Festival at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, and she recently collaborated on the performance piece, “The Book of Daniel,” by interdisciplinary theatre artist Daniel Alexander Jones, which premiered in Austin, Texas in 2005. Harper has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and won the 2002 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. A graduate of Brown University, she went on to earn her MA from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is currently working on her third novel, Motherland. Website: www.rachelmharper.com Top

Edith M. (Edie) Hemingway , MFA (writing for children & young adults) Edie Hemingway is a graduate of Spalding University’s MFA program, is co-author of two Civil War novels, both licensed by Scholastic Book Fairs and optioned for films.  Her most recent middle grade novel, Road to Tater Hill (Delacorte Press, September 2009) won a 2009 Parents’ Choice Gold Award and was listed on Bank Street College’s Best Books List for 2010. In addition to joining the Spalding MFA faculty in W4CYA, Edie is an adjunct instructor for the graduate online certificate program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at McDaniel College, Westminster, MD, and she offers creative writing workshops at Misty Hill Lodge, her secluded 1930s log cabin home near Frederick, Maryland.  She is the Regional Advisor for the MD/DE/WV chapter of SCBWI, a member of the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, DC, and a contributor to the One Potato…Ten! blog, a group of ten children’s authors and illustrators at http://onepotatoten.blogspot.com.  Visit Edie’s website at http://www.ediehemingway.com.

Roy Hoffman, MFA (creative nonfiction, fiction). Roy Hoffman, a novelist and journalist, has worked as a professional writer for more than twenty-five years. His latest book is Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations (University of Alabama Press, 2011). He is the author of two novels: Chicken Dreaming Corn (University of Georgia Press, 2004) and Almost Family (Dial, 1983; University of Alabama Press reprint, 2000), winner of the Lillian Smith Award for fiction. His Back Home: Journeys Through Mobile (Univ. of Ala. Press, 2001) is a collection of essays and narrative nonfiction published in The New York Times, Newsday, Southern Living, Preservation, and the Mobile Register. A native of Mobile who now resides in Fairhope, Alabama, Roy lived in New York City for twenty years where he wrote articles and reviews for numerous publications, penned speeches for the president of NYU and the governor and first lady of New York, and taught workshops at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. He was a long-time staff writer for his hometown paper, the Mobile Press-Register, with a special interest in the diverse cultures of the South. His reflection on changes at the Mobile paper and others appeared in his NYTimes op/ed piece, ‘Leaving Alabama Behind,’ in June 2012. He has contributed frequently to the NYTimes, including book reviews of novels by Pat Conroy and Lee Smith, his essay, ‘Tom’s World,’ included in ‘More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times,’  and his essay, “My Own Private New York,” a notable essay of the year in Best American Essays 2003. He appeared on CNN’s Moneyline to discuss a photo-essay he created and wrote the text in 2000 for Fortune magazine: Working Past 90, about 90-year olds in the workforce. His essay, On Keeping a Journal, a My Turn column for Newsweekon Campus, is in the Prentice-Hall Handbook for College Writers. His essay from Preservation magazine, “On the Dock of the Bay,” is anthologized in A Certain Somewhere: Writers on the Places They Remember (Random House, 2002). His young adult story, “Ice Cream Man,” is in Working Days: Short Stories About Teenagers at Work (Persea, 1997). A portrait of Roy on a Mobile Bay dock is in Bill Aron’s photo book, Shalom Y’all: Images of American Life in the Jewish South (Algonquin, 2002). His new novel, Come Landfall (University of Alabama Press), is forthcoming in Spring 2014.

Silas House, MFA (fiction). Silas House is the author of five novels:  Same Sun Here (2012 and co-written with Neela Vaswani), Clay’s Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), and Eli the Good (2009), a play The Hurting Part, and a work of creative nonfiction, Something’s Rising (co-written with Jason Howard, 2009). A new play, Long Time Traveling, premiered in April 2009. He has served as a commentator for NPR’S “All Things Considered” and as a contributing editor for No Depression magazine, where he has done long features on such artists as Lucinda Williams, Nickel Creek, Buddy Miller, Kelly Willis, Darrell Scott, Delbert McClinton, and many others. He is also one of Nashville’s most in-demand press kit writers, having written the press kit bios for such artists as Kris Kristofferson, Kathy Mattea, Leann Womack, and many others. Silas is a two-time finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the Year, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Prize for Literature, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Appalachian Writer of the Year, the Intellectual Freedom Award from the National Council of English Teachers, the Lee Smith Award, and many other honors. In 2009 Emory and Henry College presented the Silas House literary festival in honor of Silas’s body of work. Silas’s work can be found in The New York Times, Newsday, Oxford American, Bayou, The Southeast Review, The Louisville Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Wind, Night Train, and others, as well as in the anthologies New Stories From the South 2004: The Year’s Best, Christmas in the South, A Kentucky Reader, Of Woods and Water, A Kentucky Christmas, Shouts and Whispers, High Horse, The Alumni Grill, Stories From the Blue Moon Café I and II, and many others. For his environmental activism Silas received the Helen Lewis Community Lewis Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association. He currently serves as the Director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, where he is also an Associate Professor of Appalachian Studies and Creative Writing. House lives in Eastern Kentucky, where he was born and raised.Top

Fenton Johnson, MFA (creative nonfiction, fiction). Author and teacher Fenton Johnson’s latest book is Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks, in which he addresses what it means to a skeptic to have and to keep faith. Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary Award for best gay/lesbian nonfiction as well as a Kentucky Literary Award for creative nonfiction. He is the author of Geography ofthe Heart: A Memoir, which received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best gay nonfiction. Johnson received a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship supporting his two current projects: His third novel, The Man Who Loved Birds; and a book of creative nonfiction, Single: For Those Who Have Lived a Long Time Alone, a meditation on what it means to have a vocation of solitude. He publishes opinion essays in leading newspapers on issues involving social justice, environmentalism, and human rights. Johnson is the author of two novels: Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock. Scissors was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the Boston Review Fisk Award for best fiction. He has been a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to Harper’s Magazine. His short fiction, essays, and features have been widely published and anthologized. Johnson has an active career in writing narration for independent media, including radio, independent documentaries, personal films, and radio. He has contributed commentaries to National Public Radio and wrote the narration for several award-winning public television documentaries. Currently he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. www.fentonjohnson.com

 Helena Kriel (screenwriting, playwriting). Helena Kriel was raised and educated in Johannesburg South Africa. After graduating with a Dramatic Art and Literature degree from University of Witwatersrand she worked in Television, directing and writing. Her plays Pigs on Passion, Arachnid and I Can’t Wait To Tie You To The Sofa premiered at the National Arts Festival and were all produced a number of times. She was nominated for playwright of the year. She immigrated to America and won the Steven Spielberg Dianne Thomas Award for her first screenplay Virtuoso. She has been a working screenwriter in Los Angeles writing for the studios and independent producers. The adaptations of Ahab’s Wife, The Good Soldier, The Arabian Nights, Tsotsi, Valley Song, and Wuthering Heights are a few of her adaptations. Heated and The Other Woman are amongst her original screenplays. Kama Sutra was produced with Academy nominated director Mira Nair directing and released in 1996. Skin was produced by Elysian Films and released in 2009. Skin has won over eight festival awards and was named in the best ten independent films of 2009. She has finished her first novel: The Burning Ground. She is completing her first memoir: Heart and Stone. 

Robin Lippincott, MFA (fiction). Robin Lippincott’s latest book, Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Work of Joan Mitchell, will be published by Typecast Publishing in 2014. Robin is also the author of three novels, In the Meantime (Toby Press/Amazon Encore), Our Arcadia: An American Watercolor (Viking/Penguin), and Mr. Dalloway (Sarabande Books), as well as a short story collection, The Real, True Angel (Fleur-de-Lis). Both In the Meantime and Mr. Dalloway are also available as e-books. Robin’s fiction has received nominations for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the American Library Association Roundtable Award, the Independent Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. For ten years he reviewed mostly art and photography books for The New York Times Book Review. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in over thirty journals, including The Paris Review, Fence, American Short Fiction, The Lumberyard, Memorious, The Literary Review, Provincetown Arts, The Louisville Review, and The Bloomsbury Review, and his fiction has been anthologized in The Women We Love, M2M: New Literary Fiction, Rebel Yell and Rebel Yell 2. He has held many fellowships at Yaddo, and a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
 

Jody Lisberger, PhD, MFA (fiction). Jody Lisberger’s story collection, Remember Love, was published by Fleur-de-Lis Press in May 2008 and nominated for a National Book Award. Her stories have appeared in Fugue, Michigan Quarterly Review, Thema, Confrontation, and The Louisville Review. Her story “Crucible” was nominated for a Pushcart Award. She won third place in the 2003 American Literary Review Fiction Contest and was a finalist in the 2004 Quarterly West Fiction Contest. Her story “Bush Beating” was also selected for the fiction anthology The Way We Knew It (2006), celebrating the first twenty-five years of Vermont College’s MFA in Writing Program. Jody lives in Rhode Island. She has a PhD in English and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She has taught fiction, creative nonfiction, literature, and feminist theory for more than thirty years at the University of Rhode Island, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Holy Cross, and Boston University. She is an Associate Professor and currently the Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at URI, where she teaches courses that include Critical Issues in Feminist Scholarship, Women Writing Their Lives, and Feminist Theory. In summer, she participates in the Ocean State Summer Writers Conference. She’s also worked as a journalist, editor, and grant writer. Top. Top

Nancy McCabe,PhD, MFA (creative nonfiction). Nancy McCabe has published a collection of essays, After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening (Purdue 2003), and two full-length memoirs, Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption (Missouri 2003) and Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge: A Journey to My Daughter’s Birthplace in China (Missouri 2011). Her work has won a Pushcart Prize for memoir, been listed four times in the notable section of Best American Essays, and won two awards from Prairie Schooner. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, Fourth Genre, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska. She has published fiction, poetry, journalism and critical articles, including one for Studies in Popular Culture. Her teacher’s handbook, Making Poems: Writing Exercises for the Classroom was published in 1989 by Arkansas Writers in the Schools, a program she directed for two years in addition to working as a writer in the schools in South Carolina and Missouri. She has taught creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry workshops for twenty-one years at five colleges and universities. Currently she directs the writing program for the Bradford campus of the University of Pittsburgh, where she received the Chairs campus-wide award for excellence in teaching in 2005. The student literary magazine she advises has twice been named one of the top twelve undergraduate magazines by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. She is also a recipient of a 2007 Individual Artist’s Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her blog about returning to China with her daughter in the summer of 2011 is at http://www.backtochinaagain.wordpress.com. Top

Shane McCrae, MFA, JD, MA (poetry). Shane McCrae is the author of two full-length books of poetry—Mule, published in 2011 by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and Blood, published in 2013 by Noemi Press—and three chapbooks, the most recent of which, Nonfiction, won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2010, as well as The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, and many other journals, and has been featured as a part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Project, and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. In 2011 he received a Whiting Writer’s Award, and in 2013 a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds degrees from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard Law School, and the graduate English program at the University of Iowa.

  Maureen Morehead, PhD (poetry). Maureen Morehead has published four books of poetry: In a Yellow Room (Sulgrave Press, 1990), Our Brothers’ War (Sulgrave Press, 1993), A Sense of Time Left (Larkspur Press, 2003), and A Melancholy Teacher (Larkspur Press, 2010). She is Kentucky Poet Laureate for 2011-2012. Her poems have appeared in America, The American Poetry Review, The American Voice, The Black Warrior Review, The California Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, The Iowa Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The Louisville Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Poet and Critic, Poetry, and other literary journals. She is featured in Conversations with Kentucky Writers II (University of Kentucky Press, 1999) and Kentucky Voices: A Bicentennial Celebration of Kentucky Writing (Kentucky Arts Council, 1992). She won fellowships for her poetry from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Early in her career, she was selected to the Bluegrass Poetry Circuit, a competition judged by Robert Penn Warren. She has taught at Western Kentucky University, the University of Louisville, and for the Jefferson County Public Schools. For several years, she served on the faculty of the Kentucky Institute for the Arts in Education, a program designed to help educators integrate the arts into their curricula. She earned a PhD in English, with a creative writing thesis, from the University of Louisville.

Eleanor Morse, MFA (fiction). Eleanor Morse has written three novels. Her first, Chopin’s Garden, was published through Fox Print Books in 2006. An Unexpected Forest (Down East Books, 2007), won the 2008 Independent Book Publisher’s Award (IPPY) for best regional fiction (Northeast region) and the 2008 Maine Literary Award from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance for best published fiction. White Dog Fell from the Sky, her third novel, was published by Penguin Books in January 2013 and was a Publishers Weekly ‘pick of the week’. The audio book version received an AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award. A nonfiction book, Over the Mountains: Two Tibetan Girls Journey Toward Hope (Fox Print Books, 2008) was written in collaboration with two Tibetan girls about their flight into Nepal. Eleanor has received grants from the Maine Humanities Council to establish writing programs in three Maine prisons. She has also taught at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, through the University of Maine system, Portland Adult and Community Education, and at Maine Medical Center. She received a Master of Arts in Teaching from Yale University and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. She lives on an island off the coast of Portland, Maine. www.eleanormorse.com

 Sena Jeter Naslund , PhD (fiction). Sena Jeter Naslund is the author of six novels, Adam & Eve (Morrow-HarperCollins, 2010), Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (Morrow-HarperCollins, 2006), Four Spirits (Morrow-HarperCollins, 2003; Harper Perennial, 2004), Ahab’s Wife; Or, the Star-Gazer (Morrow, 1999; Harper Perennial, 2000; Harper Perennial Modern Classics Series, 2008), Sherlock in Love (Godine, 1993 and Harper Perennial, 2001), and The Animal Way to Love (Ampersand, 1993), and two short story collections, The Disobedience of Water (Godine, 1999 and Harper Perennial, 2000) and Ice Skating at the North Pole (Ampersand, 1989). Ahab’s Wife, a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection and national bestseller, was selected by Time magazine as one of the five best novels of 1999 and appeared on the notable book lists of the New York Review of Books and of Publishers Weekly. Four Spirits, a national bestseller, appeared on the notable book lists of The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, TheSeattle Times, and The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. Sena holds the MA and PhD from the University of Iowa and has taught in the MFA programs of the University of Montana, Indiana University, and Vermont College. She was the 2005-6 Kentucky Poet Laureate. She is Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville and the Program Director of the brief-residency MFA in Writing at Spalding University. Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The American Voice, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, and she has received grants from the NEA, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, as well as the Lawrence Fiction Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Hall-Waters Award.

 Lesléa Newman (writing for children and young adults). Lesléa (pronounced “Lez-LEE-uh”) Newman is the author of 60 books including A Letter to Harvey Milk, Nobody’s Mother, Hachiko Waits, Write from the Heart, The Boy Who Cried Fabulous, The Best Cat in the World, and Heather Has Two Mommies. She has received many literary awards including Poetry Fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award, the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, and three Pushcart Prize Nominations. Nine of her books have been Lambda Literary Award finalists.  Lesléa wrote Heather Has Two Mommies, the first children’s book to portray lesbian families in a positive way, and has followed up this pioneering work with several more children’s books on lesbian and gay families: Felicia’s Favorite Story, Too Far Away to Touch, Saturday Is Pattyday, Mommy, Mama, and Me, and Daddy, Papa, and Me. She is also the author of many books for adults that deal with lesbian identity, Jewish identity and the intersection and collision between the two. Other topics Lesléa explores include AIDS, eating disorders, butch/femme relationships and sexual abuse. Her award-winning short story, A Letter To Harvey Milk has been made into a film and adapted for the stage. In addition to being an author, Lesléa is a popular guest lecturer, and has spoken on college campuses across the country including Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Oregon, Bryn Mawr College, Smith College and the University of Judaism. From 2005-2009, Lesléa was on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. From 2008-2010, she served as the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA. She has taught fiction writing at Clark University and currently she is a faculty mentor at Spalding University’s brief residency MFA in Writing program [www.spalding.edu/mfa]. Recent projects include a collection of poetry entitled Nobody’s Mother (Orchard House Press 2008), a novel called The Reluctant Daughter (Bold Strokes Books, 2009), and the board books Mommy, Mama, and Me and Daddy, Papa, and Me (Tricycle Press, 2009). Upcoming projects include I Remember: Hachiko Speaks, a chapbook of poetry about Japan’s faithful Akita (Finishing Line Press, January 2012); October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, a collection of poetry that explores Matthew Shepard’s murder and its aftermath (Candlewick Press, Fall 2012); and A Sweet Passover, a picture book about a little girl who is sick sick sick of matzo (Abrams, Spring 2012). Website: www.lesleanewman.com

 Kira Obolensky, MFA (playwriting, fiction)  Kira Obolensky is a playwright and writer who lives in Minneapolis. She is currently a recipient of a national Mellon Foundation fellowship that puts her on staff as a playwright with the award-winning theater Ten Thousand Things, New work includes Vasa Lisa (Ten Thousand Things Theater, Minneapolis); Why We Laugh: A Terezin Cabaret, which premiered in two international festivals; Raskol (commissioned and produced by Ten Thousand Things Theatre and featured on critics’ end of year lists); Cabinet of Wonders (produced by Gas and Electric Arts, Philadelphia; Open Eye Figure Theatre, Minneapolis; 2010 Barrymore nomination for Best New Play); Modern House, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburne Prize), and Lune, pronounced Loony, produced by B Street. Kira is a Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships and grants from the Henson Foundation, NEA and Irvine Foundations, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, le Comte du Nouys Foundation, and a Pew Theatre Initiative Grant. Her play Lobster Alice was a Kesselring Prize winner; The Adventures of Herculina received Honorable Mention/ Kesselring Prize. She attended Williams College and Juilliard’s Playwriting Program and recently completed an MFA in Fiction Writing at Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. She is the author of three published books about architecture and design and is the co-author of the national bestseller, The Not So Big House. Her novella, “The Anarchists Float to St. Louis,” won Quarterly West’s 2009 novella contest. She is a core writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and teaches playwriting at the University of Minnesota and playwriting and fiction at Spalding University’s MFA Program.

 Elaine Neil Orr, Ph.D. (creative nonfiction). Elaine Neil Orr writes fiction and creative nonfiction. She is the author of a novel, A Different Sun (Berkley/Penguin 2013), a memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life (U. Virginia P. 2003/2005), and two books of literary criticism. She has also co-edited a collection of memoirs and scholarly essays, Writing Out of Limbo (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), on international childhoods. Her many short memoirs appear in such journals as The Missouri Review, Memoir Journal, Blackbird, and Southern Cultures, while her short fiction appears in Shenandoah, Image Journal, and The Louisville Review, among others.  She has three times been nominated for the Pushcart Prize; is winner of Image Journal’s Artist-of-the-Month; was selected by Book Sense Top-20 (for Gods of Noonday); is winner of Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the North Carolina Humanities Council; and is a member of North Carolina State University’s Academy of Outstanding Teachers. She has been writer-in-residence at the University of Rhode Island and University of the Cumberlands. She has read her creative work extensively from Atlanta to New York to San Francisco to Vancouver and in Nigeria. She holds a Ph.D. from Emory University in Literature and Theology. Website: elaineneilorr.net

 Greg Pape, MFA (poetry). Greg Pape is the author of ten books, including Four Swans (Lynz House Press), Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (all originally published by University of Pittsburgh Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun (winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize, now called the Iowa Prize, and published by University of Iowa Press), and American Flamingo (winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, and published by Southern Illinois University Press). Black Branches was reprinted in the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries Series. His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers’ Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. He served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.

John Pipkin, PhD. (fiction). John Pipkin’s critically-acclaimed debut novel, Woodsburner, was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in May 2009 and was awarded the 2009 First Novel Prize by the New York Center for Fiction, the 2010 Fiction Award from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and the 2010 Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner First Novel Prize. The novel is based on a little known forest fire accidentally started by Henry David Thoreau a year before he went to live at Walden Pond. Woodsburner was named “one of the best books of 2009” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Christian Science Monitor. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, John attended Washington & Lee University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received his Ph.D. in British Literature from Rice University in 1997. He was an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Rhetoric at Boston University until 2000, when he moved to Austin, where he served as the Executive Director of the Writers’ League of Texas until 2007. More recently he has taught Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and at Southwestern University, where he is also the Writer in Residence. He is currently working on his second novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Atlas. For the summer of 2010, he was awarded a Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center to research the archives of the Herschel Family Papers, and The Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program has awarded him the Jesse H. Jones Writing Fellowship for the spring of 2011. John currently lives in Austin with his wife and son. His website is www.johnpipkin.com.

 Brad Riddell, MFA (screenwriting) Brad Riddell has written four produced feature films on assignment for Paramount, MTV, Universal and independent producers. Brad’s first film, American Pie: Band Camp, remains the highest-grossing live action DVD release in history, selling two million copies and reaching syndication on TBS. His most recent film, Crooked Arrows, was released nationally in theaters in 2012, and is the first mainstream lacrosse movie ever produced. Brad earned a BA in English from the University of Kentucky and a MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. After teaching at USC for seven years and SUNY Oswego for one, he is now a professor at DePaul University’s School of Cinema and Interactive Media in Chicago, and serves on the Kentucky Film Commission. www.bradriddell.com. Website: www.bradriddell.com

Eric Schmiedl, MFA (playwriting). Eric Schmiedl is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of Kent State University and the University of Hawai’i. His plays for children and adult audiences have been produced by theatres including The Cleveland Play House, the Denver Center Theatre Company, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Cleveland Public Theatre, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, New Stages Theatre, the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, the Oregon Children’s Theatre, Karamu House, Great Lakes Theater Company, and BackStage Theatre in Chicago.  He is currently working on an adaptation of Frankenstein for the Denver Center Theatre Company and a new original play with his wife, Nigerian storyteller Adaora Nzelibe Schmiedl, to be developed through PlayhouseSquare’s innovative Launch program with the generous support of Cleveland Public Theatre. This fall Eric had the great pleasure of celebrating his love of Cleveland and the Browns in The Kardiac Kid at Cleveland Public Theatre. Eric is the recipient of a 2012 CAC Creative Workforce Fellowship as well as an Aurand Harris Fellowship, an Edgerton Award, and a Sloan Foundation Commission. Eric is a member of The Cleveland Play House’s Playwrights’ Unit.  Top

Charlie Schulman, MFA (playwriting, screenwriting). Charlie is the 2010 Walton Fellow at The Arena Stage in Washington D.C. His play “Character Assassins” received its World Premier at NJ Rep in the Fall of 2010. He wrote the book and co-produced the musical The Fartiste (“Outstanding Musical” NYC Fringe international Festival). The Fartiste is based on his original screenplay of the same name and will be produced Off-Broadway in the Spring 2010. His Off-Broadway credits include Angel of Death, The Birthday Present, and The Ground Zero Club. Charlie is a three-time winner of the Avery Hopwood award in Drama from The University of Michigan and a recipient of The Charles MacArthur award for comedy from The National Playwrights Conference. His chapter on “Playwriting” appears in The Portable MFA In Creative Writing (Writers Digest). Charlie’s plays are published by The Dramatists Play Service and in several anthologies. He teaches screenwriting in the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of The Arts. http://www.thefartiste.com

 
 
Jeanie Thompson, MFA (poetry). Jeanie Thompson has published four collections of poetry, The Seasons Bear Us (River City Publishing, 2009), White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems (River City Publishing, 2001), Witness (Black Belt Press, 1995), and How to Enter the River (Holy Cow! Press, 1985), three chapbooks and has co-edited The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers, (University of Alabama Press, 2002) with Jay Lamar. Witness won a Benjamin Franklin Award from the Publishers Marketing Association in 1996. Her poems, interviews with writers, and critical articles have appeared in Antaeus, Crazyhorse, Ironwood, North American Review, New England Review, and Southern Review. Jeanie holds the MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was founding editor of the literary journal Black Warrior Review. She has taught at the University of New Orleans and the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, as well as in the poetry-in-the schools program in New Orleans and in Alabama. Jeanie has received Individual Artist fellowships from the Louisiana State Arts Council and the Alabama State Council on the Arts and was a Walter Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference 2000. Jeanie is founding director of the award-winning Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts organization in Montgomery.

 Neela Vaswani, MFA, PhD (fiction, creative nonfiction).  Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection, Where the Long Grass Bends; a memoir, You Have Given Me a Country; and co-author of the middle-grade novel, Same Sun Here (with Silas House). She is the recipient of the American Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal, and many other honors. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She has been a Visiting-Writer-in-Residence or Guest Lecturer at more than 100 institutions, among them: Knox College, 92nd Street Y (Tribeca), the Jimenez-Porter House at the University of Maryland, Kentucky Women Writers Conference, the Whitney Museum in New York City, and IIIT Hyderabad, India. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, lives in New York City, and is also on faculty at Manhattanville College’s MFA in Writing program. An education activist in India and the United States, Vaswani is founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library. Neela’s website is neelavaswani.com. Top

 Luke Wallin, MFA (creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, fiction).Luke Wallin holds an MFA in fiction writing from Iowa, as well as graduate degrees in environmental planning and philosophy. His essays about his Iowa experiences appear in Word by Word, published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2011, and in The Workshop, 1999. Luke’s latest book, co-authored with his daughter Eva Sage Gordon, is The Everything Guide to Writing Children’s Books, 2nd edition, January 2011. In April 2011 the song “Trust Me,” written and performed by Luke in the film of the same name, written and directed by his grandson Skye Wallin in Prague, was featured at the Myrtle Beach International Film Festival. Luke’s nonfiction book Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture, was published by the Center for Policy Analysis, 2006. His award-winning young adult novels include Ceremony of the Panther (recorded for the blind by the Library of Congress), In the Shadow of the Wind (recommended by the Committee on U.S. History Standards, and chosen a Best Book by the New York Public Library), The Redneck Poacher’ Son (an American Library Association Best Book), Blue Wings, and for middle-grade readers The Slavery Ghosts. His YA science fiction, The Bestiary Trilogy, under the pseudonym John Forrester, was translated into Danish. In 1999 Luke co-edited and contributed to a nonfiction anthology, Nature and Identity in Cross-cultural Perspective, from Kluwer Academic Publishers; it was issued in softcover in 2010. Luke is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; he has been a Fulbright Teaching Professor at University College Dublin, and has given invited talks to universities in Chile, Australia, and Canada, as well as across the U.S.A. Website: http://www.lukewallin.com. Luke’s blog is http://lukewallin.wordpress.com.

Rebecca Walker, MFA (creative nonfiction). Rebecca is an award-winning writer based in Hawaii. She is the author of the bestselling memoirs Black, White and Jewish (Riverhead) and Baby Love (Riverhead), and editor of the anthologies To Be Real (Doubleday), What Makes a Man (Riverhead), One Big Happy Family, (Riverhead) and, most recently, Black Cool (Soft Skull). Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, Bomb, Afar, Greater Good, Newsweek, Real Simple, Glamour, More, Marie Claire, The Washington Post, Vibe, Interview, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Babble, and CNN, among many other publications, and in literary collections including Erica Jong’s Sugar in My Bowl, and Crush, Unbuttoned, Dirt, Shaking the Tree, The Way We Live Now, Tales from the Couch, Mixed, The Fire This Time, Blended Nation, Adios Barbie, The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, and In Search of Mary Poppins. Rebecca has taught and lectured at over three hundred universities and corporate campuses, including Yale, Harvard, Brown, Penn, MIT, Tufts, Smith, Williams, Mt. Holyoke, University of Utrecht, University of Linkoping, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, and the Ministry of Gender and Culture of Estonia, and participated in creative collaborations with other writers and visual artists at The Addison Gallery, Walker Art Center, LA Hammer Museum, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Jewish Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Amsterdam Cultural Education Foundation, and The Fundazione Merz in Turin. She has developed projects for film and television with Nickelodeon and the Kennedy Marshall Company. She is the recipient of MacDowell and Yaddo fellowships, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and has appeared on Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, and Oprah. Time Magazine named Rebecca one of the most influential leaders of her generation. She holds a BA from Yale, an MFA from Spalding, and an honorary Doctorate of Arts and Letters from the North Carolina School of the Arts. She teaches a yearly master class on memoir writing on Maui (www.writing-in-paradise.com), and is the co-founder of Write to Wellbeing (www.writetowellbeing.com), a start-up bringing voice and sanity to those with the creative itch. Rebecca’s first novel, Adé, is forthcoming from Amazon’s New Harvest imprint in 2013. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccawalker.   Top

Crystal Wilkinson, MFA (fiction). Crystal is the author of Water Street (Toby Press, 2002), which was nominated for the Orange Prize and for the Zora Neal Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award in Fiction, and Blackberries, Blackberries (Toby Press, 2000) which was named Best Debut Fiction by Today’s Librarian Magazine. Crystal is writer in residence at Morehead State University and the 2002 recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She is the recipient of the 2009 Sallie Bingham Award for the promotion of activism and feminist artist expression.  She and her partner Ron Davis are the editors of Mythium: A Journal of Contemporary Literature Celebrating Writers of Color and the Cultural Voice and owners of The Wild Fig Bookstore in Lexington. She has been published widely in anthologies and literary journals. Crystal is a former assistant director of The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. She is a graduate of the Spalding MFA in Writing Program. Top

Sam Zalutsky, MFA (screenwriting ).In 2008, Sam Zalutsky was short-listed for the Independent Spirit Award’s Someone to Watch Award. His first feature film, You Belong to Me, was released on DVD (Wolfe), Pay Per View (Warner), and Logo in 2008 and is out on DVD and/or TV in the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Sweden, and the Benelux countries. The film screened at film festivals on five continents, including Palm Springs International, San Diego FilmOut (Audience Award, Best First Feature), NewFest (Honorable Mention, Feature Film Jury), and Outfest. In March 2013, he is directing a new short film, How to Make it to the Promised Land, based on Ellen Umanksy’s acclaimed short story, for which he won a Jerome Foundation production grant (www.facebook.com/HowToMakeItToThePromisedLand). Recently Sam completed a series of videos about breast cancer survivors, which can be seen at http://artisanbreastreconstruction.com/. His play, 40 Weeks, had a reading at the Barrow Group in Fall 2011, and he directed The Jungle Fun Room, by Spalding MFA alumni Brian Hampton, at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2009. Sam’s previous short films have screened at dozens of festivals, won numerous awards, and all received distribution on various platforms. Sam has taught at Bennington College, in numerous workshops in New York, online, and at Tec de Monterey (Querétaro, Mexico). He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Fundación Valparaiso (Mojácar, Spain). He received his BA in studio art from Yale University and his MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. You can see more of his work at www.sazamproductions.com. Follow him at www.twitter.com/zalutsky. You can see more of his work at www.sazamproductions.com.