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Print Faculty List

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

Dianne Aprile, MFA (creative nonfiction). Dianne Aprile is the author of four books of nonfiction: Making a Heart for God: A Week Inside a Catholic Monastery (2000); The Eye Is Not Enough: On Seeing and Remembering (2000) with printmaker Mary Lou Hess; The Abbey of Gethsemani: Place of Peace and Paradox (1998), and The Things We Don’t Forget: Views from Real Life (1994). She is at work on a memoir, a portion of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Most recently, her work is included in an anthology of writing exercises, Now Write Nonfiction, published by Tarcher/Penguin (2010). In 2008, she was named the first writer in residence for Spalding’s BFA in Writing program. She is the recipient of three individual artist fellowships in nonfiction from the Kentucky Arts Council (most recently in 2008), and two writing grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her essays and book reviews have been published in literary journals, newspapers, magazines and on-line journals, and also appear in anthologies, including A Kentucky Christmas, Conversations with Kentucky Authors, and Savory Memories, all published by University Press of Kentucky. As a staff writer for The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, she won the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ top award in 1996, and in 1989 shared a staff Pulitzer Prize for team coverage of the aftermath of a northern Kentucky school bus crash. Her collection of Courier-Journal columns, The Things We Don’t Forget, was adapted for stage and produced by the University of Louisville theater department. As a journalist, she earned more than a dozen first-place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists in the areas of criticism, magazine writing column-writing and feature writing. Her work was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition with Bob Edwards and in Southern Living, and has been part of two gallery shows combining text and visual art, “Silence as Sacred Text” and “The Marriage Project.” She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding Univeristy. She and her husband, who co-owned a jazz club in Louisville for five years, recently moved to Seattle.” Top

Susan Campbell Bartoletti, PhD (writing for children and young adults). Newbery-Honor author Susan Campbell Bartoletti has published poetry, short stories, picture books, novels, and nonfiction for young readers. Her latest nonfiction book is 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 SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, 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. 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. Vist her website at http://www.scbartoletti.com. Top

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

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. 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, a Southwest Book of the Year, a Mississippi Press/Gulf Coast Live Book of the Year, and a School Library Journal selection as a Best Adult Book for High School Students. His new collection of stories, Love Songs for the Quarantined, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and will be published fall 2011. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, One Story, Writer’s Chronicle, Louisville Review, Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction, Poets & Writers, Witness, Best of the West: Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, Now Write: Fiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, and Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education. His honors include the grand prize from the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Arts Series, an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and artist colony residency fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Ucross. He earned his MA in literature from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and his MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona, where he teaches such courses as Forms of Fiction, Short Story Cycle, Sudden Fiction, Shakespeare, Family Systems in Film and Literature, and Literature of the American Dream. Website: www.klcook.net Top

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.comTop

Philip F. Deaver, EdD (fiction, poetry). Philip F. Deaver is the 13th winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He’s the author of the short story collection Silent Retreats, reissued in Spring, 2008 in paperback on the twentieth anniversary of its first appearance. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and Bread Loaf. His work, which can be found mostly in the literary magazines, has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He has a story in the summer 2007 issue of the Chattahoochee Review. His story “The Garden Plot” appears in the anthology Visiting Hours from Press 53. His Summer 2007 Kenyon Review story, “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder,” can still be accessed in the Kenyon Review archive online. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Reaper, Poetry Miscellany, and the Florida Review and are collected in a volume entitled How Men Pray (Anhinga, 2005). He also writes creative nonfiction and has edited an anthology of creative nonfiction baseball essays titled Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). His essay “The Bat” appears in Lee Gutkind’s big baseball issue of Creative Nonfiction (April, ’08). Philip has also published essays “My Father in Light and Shadow: 1957/1964” in the inaugural issue of New Madrid and “River of Lost Boys” in Prairie Stories. In the summer 2008 issue of the Southern Review, his retrospective on the work of David Huddle appeared. He is Professor of English and permanent Writer in Residence at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. Websites: http://longpinelimited.blogspot.com/ and http://www.philipfdeaver.com Top

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

Robert Finch, MA (creative nonfiction). Robert Finchholds degrees from Harvard University and Indiana University. He is the author of seven collections of essays, most recently A Cape Cod Notebook (2011), and is co-editor of the Norton Book of Nature Writing: The Tradition in English. His work has appeared in Antaeus, The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, ORION: Nature and People, Provincetown Arts, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. He records weekly radio commentaries for NPR affiliate WCAI on Cape Cod. He has taught at Williams College, Emerson College, Carleton College, Cape Cod Community College, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Cape Cod Writers Conference. In 2001 he was awarded the New England Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction and received an Edward R. Murrow Award for Radio Writing in 2005. He divides his time between Cape Cod and Newfoundland. 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 of the novels The Barbarian Parade (Hill Street Press, 2004) and Our Napoleon in Rags (Ig Publishing, 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 (with poet Kristin Herbert) 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.

Richard Goodman, MFA (creative nonfiction). Richard Goodman is the author of three books: A New York Memoir, French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, and The Soul of Creative Writing. He has written on a variety of subjects for many national publications, including the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Commonweal, Vanity Fair, French Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Ascent, The Louisville Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He has been awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony three times and twice been awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is a winner of a Hopwood Award for his fiction. He created, wrote, and narrated a six-part series about New York City for Public Radio in Virginia. He contributed extensively to The Mavens’ Word of the Day Collection, a book on words and word derivations published by Random House. His essay, “In Search of the Exact Word,” originally a lecture at Spalding University, appears in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus from Oxford University Press. He wrote the introduction for Travelers’ Tales Provence. He is a founding member of the New York Writers Workshop. Top

Rachel Harper, MA (fiction). Rachel M. Harper’s first novel, Brass Ankle Blues, was published in 2006 by Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone Division. A graduate of Brown University, she went on to earn her MA from the University of Southern California. Her poems and short fiction have been published in Chicago Review, African American Review, Prairie Schooner, and the anthology Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers. 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. She lives in California, where she is currently working on her second novel, This Side of Providence. Website: www.rachelmharper.com Top

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. Now a staff writer for his hometown paper, the Mobile Register, with a special interest in the diverse cultures of the South, Roy continues to contribute elsewhere. His New York Times essay, “My Own Private New York,” was 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 for 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).

Silas House, MFA (fiction). Silas House is the author of four novels: 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. Silas’s fifth novel, Same Sun Here (co-written with Neela Vaswani) will be published in 2012. 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

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 is the author of three novels, In the Meantime (Toby Press), 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). His 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 also appeared in over twenty journals, including The Paris Review, Fence, American Short Fiction, The Lumberyard, Memorious, The Literary Review, Provincetown Arts, The Louisville Review, The Bloomsbury Review, and his fiction has been anthologized in 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. Her stories have appeared in Fugue, Michigan Quarterly Review, Thema, Confrontation, and The Louisville Review. Her story “Crucible” has been 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 twenty-five years at the University of Rhode Island, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Holy Cross, and Boston University. She currently holds a lectureship at URI in Women’s Studies, where she teaches courses that include postcolonial literature, women writers, and narrative theory. In summer, she participates in the Ocean State Writer’s Conference. She’s also worked as a journalist, editor, and grant writer. 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.

Joyce McDonald, PhD (writing for children and young adults). Joyce McDonald is the author of several critically acclaimed novels for middle grade and young adults, among them: Swallowing Stones (Delacorte, 1997), an American Library Association/YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults, Booklist‘s Best of the Best 100, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, VOYA‘s “Books in the Middle” Outstanding Title of the Year, and an ALA/YALSA Popular Paperback for Young Adults; Shadow People (Delacorte, 2000), a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age; Shades of Simon Gray (Delacorte, 2001), an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a VOYA Best Science Fiction/Fantasy/ Horror of the Year, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, and a 2002 Edgar Award nominee; Comfort Creek (Delacorte), a Children’s Book Committee Children’s Book of the Year; Homebody (Putnam); and Mail-Order Kid (Putnam), an IRA/CBC Children’s Choice Book. Her short story, “Transfusion,” appears in Don’t Cramp My Style (Simon & Schuster, 2004), edited by Lisa Rowe Fraustino. Her latest book is Devil on My Heels (Delacorte, 2004), a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age and a Children’s Book Committee/ Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year (starred). Her books have been nominated for numerous state awards and are on several state reading lists. Her academic publications include The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather’s Southern Heritage (University of Alabama Press, 1998). She has taught literature and creative writing at Drew University and East Stroudsburg University. Website: www.joycemcdonald.net Top

Cathleen Medwick, MA, Mphil (creative nonfiction). As an editor and writer at Vogue, Vanity Fair, Mirabella and O Magazine (among others), Cathy Medwick has profiled a number of writers, including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Kathryn Harrison, Joseph Heller and A.M. Homes. In 1999 she published Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul, the life of a 16^th century Spanish mystic, and is currently at work on a biography of Teresa’s contemporary, the poet and mystic John of the Cross. When not immersed in the lives of cultural icons, Cathleen covers books for various publications; her review of Fernanda Eberstadt’s latest novel, Rat, recently appeared in The New York Times Book Review, and a review of Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America is slated to appear in the June issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. She is currently Acting Editor-at-Large at More magazine.

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 Lincoln Morse, MFA (fiction). Eleanor Lincoln Morse has published two novels: Chopin’s Garden (Fox Print Books, 2006) and An Unexpected Forest (Down East Books, 2007), which 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. A nonfiction book, Over the Mountains: Two Tibetan Girls Journey Toward Hope (Fox Print Books, 2008) was written in collaboration with Namdol Kalsang Methok and Dawa Dolma about their flight from Tibet into Nepal and India as children. 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.

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 Newman is the author of 63 books for readers of all ages, including the board books Mommy, Mama, and Me and Daddy, Papa, and Me; the picture books Cats, Cats, Cats!, Just Like Mama, Miss Tutu’s Star, and Heather Has Two Mommies; the middle-grade novels Fat Chance, and Hachiko Waits; the teen novels Still Life with Buddy (written in verse) and Jailbait; and the adult titles A Letter to Harvey Milk (short stories); The Reluctant Daughter (novel); Nobody’s Mother (poetry); and Write From The Heart (non-fiction). Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Sun, Lilith Magazine, The Bark, Cimarron Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Evergreen Review, Seventeen Magazine, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Foundation, three Pushcart Prize nominations, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund fiction-writing grant, the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, the Burning Bush Poetry Prize, the Americus Review Poetry Prize, Third Place Winner of the Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Award, National Christian School Association Children’s Crown Honor, a Parents’ Choice Silver Medal, an American Library Association Notable, an MSPCA Henry Bergh Honor, and the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award. Nine of her books have been Lambda Literary Award finalists. From 2008-2010 Lesléa Newman served as the Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. She has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University, Yale University, Smith College, Princeton University, The University of Judaica, among others. In addition, she has taught at Clark University, the University of Southern Maine, and The Frost Place. From 1979-1981, she studied with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her newest YA poetry collection, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard is forthcoming from Candlewick Press. Website: www.lesleakids.com

Kira Obolensky, MFA (playwriting, fiction) Kira Obolensky is an award-winning playwright and writer who lives in Minneapolis. New work includes Raskol (commissioned and produced by Ten Thousand Things Theatre and featured on several critics’ 2009 end of year lists); Cabinet of Wonders (Philadelphia—2010 Barrymore nomination for Best New Play); Modern House, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburne Prize); Lune, pronounced Loony, produced by B Street; and Alice’s Adventures Underground, a commission from The Acting Company that will tour during the Company’s 2011 season. 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 prestigious 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, judged by Padgett Powell. A core writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, Kira also teaches playwriting at the University of Minnesota.

Elaine Neil Orr, Ph.D. (creative nonfiction). Elaine was born and grew up in southwestern Nigeria. Her recent essays, fiction, and poetry appear in The Missouri Review, Shenandoah, Image, Cold Mountain, Louisville Review, The Rambler, and Southern Cultures. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the North Carolina Humanities Council and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Elaine was honored by Image as Artist of the Month, July 2008, http://imagejournal.org/page/artist-of-the-month/elaine-neil-orr. Her memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life (Virginia, 2003, 2005), was a BookSense selection and chosen by MaximsNews as the best book of creative nonfiction for 2003. She is included in diverse anthologies, including The Yoruba in Transition, Women on the Edge: Ethnicity and Gender in Short Stories by American Women, and Cries of the Spirit. A literary scholar as well as creative writer, Elaine is also the author of Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women’s Fictions (Virginia, 1997) and Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision (UMississippiP, 1987, 2009). Her scholarly essays and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture, Studies in American Fiction, Modern Language Quarterly, and South Atlantic Review, among others. Elaine is an award-winning professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C.

Greg Pape, MFA (poetry). Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including 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.

Molly Peacock, MA (poetry, creative nonfiction). Molly, a member of Spalding’s poetry and creative nonfiction faculty, has recently published her sixth book of poems, The Second Blush (W.W. Norton and Company) and is at work on a sequence of new poems titled “Alphabetica: the Stories of the Letters.” In April 2011 BloomsburyUSA published her nonfiction book, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, the result of her Fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography. This book, both a biography of the remarkable 18th-century gentlewoman Mrs. Mary Delany and the invention of her floral collages as well as a meditation on late-life creativity, began as an essay, “Passion Flowers in Winter” published in The Best American Essays 2007. From 2002 to 2006 Molly performed her one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, throughout North America. She served as Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets’ Corner (Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City) from 2000-2004 and is one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on the nation’s subways and buses. Molly’s other books include Cornucopia: New and Collected Poems (Norton, 2002). How to Read a Poem & Start a Poetry Circle (Riverhead), four other collections of poems, and a memoir, Paradise, Piece By Piece (Riverhead). She is also the editor of The Private I: Privacy in a Public Age (Graywolf Press, 2001) and co-editor of Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses. Her articles have appeared in Elle, O the Oprah Magazine, Mirabella, New York Magazine, and House & Garden. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and other leading literary journals. She is former president of the Poetry Society of America and has been visiting poet at numerous colleges and universities, including Bennington and Bucknell. Molly has been awarded fellowships from the Danforth, Ingram Merrill, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in Toronto with her husband, James Joyce scholar Michael Groden. In Canada she is General Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English series and Contributing Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. Website: www.mollypeacock.org Top

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 A graduate of the University of Kentucky, Brad worked professionally in film and video production for five years before attending the University of Southern California to earn an MFA in screenwriting from the School of Cinematic Arts. His award-winning thesis script eventually lead him to write American Pie Presents: Band Camp for Universal. Brad went on to write Slap Shot: The Junior League for Universal and Road Trip 2 for Paramount. He has also written on assignment for MTV, and performed rewrites and novel adaptations for independent producers. Brad is a founding director of the Kentucky Film Lab, and a Governor-appointed member of the Kentucky Film Commission. Beginning in 2006, Brad taught screenwriting courses for MFA and BFA students at USC, then also joined the Spalding faculty in 2007. He is now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego, and lives with his family in Syracuse. 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. His adaptation of Kent Haruf’s best selling novel Plainsong won the 2008 Westword: Best of Denver award for Best Dramatization of a Novel. His rock inspired adaptation of Treasure Island created with recording artists Captain Bogg and Salty (Jake and the Never Land Pirates, Disney Junior) recently received acclaimed productions in Portland (Oregon Children’s Theatre) and Chicago (Adventure Stage Chicago). The Cleveland Play House has produced nine of Eric’s plays for young audiences, including adaptations of The Wind in the Willows and Jungle Book as well as original works. His exploration of the mythic character of John Henry was called “engrossing theater and a welcome reconciliation of art and labor” by Plain Dealer theatre critic Tony Brown. Eric is the recipient of an Aurand Harris Fellowship from The Children’s Theatre Foundation of America in support of his new play, My Hemisphere and Your Hemisphere Live Across the Street, created with his wife and Nigerian storyteller, Adaora Nzelibe Schmiedl. This play has been invited to be further developed in Cleveland in October, 2011, through a workshop generously supported by Playhouse Square and Cleveland Public Theatre. Eric is also working on a commissioned adaptation of Frankenstein for the Denver Center Theatre Company. He has written for the Emmy Award nominated children’s television program Ask Gilby and has been awarded an Edgerton Award and was a finalist for the 2010 COSE Arts Business and Innovation Award. Eric is a proud member of The Cleveland Play House’s Playwrights’ Unit and of the Dramatists Guild of AmericaTop

Charles 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 author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends and a memoir You Have Given Me a Country. 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 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 is an education activist in the United States and India and is the founder and curator 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.

Mary Yukari Waters, MFA (fiction). Mary Yukari Waters’ fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2002, 2003, and 2004; The O. Henry Prize Stories; The Pushcart Prize Anthology; The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize; and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Anthology 2. She is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work has been aired on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her debut collection, The Laws of Evening (Scribner, 2003), was a BookSense 76 selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. It was also selected by iNewsday and The San Francisco Chronicle as one of the Best Books of 2003. 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 and visiting associate professor at Morehead State University and the 2002 recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She is the wi nner of the 2009 Sallie Bingham Award for the promotion of activism and feminist artist expression. She has presented workshops and readings throughout the country, including the Sixth International Conference on the Short Story in English at the University of Iowa and the African American Women Writers Conference at the University of the District of Columbia. She and her partner Ron Davis are the editors of Mythium: A Journal of Contemporary Literature Celebrating Writers of Color and the Cultural Voice. She has been published widely in anthologies including Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region (University of Kentucky Press, 1999); Gifts from Our Grandmothers (Crown Publishers, a Division of Random House, 2000); Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium (Purdue University, 1998); Home and Beyond: A Half-Century of Short Stories by Kentucky Writers (University of Kentucky Press, 2001); and Gumbo: Stories by Black Writers (Doubleday, Harlem Moon Press, 2002). Her work has also appeared in various literary journals including Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, Southern Exposure, The Briar Cliff Review, LIT, Calyx, African Voices, and the Indiana Review. Crystal is the 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 in the UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Australia. 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. He recently completed a series of videos about breast cancer survivors, which can be seen at http://artisanbreastreconstruction.com/. His play, 40 Weeks, will have 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 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 was awarded a residency at Fundación Valparaiso (Mojácar, Spain) in 2002 and 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.

last updated 10/22/2011 information subject to change without notice

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