Faculty

Sandra Alcosser ~ Poetry

 

Sandra Alcosser has published seven books of poetry, including A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature, which have been selected for the National Poetry Series, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, the Larry Levis Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, and the William Stafford PNBA Award. She is the National Endowment for the Arts' first Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House, New York, as well as Montana's first poet laureate and recipient of the Merriam Award for Distinguished Contribution to Montana Literature. She founded and directs the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University each fall, and has been a writer-in-residence at National University of Ireland, Galway, University of Michigan, University of Montana, Glacier National Park and Central Park, New York. She received two individual artist fellowships from NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

 

Kim Barnes ~ Nonfiction/Fiction

 

Kim Barnes’ most recent book is A Country Called Home (Knopf, 2008). She also is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs: In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the PEN/Jerard Award for Nonfiction; and Hungry for the World. She is co-editor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including MORE Magazine, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

 
 

Ellen Bass ~ Poetry

 

Ellen Bass' most recent book of poetry, The Human Line, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2007 to national acclaim. Mules of Love, published by BOA Editions, is the winner of the 2002 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. Ellen co-edited the groundbreaking book, No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women and has published four previous volumes of poetry, I’m Not Your Laughing Daughter, Of Separateness and Merging, For Earthly Survival, and Our Stunning Harvest.

Among her awards for poetry are the Elliston Book Award from the University of Cincinnati, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, the Larry Levis Prize from Missouri Review, New Letters Poetry Prize, Greensboro Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize and a Fellowship from the California Arts Council.

 
 

Marvin Bell ~ Poetry

 

Marvin Bell has been called "an insider who thinks like an outsider," and his writing has been called "ambitious without pretension." He was for many years the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he served two terms as the state of Iowa's first Poet Laureate. His list of former students reads like a Who's Who of American Poetry. He has collaborated with composers, musicians and dancers and is famous and infamous as the creator of what are known as the "Dead Man" poems and the "Dead Man Resurrected" poems. The most recent of his nineteen collections of poetry and essays are Iris of Creation, The Book of the Dead Man, Ardor, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, Rampant, and his latest collection, Mars Being Red (2007). Mr. Bell divides his time between Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington.

 

Bonnie Jo Campbell ~ Fiction

 

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Q Road (Scribner, 2003), and the story collection Women & Other Animals (University of Massachusetts Press 2000, Scribner 2003), both of which have been translated into German. Her second story collection, American Salvage (Wayne State Univ. Press), is forthcoming Spring 2009. She has won the
AWP award for short fiction and a Pushcart prize, and she was named a Barnes & Noble Great New Writer. The New York Times has called her stories “Bitter but sweetened by humor,” and Publisher’s Weekly said Campbell details, “domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to
tread.” Her fiction has recently been published in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Alaska Review, Boulevard, Pleiades and Witness. Her essays have appeared in Utne Reader, Ontario Review, Bark Magazine, and Fourth Genre. A dozen of her poems will appear in Midwest Quarterly Review, Spring 2009. She has a second degree black belt in kobudo, and she lives with her husband and donkeys in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Visit her Web site at http://www.bonniejocampbell.com/.
 

 

Kwame Dawes ~ Poetry

 

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his "spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music." His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. Kwame Dawes is the author of twelve collections of poetry.  His most recent collections are, Impossible Flying (Peepal Tree, January 2007) and Wisteria (Red Hen, January 2006) which has also been set to music by Kevin Simmonds and premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in London England.  In January 2007, Akashic Books will publish his novel She’s Gone.  His awards include The Forward Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Poetry Business Award.  His non-fiction writing includes the book A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative (Peepal Tree, January 2007).  Kwame Dawes, former director of the MFA program at the University of South Carolina, is founder and director of the USC Poetry Initiative.  Since January 2008, Dawes has been the Associate Poetry editor at Peepal Tree Press.  In 2005 he was appointed the Executive Director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute.  Dawes is the programmer for the Calabash International Literary Festival held in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, each year, and is the Director of the Calabash Writer’s Workshop.  Kwame Dawes is a faculty member of Cave Canem and the Louise Frye Liberal Arts Professor in the College of Liberal Arts.  He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at USC.  

 

Denise Duhamel ~ Poetry

 

Denise Duhamel's most recent book, Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), is winner of Binghamton University's Milt Kessler Book Award.  Her other titles include Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner(Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). She co-edited, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull, 2007).

Duhamel has read her work on NPR and as a featured poet on the PBS special "Fooling with Words," hosted by Bill Moyers. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an associate professor at Florida International University in Miami. William D. Waltz, in Rain Taxi, writes "As I read her work...I feel like I'm taking a sneak peek at the future: Duhamel hints at a poetry that transcends irony and alienation. There's plenty of both here, but she's busy working them over...pushing so hard that the next step may be beyond what is known."
 

Judy Blunt ~ Nonfiction

 

Judy Blunt knocked out the literary world with her collection of nonfiction essays, Breaking Clean (Knopf, 2002). She was winner of the Whiting Writers' Award in 2001. Her book won the Pen/Jerard Award, Mountains and Plains Nonfiction Award, Willa Cather Literary Award, and was listed as one of The New York Times Notable Books. More recently she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006. Judy's short pieces have appeared in Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, Big Sky Journal, and others. She is an associate professor in English at the University of Montana.

 

Claire Davis ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

 

Claire Davis’ first novel Winter Range was listed among the best books of 2000 by the Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, Denver Post, Seattle Post, The Oregonian and The Christian Science Monitor, and was the first book to receive both the PNBA and MPBA awards for best fiction. Her second novel Season of the Snake, and her short story collection Labors of the Heart were both released to wide critical acclaim. She is co-editor of the anthology Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-five Women over Forty. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines such as The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Short Stories. She lives in Lewiston, Idaho where she teaches creative writing at Lewis-Clark State College. 

 
 

Jack Driscoll ~ Fiction

 

Jack Driscoll is the author of four books of poems, a collection of short stories, and four novels. In addition, he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the NEH Independent Study Grant, Pushcart and Best American Short Story citations, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award, and seven PEN Syndicated Project Short Fiction Awards.

His stories have been read frequently over NPR’s “The Sound of Writing,” and his work has appeared nationally in magazines, literary journals, and newspapers such as Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, Civilization, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares.

His novel Lucky Man, Lucky Woman received the 1998 Pushcart Editors’ Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Discovery of Great New Writers Award, and the 1999 Independent Book Publishers Award for Fiction. Stardog, his third novel, appeared in 2000, and How Like an Angel, a University of Michegan Press Sweetwater release, appeared in May, 2005.

 

Pete Fromm ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

 

Pete Fromm's latest novel, As Cool As I Am (2003), earned him an unprecedented fourth Pacific Northwest Booksellers Literary Award. Earlier winners were his novel How All This Started (2000), a story collection, Dry Rain (1997), and a memoir Indian Creek Chronicles (1993). Hailed as one of "America 's best-kept literary secrets," he has published four other story collections, as well as more than a hundred stories in magazines. His short story, "Dark Rain," was recently made into a film that opened at the 2008 Seattle International Film festival. He lives with his family in Great Falls, Montana.

 

Molly Gloss ~ Fiction

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland. Her novel The Jump-Off Creek was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction, and a winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award. In 1996 Molly was a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award.

The Dazzle of Day was named a New York Times Notable Book and was awarded the PEN Center West Fiction Prize.

Wild Life won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was chosen as the 2002 selection for "If All Seattle Read the Same Book." The Hearts of Horses, just released in the fall of 2007, is the novel of a young woman breaking horses for several ranchers in Eastern Oregon in the winter of 1917.

Stephen Kuusisto ~ Nonfiction/Poetry

 

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of Only Bread, Only Light, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, and of the memoirs Planet of the Blind and Eavesdropping.  He holds a dual appointment at the University of Iowa where he teaches courses in creative nonfiction in the Department of English and serves as a public humanities scholar in the College of Medicine.  

He speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.  His essays and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines including Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and Partisan Review.  He is currently working on a collection of prose poems for Copper Canyon Press entitled Mornings With Borges as well as a collection of political poems about disability.

 
 

Dorianne Laux ~ Poetry

 

Dorianne Laux's newest book, Superman: The Chapbook, was published in January 2008 by Red Dragonfly Press. Her previous and fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, published by W.W. Norton in 2005, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and the Oregon Book Award. She is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke, (2000). She is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has been twice included in Best American Poetry. She has been awarded with a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University.

 
 

Craig Lesley ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

 

Craig Lesley is the author of four novels, numerous short stories, and, most recently, a memoir. His work has received The Western Writers of America Best Novel of the Year, three Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Association Awards, an Oregon Book Award, and the Medicine Pipe Bearer's Award. He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Fellowship in the Novel, as well as two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships to study Native American literature. Both Storm Riders and The Sky Fisherman were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Craig’s memoir Burning Fence is receiving outstanding praise, including these words from Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong: "Craig Lesley has been justly celebrated for his novels. Now this vivid, unflinching story of his own life, as a son and as a father, can only serve to increase his already considerable stature as a writer and, not incidentally, as a human being."

 
 

David Long ~ Fiction

 

David Long was born in Boston, and spent his adult life in Northwest Montana, before relocating to Tacoma, Washington in 1999. His short stories appear in The New Yorker, GQ, Story, and many anthologies, including the O. Henrys. His third collection of stories, Blue Spruce (1997), was given the Lowenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the 1970s, he was a student of Richard Hugo and William Kittredge at the University of Montana. His novels include The Falling Boy (1997), The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux (2000), and The Inhabited World (2006). He is currently finishing a book on sentence craft called Dangerous Sentences. His loves: coffee, reading, the Seattle International Film Festival, blues harmonica, English football, his family.
 

Joseph Millar ~ Poetry

 

Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press. His first collection, Overtime (2001), was finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, New Letters, Manoa, and River Styx. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, the Moncalvo Center for the Arts, and Oregon Literary Arts. He now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux.
 

Leslie Adrienne Miller ~ Poetry

 

Leslie Adrienne Miller's most recent collection of poems, The Resurrection Trade, was published by  Graywolf Press in 2007. Her previous collections include Eat Quite Everything You See (Graywolf Press, 2002), Yesterday Had a Man In It (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), Ungodliness (CMU 1994) and Staying Up For Love (CMU 1990), as well as several chapbooks of poems: No River, chosen by William Stafford as the winner of the Stanely Hanks Chapbook Award from St. Louis Poetry Center, and Hanging on the Sunburned Arm of Some Homeboy, (Domino Impressions Press 1982).

She has won a number of prizes and awards including the Loft McKnight Award of Distinction, judged by Alice Fulton, two Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the PEN Southwest Discovery Award, two Writers-at-Work Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, the Billee Murray Denny Award in Poetry, and prizes from literary magazines, including the Anne Stanford Poetry Prize, the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, and the Nebraska Review Poetry Award.

Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including  Best American Poetry 2007, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Crazyhorse. A Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, since 1991, Miller holds degrees in creative writing and English from Stephens College (B.A. 1978), the University of Missouri (M.A. 1980), the Iowa Writers Workshop (M.F.A., 1982), and the University of Houston (Ph.D., 1991). 
 

Valerie Miner ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

 

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books including Abundant Light (short stories), The Low Road (memoir) and A Walking Fire (novel). She has published in The Village Voice, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, and many other journals. BBC Radio has broadcast both her fiction and memoir. Her newest novel, After Eden, was published by University of Oklahomah Press in spring, 2007.

Valerie Miner has won awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and other sources. She has had Fulbright fellowships to Tunisia and India. She is an artist-in-residence and professor at Stanford University. Her Web site is www.valerieminer.com.
 

John Rember ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

 

John Rember was born in Sun Valley, Idaho, and raised in the nearby Sawtooth Valley. He worked as a forest service wilderness ranger, cement worker, carpenter, and ski patrolman as well as an instructor in a private prep school. For the past fifteen years, he has taught at Albertson College. Rember has published numerous magazine articles in Wildlife Conservation, Naturalist, Travel and Leisure, Snow Country, and Skiing. His two books of short stories are Coyote in the Mountains (Limberlost, 1989) and Cheerleaders from Gomorrah (Confluence, 1995). His memoir, Traplines, was published in 2003 by Pantheon, and the Vintage paperback was released in December 2004.
 

Peter Sears ~ Poetry

 

Peter Sears is the author of two books of poetry: The Brink, the winning manuscript of a national competition sponsored by Gibbs Smith Publisher; and Tour: New & Selected Poems from Breitenbush Books. He has also written four chapbooks of poetry. His work has been widely published and has appeared in The Atlantic, Zyzzyva, Northwest Review, Rolling Stone, Southern Poetry Review, Mother Jones, Antioch Review, Poetry Northwest, Mademoiselle, Poetry Now, Iowa Review, New Letters, and the New York Times. In 1999, Sears was awarded the Stewart H. Holbrook Award from Literary Arts, Inc. He currently resides in Corvallis, Oregon.

 

 

Mark Spragg ~ Fiction

 

 

Mark Spragg is the author of three books: Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir which won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone, and most recently, An Unfinished Life.  All were top-ten BookSense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. Mark and his wife, Virginia, wrote the screenplay for An Unfinished Life, which was released in 2005 by Miramax Films.

 

 

 

 
 

David St. John ~ Poetry

 

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he is the Director of The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing.

David St. John is the author of six limited edition books and of nine collections of poetry, including No Heaven, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985; Study for the World’s Body, HarperCollins, 1994; The Red Leaves of the Night, HarperCollins, 1999; Prism, Arctos Press, 2002; and most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, HarperCollins, 2004.

 
 

Mary Helen Stefaniak ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

 

Mary Helen Stefaniak’s first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W.W. Norton 2004) received the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Award and has been translated into several languages. It was named a Favorite Book of 2004 by The Chicago Tribune. Her first book, Self Storage and Other Stories (New Rivers Press), received the Wisconsin Library Association’s 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including  Antioch Review, AGNI, Epoch, The Iowa Review, New Stories from the South (Algonquin), and A Different Plain (University of Nebraska). An Iowa Public Radio commentator and former contributing editor for The Iowa Review, she divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband John live in a 150-year-old stagecoach inn they recently restored, and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University.  Visit her website at www.maryhelenstefaniak.com. 

 

 

Brady Udall ~ Fiction

A recipient of many awards and fellowships, Brady Udall received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His widely anthologized stories and nonfiction have been published in journals and magazines such as Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly and The Paris Review. He is the author of a short story collection, Letting Loose the Hounds, and a novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, which was an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty languages.