Faculty & Staff

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 the NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Ellen Bass' poetry books include The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002) which won the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. Ellen co-edited the groundbreaking book, No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women and has published several nonfiction books, including the pioneering The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins 1988, 2008) and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth.

Among her awards for poetry are a Pushcart Prize, 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, and a Fellowship from the California Arts Council. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.

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 Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His former students cover a wide range of aesthetics and include Denis Johnson, Juan Felipe Herrera, Marilyn Chin, Larry Levis, Rita Dove, Norman Dubie, Michael Burkard, Albert Goldbarth, Joy Harjo, Mark Jarman, David St. John, Thomas Lux, Patricia Hampl, Kimiko Hahn, Stephen Kuusisto and James Tate. He served two terms as the state of Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He has collaborated with composers, musicians, dancers and other writers, and is the originator of a form known as the "Dead Man" poem. His 23 books include Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems and Whiteout, a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons-both released in 2011. A CD is forthcoming of a song cycle, "The Animals," commissioned by composer David Gompper. His literary honors include awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Poetry Review, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. Mr. Bell designed and ran for five years a program for teachers from America SCORES. He edited poetry for five years apiece for The North American Review and The Iowa Review, and he conceived and edited an annual series for Lost Horse Press called New Poets / Short Books. Mr. Bell lives mainly in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. One can see a brief interview with him about writing in the "On the Fly" series on Youtube.

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.

Bonnie Jo Campbell ~ Fiction

Claire Davis ~ Fiction

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.

Kwame Dawes ~ Poetry

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. His newest short story collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2012.

Katherine Dunn’s third novel, Geek Love, was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the Bram Stoker Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines ranging from The Mississippi Mud to the Paris Review. Dunn has been a freelance boxing journalist for more than three decades, writing about the sport for Mother Jones, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Vogue and Playboy, among many other publications. A collection of her boxing essays, One Ring Circus, was released in 2009. Her collaboration with photographer Jim Lommasson on the book Shadow Boxers won the Lange-Taylor Documentary Prize.

Dunn’s criticism and essays on cultural topics have been widely published. Death Scenes won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. Dunn lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Photo by Robbie McClaran.

Pete Fromm's latest novel, As Cool As I Am, was filmed this summer, starring Claire Danes, James Marsden and Sarah Bolger, and is scheduled for a 2012 release. He is a four-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Literary Award for As Cool As I Am; his novel How All This Started; a story collection, Dry Rain, and his memoir Indian Creek Chronicles. Hailed as one of "America's best-kept literary secrets," he has published four other story collections, as well as more than two hundred stories in magazines. He lives with his family in Montana.

Frank X. Gaspar ~ Fiction

Frank X. Gaspar was born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, of Azorean Descent (Pico, Sao Miguel). His ancestors were traditionally whalers and Grand Banks fisherman, sailing out of the Islands and then Provincetown. He holds an MFA from the Graduate Writing Program at UC Irvine and is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels. Among his many awards are multiple inclusions in Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and a California Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. His debut novel, Leaving Pico, was a Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize winner, a recipient of the California Book Award for First Fiction and a New York Times Notable Book (paperback edition). His second novel, Stealing Fatima, was a MassBook of the Year in Fiction (Massachusetts Foundation for the Book). He most recently held the Helio and Amelia Pedrosa/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He is currently at work on a new novel.

Debra Gwartney ~ Nonfiction

Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This, a memoir published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Books for a Better Life Award. Her book was also named one of the best books of 2009 by The Oregonian and Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Association. Debra has published in many magazines and newspapers, as well as literary journals including Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square Review, Kenyon Review, Salon, Triquarterly Review, and others. She was co-editor, along with Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published in 2006 by Trinity University Press.   Laura Hendrie ~ Fiction Laura Hendrie’s first book, Stygo, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award in 1995, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Fiction Award, and a finalist citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her novel, Remember Me, was a Book Sense selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection, a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and is under option for a movie. Her fiction has been aired on National Public Radio and published in many anthologies including Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Best of the West, Writers Forum, and Going Green; her nonfiction has appeared in magazines such as Outside, Boston Review, LIFE, and Chicago Tribune. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers in Denver, Colorado, and has taught at Warren Wilson in Asheville, N.C. She currently lives in Salida, Colorado.   Ann Hood ~ Fiction   Ann Hood is the author of eight novels, including the bestsellers Somewhere off the Coast of Maine, The Knitting Circle and The Red Thread; two memoirs, Do Not Go Gentle: My Search For Miracles in a Cynical Time and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly; and a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist's Guide To Life. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and many other publications. A regular contributor to The New York Times, she has won two Pushcart Prizes, a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and won the 2010 Literary Light Award from the Boston Public Library. Her Young Adult Novel, How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else) was selected as the Best YA Book of the Year by ASTAL for 2010. She lives in Providence, RI.
Pam Houston ~ Fiction   Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. A collection of essays, A Little More About Me, was published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 1999. In 2001 she completed a stage play called "Tracking the Pleiades" and her first novel, Sighthound, was published by W.W. Norton in January 2005. Her novel Contents May Have Shifted is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2012. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award. She is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis, and she divides her time between Davis, California, and her ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Tayari Jones ~ Fiction

Stephen Kuusisto ~ Nonfiction/Poetry

Steve Kuusisto is Director of the Renee Crown Honors Program at Syracuse University where he is also a "University Professor" in Disability Studies. He has taught creative writing at The Ohio State University and The University of Iowa. His memoir Planet of the Blind was named a New York Times Notable Book and he is the author of Eavesdropping: A Memoir and Do Not Interrupt, a book-length essay on the art of conversation. He is a poet with Copper Canyon Press and a member of Pacific University’s MFA faculty in creative nonfiction.     Valerie Laken ~ Fiction   Valerie Laken's short story collection, Separate Kingdoms (Harper Perennial, 2011), was longlisted for the Story Prize and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel, Dream House (Harper 2009), received the Anne Powers prize for fiction and was listed among Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2009. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, the Chicago Tribune, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and has received a Pushcart Prize and a Missouri Review Editors' Prize. She holds an MA in Slavic Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and she teaches in the graduate program for creative writing at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.   Elinor Langer ~ Nonfiction   Elinor Langer's most recent publication is an essay on the American overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in the 1890's and the contemporary sovereignty movement,  "Famous are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then--and Now," published as a Special Issue of The Nation in 2008. She is currently working on a biography of the Queen Lili'uokalani, to be published by Holt/Metropolitan. Her latest book, A Hundred Little Hitlers, an account of the historical, political and legal implications and consequences of the skinhead killing of an Ethiopian man named Mulugeta Seraw in Portland, Oregon, was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award for a Work-in-Progress, for the PEN West award for research-based nonfiction, and for the Book of the Month Club's Best Non-Fiction Book award in 2003. A long-time member of  The Nation editorial board, she has written for such publications as Science, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and many others. Her first book, a biography of the radical novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst, was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1984. The recipient of a Guggenheim, NEA, Bunting, MacArthur  and other fellowships, Langer is also an experienced teacher who has taught at Goddard, Reed, Lewis & Clark, and in private workshops in Portland, where she lives.

Dorianne Laux's newest poetry collection, The Book of Men, was published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Her book Dark Charms was published by Red Dragonfly Press in 2010 and Superman: The Chapbook, also by Red Dragonfly Press, was published in January 2008. 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 winner of 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 Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has been twice included in Best American Poetry. She has been awarded 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 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, received 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 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.

Mike Magnuson is the author of two novels, The Right Man for the Job and The Fire Gospels, and two books of nonfiction, Lummox: The Evolution of a Man and Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180. In May of 2012, Rodale Press will publish a new book of Mike’s nonfiction: Bike Tribes. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Men’s Health, Backpacker, and other publications, and he is a longtime contributing writer with Bicycling magazine. His piece “Whatever Happened to Greg LeMond” – originally published in Bicycling – has been reprinted in Best American Sports Writing 2010. He lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he is finishing a long novel about working people in Wisconsin’s Fox Valley region. He is also working on a documentary film about the intense political divisions in Wisconsin. In his spare time, Mike is an avid cyclocross racer and an indoor cycling instructor at the downtown Oshkosh YMCA.

John McNally is author of three novels (The Book of Ralph; America’s Report Card; and After the Workshop), two short story collections (Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago), and one nonfiction book (The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist). His next book, Vivid and Continuous, a collection of essays on the craft of writing fiction, will be published in spring of 2013. He has edited, co-edited, or guest edited seven anthologies. His work has appeared in over a hundred publications, including The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Virginia Quarterly Review, and, most recently, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury (William Morrow). He has been the recipient of fellowships from Paramount Pictures (Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project), the University of Iowa (James Michener Award), George Washington University (Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Djerassi Fellowship). He holds degrees from Southern Illinois University (B.A.), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A.), and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Ph.D.). A native of Chicago’s southwest side, John lives in North Carolina, where he is an associate professor of English at Wake Forest University.

Joseph Millar’s first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, and a third, Blue Rust, is due out this fall (2011) from Carnegie-Mellon. 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. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His poems—stark, clean, unsparing—record the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorces, men and women.

His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. In 1997, he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. After five years at Oregon State University, Millar now teaches at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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). 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil ~ Poetry

Benjamin Percy was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette) and The Wilding (Graywolf Press, 2010), as well as two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire (where he is a regular contributor), GQ, Outside, TIME, Men's Journal, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, Orion, Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other magazines and journals. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics. In 2009, First Second Books (a division of Macmillan) published the graphic novel adaptation of Refresh, Refresh -- co-authored by filmmaker James Ponsoldt and illustrated by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff. The story is also in pre-production as a film. He is currently adapting The Wilding into a screenplay for filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Babel). He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University.To learn more about him, visit his Web page.

Laura Pritchett ~ Fiction/Nonfiction

Laura Pritchett writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her fiction includes the novel Sky Bridge and the short story collection Hell's Bottom, Colorado (both published by Milkweed Editions). Her nonfiction includes Great Colorado Bear Stories (Riverbend Press) and three edited anthologies: Pulse of the River, Home Land, Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers. Awards for these books include the PEN USA Award for Fiction, the WILLA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and the Colorado Book Award. She also makes her living as a freelance writer, and has published over 100 essays and short stories in numerous magazines, including The Sun, Orion, High Country News, OnEarth, Poets & Writers, High Desert Journal, 5280, NPR’s This I Believe, and others. Pritchett received her Ph.D. in Contemporary American Literature/Creative Writing at Purdue University. She teaches writing around the country. For more information, visit her Web page.

Peter Sears is the author of three books of poetry: The Brink, the winning manuscript of a national competition sponsored by Gibbs Smith Publisher; Tour: New & Selected Poems from Breitenbush Books; and, more recently, Green Diver published by CW 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.

Christine Sneed ~ Fiction

Christine Sneed's first book, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, won AWP's 2009 Grace Paley Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, first-fiction category. Portraits was awarded Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis prize for a first book, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award (for traditionally published fiction) and was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her second book, a novel titled Little Known Facts, will be published by Bloomsbury USA in early 2013. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories of the Midwest, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, and a number of other journals. She has also been awarded a poetry fellowship by the Illinois Arts Council. She lives in Evanston, IL, and also teaches for Northwestern University's graduate writing program.

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. He lives in Venice Beach. David St. John is the author of six limited edition books and of ten collections of poetry, including No Heaven (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985); Study for the World’s Body (HarperCollins, 1994), which was nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry; The Red Leaves of the Night (HarperCollins, 1999); Prism (Arctos Press, 2002); The Face: A Novella in Verse (HarperCollins, 2004); and the upcoming volume, The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012).

Mary Helen Stefaniak’s second novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W. W. Norton, 2010) received a 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. Anisfield-Wolf Awards recognize books that make important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia was also selected by independent booksellers as an Indie-Next “Great Read.” Her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W. W. Norton), 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 occasional Iowa Public Radio commentator, Mary Helen 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. She currently serves as contributing editor for the international journal Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com).

Jess Walter ~ Fiction

Shelley Washburn, Director: washburn@pacificu.edu & 503-352-1532

Colleen Sump, Assistant Director: colleensump@pacificu.edu & 503-352-1533

Tenley Taylor, Administrative Assistant: mfa@pacificu.edu & 503-352-1531