Faculty

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.

Ellen Bass' most recent book of poetry, Mules of Love, was published by BOA Editions and 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. In 2007 her next book of poetry, The Human Line, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.

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 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.

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’ 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 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. He is currently writer-in-residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts in northern Michigan.

 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. He lives with his family in Great Falls, Montana.

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.

Dorianne Laux's fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, (finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and the Oregon Book Award), was published by W.W. Norton in 2005. 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. Laux is a Professor in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Eugene with her husband, poet Joseph Millar.

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 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 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 teaches at Oregon State University, The University of Oregon, and Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program.

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 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 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.

Pattiann Rogers has published 10 books of poetry, a book-length essay, The Dream of the Marsh Wren, and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with the artist Joellyn Duesberry. Her two most recent books are Generations (Penguin, 2004) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded Edition (Milkweed, 2005). Song of the World Becoming, New and Collected Poems, 1981 – 2001 (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and an Editor’s Choice in Booklist. Firekeeper, New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1994. Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Poetry Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, and the 2005 Lannan Award for Poetry. Her poems have won the Tietjens Prize, the Hokin Prize, and the Bock Prize from Poetry, the RoethkePrize from Poetry Northwest, two Strousse Awards from Prairie Schooner, and five Pushcart Prizes. In May, 2000, Rogers was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Her papers are archived in the Sowell Family Collection of Literature, Community, and the Natural World at Texas Tech University. She has been a visiting professor at numerous universities and colleges and was Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas from 1993–1997. Rogers has two sons and three grandsons. She lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.

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.

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.