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

Doug Anderson’s new memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, The Sixties, And a Journey of Self-Discovery was published by W.W. Norton in 2009. His book of poetry, The Moon Reflected Fire won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 1995; and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Eric Matthew King Fund of The Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in many literary journals including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and The Massachusetts Review. He has received fellowships and grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Cultural Council and other funding organizations. In addition to poetry and creative nonfiction he has written plays, screenplays and journalism. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut and teaches creative writing for the University of Connecticut’s Greater Hartford Campus.

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 several non-fiction books, including the pioneering The Courage to Heal (HarperCollins 1988, 2008) which has been translated into ten languages.

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.

Carol Ann Bassett is an award-winning author who has published three works of literary nonfiction: Galápagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin’s Cradle of Evolution; A Gathering of Stones: Journeys to the Edges of a Changing World (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction), and Organ Pipe: Life on the Edge (part of the Desert Places series). Her essays have been published in the American Nature Writing series and other anthologies. Bassett was a regular contributor to The New York Times and Time-Life, and was an independent producer for National Public Radio. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Condé Nast Traveler and numerous other national publications. She teaches environmental writing and literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon, and directed a study abroad summer program called "Environmental Writing in the Galápagos" from 2006 through 2008. To learn more about her, visit her Web site.

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. He has collaborated with composers, musicians and dancers and is the originator of a form known as the "Dead Man" poem. His literary honors include awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Poetry Review. His nineteenth book, Mars Being Red, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards. His twentieth is a collaboration titled, 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, co-authored with poets from Hungary, Malta, Russia and Slovenia, as well as the U.S.

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/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.

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.

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, "Dry Rain," was recently made into a film that opened at the 2008 Seattle International Film festival. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

Debra Gwartney ~ Nonfiction

Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This, a memoir published by Houghton Mifflin in early 2009, and about which Phillip Lopate writes, "Unlike so many self-serving memoirists today, Debra Gwartney has done the necessary maturity-homework: she has seen clear to the bottom of her experience, purged it of self-righteousness, and emerged with a stunningly humane and humbled awareness of life's troubles." Debra has published in many magazines and newspapers, as well as literary journals including 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. Read more about her work at debragwartney.com.
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. 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

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.     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 "we" overthrew, 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, in 1988 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 and Clark, and elsewhere, and is currently teaching a private prose narrative workshop at the Looking Glass Bookstore in Portland, where she lives.

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 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 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.

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. His stories and occasional pieces have appeared in Bicycling, Men’s Health, Esquire, GQ, and a number of other publications. He holds degrees from University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire (B.A.), Minnesota State University at Mankato (M.A.), and University of Florida (M.F.A.) and has spent many odd years as a university professor and, before that, many odd years as a factory worker and day laborer. He currently is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles, California.

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 Montalvo Center for the Arts, Oregon Literary Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize. He now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux.

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). 

Thisbe Nissen’s first book, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night, won the 1999 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. She’s also the author of two novels, The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), and co-author and co-illustrator of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook (Harper Collins, 2002). Thisbe has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Brandeis University, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at The New School’s Eugene Lang College in NYC. She’s been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and the Vermont Studio Center, and has taught at numerous conferences including Writers in Paradise, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and Centrum. Thisbe is co-founder and co-director of The Catskill Studio for Writing in Saugerties, NY where Thisbe lives with her husband, and their cats and chickens. She’s currently at work on a novel, a story collection, various collaged picture books, and a few patchwork quilts too.

Benjamin Percy was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2010), and 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), Men's Journal, the Paris Review, Orion, Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and many other magazines and journals. His honors include a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. 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. Ben is collaborating with Danica again on an illustrated collection of fables. He also teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University. To learn more about him, visit his Web page.

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 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.

Mark Spragg ~ Fiction

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’s second novel, The Caliphs of Baghdad, Georgia, will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in Fall 2010. (The accompanying Web site, www.baghdadbazaarGA.com, will be ready for visitors this summer.) 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 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 Web site.

Rachel Toor is the author of three books of creative nonfiction: Admissions Confidential (St. Martin’s), The Pig and I (Nebraska), and Personal Record (Nebraska). She writes a monthly column on issues in writing and publishing for The Chronicle of Higher Education and a bi-monthly column for Running Times. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Glamour, Reader’s Digest, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The LA Times, and other various and diverse publications. After graduating from Yale, she spent a dozen years as an acquisitions editor at Oxford and Duke University Presses. Rachel has an MFA from the University of Montana, and has taught in the low-residency program at Antioch University. She is currently an assistant professor in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

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.

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