Past Faculty

Sharon Bryan has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, The Discovery Award from The Nation, and two fellowships in poetry from the NEA. She has published three collections of poetry: Salt Air, Objects of Affection, Flying Blind, with a fourth, Stardust, in progress. She edited Where We Stand: Women on Literary Tradition, and co-edited (along with William Olsen) Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life. Sharon Bryan is a visiting poet at universities around the country.

Madeline DeFrees has taught at the Holy Named College, the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts. She was dispensed from her religious vows in 1973. Since her retirement to Seattle, DeFrees has held residencies at Bucknell University, Eastern Washington University and Wichita State University. Her eighth full-length poetry collection, Spectral Waves, is due from Copper Canyon Press in June of 2006. Her collected poems, Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), won a Washington State book award and the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts award, and the Denise Levertov Award.

Denise Duhamel

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."

Debra Magpie Earling is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation. She earned her MFA from Cornell (Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellow 1988-91) and teaches Fiction and Native American Studies at the University of Montana. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Northeast Indian Quarterly and numerous anthologies, including: Reinventing the Enemy's Language; Song of the Turtle; Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories Celebrating Women; Circle of Women, Anthology of Western Women Writers; Talking Leaves: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Short Stories; The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. Of Perma Red (2002), her first novel, Sherman Alexie said: "Like the Loch Ness monster, Sasquatch, and Amelia Earhart, this book has been circling around my life. I caught glimpses of it, heard people talk about it...And now here it is: the missing link, the Rosetta Stone, the cure for every damn disease there is." Perma Red received the 2003 Mountains and Plains Bookseller Association Award, the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West, and the Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel. Earling is one of fifteen writers for the National Millennium Survey Project, which will tour seven U.S. cities, Europe and Asia from 2002-2005.

William Kittredge taught for the University of Montana for 29 years, where he was Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing. Kittredge has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two NEA Fellowships, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts. Kittredge has published essays and articles in over fifty magazines, including Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, Outside, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. His books include two collections of short fiction, The Van Gogh Fields and Other Stories (1979) and We Are Not In This Together (1984), two collections of essays, Owning It All (1987) and Who Owns the West (1996), and a memoir Hole in the Sky (1992). His novel Run With Horses, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2005. A book-length essay on life along the 100 th meridian, called American Heartline, is forthcoming form Texas Tech University Press in 2006.

Kathleen Tyau is the author of two novels that draw upon her Hawaiian-Chinese heritage: A Little Too Much Is Enough (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995) and Makai (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Sherman Alexie calls her first book "a feast of a novel, each story a separate course, each fragment an appetizer for the next." Her novel Makai is inspired by a near-drowning experience and interviews with island women who danced with troops based in Hawaii during World War II. Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award, Tyau is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, Literary Arts, Inc., and Fishtrap. Her stories and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Story, ZYZZYVA, Glimmer Train, Boulevard, Bellingham Review, and Bamboo Ridge, and in anthologies, including The Stories That Shape Us, The Writers’ Journal, Growing Up Local, Fishing for Chickens, and Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women. Raised on the island of Oahu, Tyau moved to Oregon to attend Lewis and Clark College. In addition to working as a guest lecturer and writing instructor, Tyau is working on a third novel, Mele . She lives with her husband on a tree farm in Yamhill County, Oregon, and plays bluegrass mandolin and guitar.