Writing Program Faculty


Gary Hawkins (Director) is a poet, essayist, and connoisseur of manifestoes. His work collects around his concerns of beauty, identity, and democracy. Every morning he wakes up in Black Mountain, thrilled to have one of poetry's most enviable addresses.

 

Catherine Reid is the author of Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst  (Houghton Mifflin), a work of creative nonfiction.  Her essays, stories and poems have appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review and the Bellevue Literary Review.  She studied fiction writing at Florida State University, where she was a Kingsbury Writing Fellow, and then settled on nonfiction as the genre that demanded the most honesty.  She has edited two anthologies, served on the editorial board for a literary journal, and ghostwritten a book on a well-known costume jeweler.  Her current interests are in environmental writing and in prose in which style matters as much as content.

 

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the poetry collection We Generous (Red Hen Press) and a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps (W. W. Norton).  He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poem s of William Matthews. Matthews teaches as an adjunct at Warren Wilson College and UNC-A’s Great Smokies Writing Program and serves on the faculty  at Queens College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing. His poetry and prose has appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, New England, Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Seneca Review, The Sun, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Writer’s Almanac, among others. Matthews co-edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal, and serves as poetry consultant for Ecotone: Re-Imagining Place.  He is the Creative Director of Asheville Wordfest (www.ashevillewordfest.org).

 

Raised in Boone, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and Cornell University, John Crutchfield is a poet, playwright and performer currently based in Asheville, NC. His poems, essays, translations and reviews have appeared in a variety of literary and cultural journals, including Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Southern Review, The Appalachian Journal, and Zone 3. His plays The Songs of Robert, Ruth, Jack-in-the-Park Tales, Twelve Treatises on Memory: An Epistemological Slapstick (With Sock-Puppets), Everything, and God, and Ivory have been produced regionally, as have various shorter works, including Caliban’s Dream and Black Snow Flying Upwards, or: My Embarrassment, two movement-based solo performances which premiered at the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival in 2007 and 2008 respectively. An avid collaborator, he has created and performed interdisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, G. Alex and the Movement, and Legacy Butoh. Recent stage appearances include “Malvolio” in Twelfth Night (Appalachian State University), “Caliban” in The Tempest (Lenoir-Rhyne Players), “Banquo” and “Doctor” in Macbeth (North Carolina Stage Company),  “Prosecutor” in David Mamet’s Romance (Zealot), and “Fraser” in Mac Wellman’s Description Beggared, or: The Allegory of Whiteness (Warren-Wilson College). He has been Artist-In-Residence at the North Carolina Governor’s School East, the Djerassi Artists Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Association d’Art de La Napoule (France) and the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe (Germany), as well as at various American schools, colleges, and universities. He is Founding Artistic Director of Corpus Theatre Collective. At present, he teaches part-time at Warren-Wilson College near his home in Asheville, NC, and works as a literary translator. More info at: www.johncrutchfield.com