CURRENT SEMESTER'S FACULTY
(January - July 2008)
Betty Adcock (Poetry) is the author of five poetry collections from LSU Press, most recently Intervale: New and Selected Poems. A sixth book of poems, Slantwise,
will appear in March/April, when it will be published as the LSU Press L.E. Phillabaum Prize volume for 2008. Intervale was winner of the Poets’ Prize and was one of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Prize. She received the North Carolina Medal for Literature, the Texas Institute of Letters Prize, and has twice been a Pushcart Prize winner. She has held Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of North Carolina, and was a Guggenheim Fellow for 2002-2003. After some years in the business world, Betty began teaching in the 1980’s at Meredith College, where she was Writer in Residence until 2005. Over the years she has held residencies at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Kalamazoo College, and Duke University, and has twice been Visiting Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University.
Debra Allbery (Poetry) received her MFA from the University of Iowa and her MA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, Walking Distance, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her new collection, Fimbul-Winter, is currently being considered by publishers. She has twice received fellowships from the NEA; other awards include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Hawthornden fellowship, and two grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She has taught writing and literature at Phillips Exeter Academy, Interlochen Arts Academy, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, Dickinson College, and the University of Michigan.
Wilton Barnhardt (Fiction) was raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and received his BA from Michigan State University and his Masters in English Letters from Brasenose College, Oxford University. A former reporter for Sports Illustrated magazine, he is also the author of Emma Who Saved My Life, Gospel, and Show World. He directs the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh.
Marianne Boruch (Poetry) received her MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1979. She has published five books of poetry, most recently Poems: New and Selected, and two essay collections, Poetry’s Old Air and In the Blue Pharmacy. A new poetry collection—Grace, Fallen from—is due out from Wesleyan University Press in January, 2008. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Field and elsewhere, and her awards include Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a stint as artist-in-residence at Isle Royale, our most isolated National Park. She has taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, Tunghai University in Taiwan, the University of Hamburg in Germany, and, since 1987, at Purdue University where she developed the MFA program.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Poetry) grew up in Central Connecticut. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Columbia University. She was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Emerging Writers Award and The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize, her book The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart was published by Persea Books in April 2005. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the winner of the Connecticut Book Award. She is currently at work on an anthology entitled Out in the Afternoon: Gay and Lesbian Writers Write about Soap Operas. Her second book of poems will be published by Persea Books in 2008. She lives in Los Angeles.
Maud Casey (Fiction) is the author of the novels The Shape of Things to Come, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy, as well as a short story collection, Drastic. Her stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction and other literary journals. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, and Post Road. She was the Reginald Tickner Writing Fellow at The Gilman School and the Kratz Center for Creative Writing Writer-in-Residence at Goucher College. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is the Associate Director of the MFA program at the University of Maryland.
Charles D’Ambrosio (Fiction) is the author of The Point and Other Stories, The Dead Fish Museum, and Orphans, a collection of essays. He has taught literature and creative writing at a number of schools, including the University of Chicago, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Montana, where he was the William Kittredge Professor of English Literature. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Among other honors, he is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Dead Fish Museum was a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist.
Anthony Doerr (Fiction) is the author of a story collection, The Shell Collector, a novel, About Grace, and a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome. He also writes the “On Science” column for the Boston Globe. His work has won the Rome Prize, Barnes & Noble’s Discover Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, and three O. Henry Prizes. His short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and Best American Short Stories. In 2007, Granta put Doerr on its list of Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Boise, Idaho.
Jennifer Grotz (Poetry) received her BA in French, English, and Art History from Tulane University, her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She is the author of Cusp, winner of the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters; and the letterpress chapbook Not Body. Her poems and translations from the French and Polish have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Best American Poetry. Her essays and reviews have recently appeared in Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and The Washington Post. She has received awards from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Camargo Foundation, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and serves as the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
Brooks Haxton (Poetry) has a BA from Beloit College and an MA from Syracuse. He has published seven books of poems: Traveling Company; Dead Reckoning (a novel in verse); Dominion; The Lay of Eleanor and Irene (a narrative poem); The Sun at Night; Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero; and Uproar. He wrote the script for Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage, a film broadcast on PBS in the “American Masters” series in 1994. His books of translations from the ancient Greek are Dances for Flute and Thunder (poems), Fragments (sayings of Heraclitus translated into free verse) and Selected Poems, translated from the French of Victor Hugo. He has received awards from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His translations of Greek poetry were nominated for the PEN 2000 Translation Award in Poetry, and he received the Mississippi Institute of Arts Poetry Award in 2001 and in 2005. He currently teaches at Syracuse University.
David Haynes (Fiction) earned a BA from Macalester College and an MA in liberal studies from Hamline University. He is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University where he directs the creative writing program. He has taught writing in the MFA Programs at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers’ Garret in Dallas. His sixth and most recent novel is The Full Matilda. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” He is also the author of a series for children called “The West Seventh Wildcats.”
C.J. Hribal (Fiction) is the author of the novel The Company Car and three other works of fiction. His most recent collection of novellas and stories, The Clouds in Memphis, won the AWP Prize in Short Fiction. He is also the author of the novel American Beauty, another collection of stories and novellas, Matty’s Heart, and he edited the collection The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bush Foundation. His BA is from St. Norbert College and his MA from Syracuse University. He teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
A. Van Jordan (Poetry) is the author of three books of poetry: Rise, which won a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2002; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, for which he was awarded a 2004 Whiting Writers Award and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Quantum Lyrics, published July 2007. He also received a Pushcart Prize in 2006. He currently teaches at the University of Texas in Austin.
Victor LaValle (Fiction) is the author of Slapboxing with Jesus (1999), a collection of stories which won the PEN/Open Book Award and also won him the key to Southeastern Queens. His novel, The Ecstatic, was a finalist for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. He was a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a USA Ford Fellowship.
Maurice Manning (Poetry) received his MFA from the University of Alabama, an MA in Literature from the University of Kentucky, and a BA in English from Earlham College. He has published three books of poetry, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, which was selected by W.S. Merwin for The Yale Series of Younger Poets, A Companion for Owls, a collection written in the voice of Daniel Boone, and Bucolics. He has taught at DePauw University and currently teaches literature and creative writing at Indiana University.
Michael Martone (Fiction) holds an MA in fiction writing from The Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at Johns Hopkins, Iowa State University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, and teaches in and has directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama. He has published eight books of fiction: At a Loss, Alive and Dead in Indiana, Return to Powers, Safety Patrol, Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List and Other Indiana Stories, Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, Seeing Eye, Double-wide; a travel book, The Blue Guide to Indiana; a memoir, Michael Martone; and two books of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, which won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1998, and Unconventions. He is also the editor of two essay anthologies (A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest and Townships: Pieces of the Midwest), Scribner’s Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction (with Lex Williford), and (with Robin Hemley) Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists, and (with Susan Neville) Rules of Thumb. He has published articles and short fiction in the North American Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Story, The Antioch Review, and others. He received NEA grants for fiction in 1983 and 1988.
Heather McHugh (Poetry) has published seven collections of poems; one of essays (Broken English: Poetry and Partiality); and four of translation (most recently, with Nikolai Popov: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, and with David Konstan, Euripides’ Cyclops). She has also collaborated with the British artist Tom Phillips, producing an edition of collages and verse texts. She was co-editor with Ellen Voigt of Hammer and Blaze, and her translations are among those in the recent McClatchy edition of Horace’s odes.
Heather McHugh graduated with a BA from Radcliffe College in 1969, and received her MA in literature and writing from the University of Denver. Since then, she has won grants in creative writing from the National Endowments for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship (1992-93), a Lila Wallace/ Reader’s Digest Writing Award (1995-98), and in 2000 the PEN/Voelcker Prize. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs; on the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts; and on the faculties of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, UC Irvine, SUNY Binghamton, and UC Berkeley. She is Milliman Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she works for part of each year. In 1999 she was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; in 2000, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Steve Orlen (Poetry) has published eight books of poems: Separate Creatures, Sleeping on Doors, Permission to Speak, A Place at the Table, The Bridge of Sighs, Kisses, This Particular Eternity, and The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005. His poems have appeared in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, New American Poets of the ‘80’s, Best American Poetry 1989, The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets, Poets of the New Century, and in numerous magazines. He won National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1974, 1980 and 1985, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. He has taught in the Goddard College MFA Writing Program and is currently a Professor in the MFA Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He received his BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his MFA from the University of Iowa.
Barbara Ras r(Poetry) eceived the Walt Whitman Award for her book of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, which was also honored with the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, Orion, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Five Points, and many anthologies and literary magazines nationwide. Her most recent collection is One Hidden Stuff (Penguin, 2006). Ras is also the editor of Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion, a collection of Costa Rican short fiction in translation. She has taught at workshops and conferences, including Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Art of the Wild, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House, the Frost Place, and the Island Institute. Ras is the director of Trinity University Press in San Antonio, publisher of the series The Writer’s World, edited by Edward Hirsch, and other books by writers on writing.
Dominic Smith (Fiction) grew up in Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas. He attended the University of Iowa and the MFA program at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His first novel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, was chosen for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and received the Steven Turner Prize for Best First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. His second novel, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, was published in June. Dominic’s short fiction has recently appeared in The Atlantic and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His fiction prizes include the Gulf Coast Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship.
Debra Spark (Fiction) received her MFA from the University of Iowa and her BA from Yale University. She is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint and The Ghost of Bridgetown and the book of essays Curious Attractions. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yankee, Food and Wine, and elsewhere. She has received an NEA, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, and a Wisconsin Institute Fellowship.
Megan Staffel (Fiction) has a BFA from Emerson College and an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has a new collection of short fiction forthcoming and is the author of three previous books: A Length of Wire and Other Stories and the novels She Wanted Something Else and The Notebook of Lost Things. Her stories have appeared most recently in Ploughshares and Gargoyle and twice been listed in The Best American series. A recipient of a grant from the Michigan Council of the Arts, Ms. Staffel has taught for many years in undergraduate programs around the country. Her essay on first drafts appears in the collection, Letters to a Fiction Writer, edited by Frederick Busch.
Peter Turchi (Director) (Fiction) is the author of four books, including Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; a novel, The Girls Next Door; and a collection of stories, Magician. He has co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, a collection of essays by Warren Wilson MFA faculty. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Colorado Review, among other magazines. He wrote and edited the catalogue for the touring exhibition Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings and Prints of Charles Ritchie. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, he has taught at the University of Houston, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the University of Arizona, Northwestern University, and Appalachian State University. He has served as Director of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers since 1993. His essays on writing workshops and annotations are posted under “Resources for Writers” at www.peterturchi.com.
Ellen Bryant Voigt (Poetry) developed and directed the country’s first low-residency writing program in the mid-seventies, at Goddard College, and helped move it to Warren Wilson in 1981. A Guggenheim, Lila-Wallace and NEA Fellow, she was Professor of Poetry at MIT for three years and has taught at the Bread Loaf, Aspen, Indiana, Napa, Catskills, Sarah Lawrence, and RopeWalk Writers’ Conferences. Voigt has published six books of poetry: Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, Kyrie (a National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist and Teasdale Prize winner), Shadow of Heaven (nominated for the 2002 National Book Award), and, scheduled for January 2007, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006. She co-edited with Gregory Orr, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, a selection of craft essays by Warren Wilson MFA faculty, and has also collected her own essays, developed from residency lectures, in The Flexible Lyric. In 2002, she received the O.B. Hardison Award for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Library and the Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, where she has since been named a Chancellor.
