We are pleased to announce the July 2008 Faculty:
Joan Aleshire (POETRY) received her BA from Harvard/Radcliffe and her MFA in Writing from Goddard College in 1980. She is the author of four collections of poems: Cloud Train (an Associated Writing Programs Award Series selection), This Far, The Yellow Transparents, and Litany of Thanks. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals. Her essay “Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric” was published in Poets Teaching Poets, and reprinted in After Confession, a collection of essays on poetry and autobiography published by Graywolf Press in 2001. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the Emily Clark Balch Prize from Virginia Quarterly Review, and a grant from the Vermont Council on the Arts. She served as Interim Director of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program from 1983-84 and from November 1992 to June 1993, and has been a member of the MFA Academic Board.
Rick Barot (POETRY) received his BA from Wesleyan University and his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was also a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he was subsequently Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His first book, The Darker Fall, was chosen by Stanley Plumly for the Kathryn Morton Prize. In 2001 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Slate, New England Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and Threepenny Review. His second book of poems, Want, will be published by Sarabande in 2008.
Charles Baxter (FICTION) has a BA from Macalester College and a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and teaches in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He has received Guggenheim and NEA grants, and was a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1997 Award in Literature. He has published five novels (First Light, Shadow Play and The Feast of Love, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction, Saul and Patsy, The Soul Thief), four short story collections (Harmony of the World, Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, and Believers), a book of poetry (Imaginary Paintings), and two books of essays on fiction (Burning Down the House, and Beyond Plot). He is also co-editor (with Peter Turchi) of Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, a collection of essays by Warren Wilson MFA faculty.
Liam Callanan’s (FICTION) most recent novel, All Saints, was named a Target Bookmarked Book Club Breakout pick; his previous novel, The Cloud Atlas, was a finalist for the Edgar Award. He’s a frequent essayist for local and national public radio, and has written for Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Coordinator of the Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Liam earned his MFA from George Mason University, his MA at Georgetown and his BA at Yale.
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.
Christopher Castellani (FICTION) is the author of two novels: A Kiss from Maddalena, winner of the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award, and The Saint of Lost Things. He has been twice a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and has taught fiction workshops at Swarthmore College and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University, a BA in English from Swarthmore, and is ABD in English Literature at Tufts University. He works as Executive Director of Grub Street Writers, a Boston-based non-profit literary arts center, in an elaborate attempt to avoid finishing his third novel. To learn more about Christopher, visit www.christophercastellani.com.
Robert Cohen (FICTION) is the author of the novels Inspired Sleep, The Organ Builder, and The Here and Now, as well as a collection of stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Antaeus, GQ, and other magazines. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writer’s Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and has taught at Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Houston. He currently teaches at Middlebury College.
Michael Collier (POETRY) received his MFA from the University of Arizona and has taught, since 1984, at the University of Maryland. He has published five collections of poems, The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, The Neighbor, The Ledge, and Dark Wild Realm. He has edited three anthologies, The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (with Stanley Plumly), and The New American Poets, and co-edited with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, A William Maxwell Portrait. A translation of Medea appeared in 2006 and Make Us Wave Back: Essays on Poetry and Influence in 2007. He has received the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Poetry Prize. Since 1994 he has directed the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
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 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist.
Stacey D’Erasmo (FICTION) is the author of the novels Tea, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and A Seahorse Year, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday, and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award. Her third novel, The Sky Below, will be published in January, 2009. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MA in English and American Literature from New York University. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 1995-1997. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She has been a senior editor at the Voice Literary Supplement and Bookforum. She is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. She will be a member of the Bread Loaf faculty in the summer of 2008.
Stephen Dobyns (FICTION AND POETRY) has published twelve books of poems, twenty novels, a book of essays on poetry and a book of short stories (Eating Naked, 2000). His most recent book of poems is Mystery, So Long. He has received a Guggenheim and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at over ten colleges and universities including the University of New Hampshire, Boston University, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University and Sarah Lawrence College. Since 1995, he has written 30 cover articles for the San Diego Reader. He lives in Westerly, RI.
Reginald Gibbons (POETRY) has published eight books of poems: Roofs Voices Roads; The Ruined Motel; Saints; Maybe It Was So; Sparrow: New and Selected Poems; Homage to Longshot O’Leary; It’s Time;, and Creatures of a Day (2008); and two chapbooks: In the Warhouse and Fern-Texts. He has also published a book of very short stories, Five Pears or Peaches, and a novel, Sweetbitter. He is the editor of The Poet’s Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art, and has translated two Spanish poets, Luis Cernuda and Jorge Guillén and a number of Mexican poets; Euripides’ Bakkhai; and Sophokles’ Antigone (the latter two with Charles Segal). His new translations of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments, will be published in September 2008. His work on the American fiction
writer William Goyen includes the editing of Goyen’s posthumous novel Half a Look of Cain and the 50th Anniversary Edition of Goyen’s The House of Breath, as well as a posthumous volume of Goyen’s autobiographical writings. Gibbons received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, an NEA fellowship in 1985, and, in 2004, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison Jr. Prize in poetry. He is a professor of English at Northwestern University, where from 1981 to 1997 he was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine. He is currently a columnist for American Poetry Review.
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 in the MFA Programs at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and 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.”
Laura Hendrie (FICTION) studied with the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of Alabama Writers Workshop. Her book of interlocked stories, Stygo, won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and a finalist citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her novel, Remember Me, was a Book Sense '76 selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection, a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and is currently under option for a movie. Her stories have been aired on National Public Radio and published in many anthologies including Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Taos Review, Writers Forum, and Best of the West; her non-fiction has appeared in magazines such as Outside, LIFE, Boston Review and Chicago Tribune. She currently lives in Colorado.
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 NEA, and the Bush Foundation. His BA is from St. Norbert College and his MA from Syracuse University. He teaches at Marquette University.
Murad Kalam (FICTION) was born in Seattle to a Jamaican father and an American mother. In college he published in the Harvard Advocate. While a second-year at Harvard Law School, he published his first short story, “Bow Down,” in Harper’s Magazine, which won an O. Henry Award. His first novel, Night Journey, was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award for Fiction. He lives with his wife in Washington, D.C., where he is an attorney. He is at work on his second novel.
Laila Lalami (FICTION) was born and raised in Morocco. She earned her B.A. in English from Université Mohammed V in Rabat, her M.A. from University College, London, and her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the ‘African Booker’) in 2006. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in 2005 and has since been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Her first novel, The Outsider, will be published in the spring of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.
Mary Leader, (POETRY) before coming to poetry, worked as a lawyer, serving as Assistant Attorney General of Oklahoma and as Referee for the Oklahoma Supreme Court. In 1991, she earned her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and then went on to earn her PhD in Literature from Brandeis University. She now teaches at Purdue University. Her first book of poems, Red Signature, won the National Poetry Series. Her second, The Penultimate Suitor, won the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Grace Dane Mazur (Gretchen) (FICTION) received her BA and PhD from Harvard University and her MFA from Warren Wilson. Before coming to fiction she was a post-doctoral research biologist at Harvard University, studying micro-architecture in silkworms. She has published a book of short stories, Silk, and a novel, Trespass. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, STORY, Harvard Review, New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol. For ten years she was associate editor for fiction at Harvard Review. She is currently on leave from Harvard University Extension School.
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). McHugh 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.
She 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.
Kevin McIlvoy (FICTION) is the author of The Complete History of New Mexico and Other Stories and four novels: A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, and Hyssop. His stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. In 1983 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He has taught in the creative writing MFA program at New Mexico State University, where he was editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol magazine for twenty-five years, and received the 1990 and 2000 New Mexico State University Donald C. Rousch Awards for Teaching Achievement.
Susan Neville (FICTION) received her MFA from Bowling Green State University and her BA from DePauw University. Her collection of stories In the House of Blue Lights is a recipient of the Sullivan Fiction Prize and was selected as one of the “Best Books of 1998” by the Chicago Tribune. Other books include The Invention of Flight, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Indiana Winter, Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; and a collection of essays, many of them given originally as lectures at Warren Wilson, Sailing the Inland Sea.. She co-edited an anthology, Rules of Thumb, with Michael Martone. Susan currently holds the Demia Butler Chair of English Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis where she is head of the MFA program.
Alix Ohlin (FICTION) is the author of The Missing Person, a novel, and Babylon and Other Stories. Her stories have appeared in, among other places, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Triquarterly, and One Story, and have been selected for Best New American Voices, Best American Short Stories, and NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” She received her BA from Harvard and her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. She grew up in Montreal and currently lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches at Lafayette College.
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 NEA 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.
Martha Rhodes (POETRY) is the author of three poetry collections: Mother Quiet, Perfect Disappearance (winner of the 2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and other journals, and have been anthologized in The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Aizenberg and Belieu, eds., Columbia University Press), and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (Michael Collier, ed., University Press of New England), among other anthologies. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books, an independent literary press in New York City.
Alan Shapiro, (POETRY) a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poetry, most recently, Old War. He has been the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, an LA Times Book Award in poetry, and been a finalist in poetry and nonfiction for the National Books Critics Circle Award. A recipient of two awards from the NEA, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shapiro teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he lives with his wife, Callie Warner, and their three children.
Daniel Tobin (POETRY) is the author of four books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), and Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), as well as the critical study Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University Press of Kentucky, 1999). Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). Among his awards are the "The Discovery /The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the NEA. His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He is Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston.
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.
C. Dale Young (POETRY) received his BS in Molecular Biology and English from Boston College and both his MFA and MD from the University of Florida. He did his internship in Newport News, Virginia, and his residency in Radiation Oncology at the University of California San Francisco. He currently administers his own medical practice, practices medicine full-time, and serves (as he has for over ten years) as Poetry Editor of the New England Review. He is the author of The Day Underneath the Day and The Second Person, recently named a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award, the Lambda Book Award, and the Northern California Book Award. He is a former recipient of the Grolier Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry, the Stanley P. Young Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Fellowship from Yaddo.
His work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
