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Contact our MFA Core Faculty: 800-7-ANTIOCH
Steve Heller (Fiction, Program Chair) ext. 312
Meet our MFA Mentor Faculty: Dodie Bellamy's (Fiction) latest book is Academonia, a cross-genre collection of pedagogical essays and fictions was published by Krupskaya in 2006. Her novel, The Letters of Mina Harker (reprint with introduction by Dennis Cooper, 2004 from University of Wisconsin Press) is a Gothic thriller updated for the 21st century. Also in 2004 San Francisco's Suspect Thoughts Press published Pink Steam, a collection of fiction, memoirs, and essays. Real, her epistolary collaboration with the late Sam D'Allesandro, tackles AIDS, sexual transgression, and the desire for the forbidden. Her book, Cunt-Ups, a radical feminist revision of the "cut-up" pioneered by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Poetry. She is currently working on The Fourth Form, a multi-dimensional sex novel. Her writing has appeared in, among others, the anthologies Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache, Best American Erotica 2001, High Risk, The New Fuck You, and Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories. In 1998 she won the San Francisco Bay Guardian "Goldie" Award for Literature. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, Out/Look, The San Diego Reader, Nest, as well as numerous literary journals and web sites. In January, 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker's clothes for White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art space. With Kevin Killian, she has edited over 140 issuesof the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period(ical).
Molly Bendall (poetry) is the author three collections of poetry, After Estrangement (Peregrine Smith, 1992), Dark Summer (Miami University Press, 1999, and Ariadne’s Island (Miami University Press, 2001). Her new collection Under the Quick is forthcoming from Parlor Press, 2009. Her poems, reviews, and translations of the French surrealist poet Joyce Mansour have appeared in Paris Review, Field, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Pool and many other journals. She has received the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Lynda Hull Poetry Award from Denver Quarterly and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems are forthcoming in the anthology American Hybrid: The Norton Anthology of the New Poem. Poems have also appeared in anthologies, American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry, 2007, and The New American Poets. She has also co-authored with poet Gail Wronsky two collections of “Cowgirl” poetry and has a forthcoming collection in collaboration with her entitled Bling and Fringe. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California.
Gayle Brandeis (Fiction) is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House), The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, and her latest novel, Self Storage (Ballantine). Other cool Barbara-related awards include a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women and a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award; other non-Barbara-related awards include the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award and a Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred honor. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including The Nation and Salon.com. In 1986, when she was 18, her piece on the liberty of the human imagination was one of three "meaning of liberty" essays included in the Centennial time capsule of the Statue of Liberty. More recently, Gayle was named a Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine. She is on the national staff of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and is a founding member of the Women Creating Peace Collective. Gayle holds a BA in "Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing", a major she created at the University of Redlands, and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from Antioch University (where she was in the blue cohort). She currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and is mom to two teenagers. Her novel Pears will be published by Ballatine in 2009, and her first young adult novel, My Life with the Lincolns (which she sold during the June, 2008 residency) will be published by Holt in 2010.
Leonard Chang’s (Fiction) first novel, The Fruit 'N Food, won the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction in 1996, and is now taught at universities around the world. His second novel, Dispatches from the Cold (Black Heron, 1998) won a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature. He is also the author of a popular and critically-acclaimed noir trilogy, which includes Over the Shoulder (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2001), Underkill (St. Martin's, 2003) and Fade to Clear (St. Martin's, 2004). His novels have been translated and published in France, Japan and Korea. His award-winning short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Crescent Review, Prairie Schooner, Confluence, and The Literary Review. His new novel, Crossings, will be published in the Fall of 2009. For more information, visit www.leonardchang.com.
Susan Taylor Chehak (Fiction) received her M.F.A. in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa and in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, where in 2001, she was awarded an Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing. She is the author of five novels, including Smithereens (a Dashiell Hammett Prize nominee), The Story of Annie D. (an Edgar Award nominee and New York Times Notable Book), and Harmony (a Literary Guild Editor's Choice), and her short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Vice, Guernica Magazine, LA Under the Influence (Doublewide Press), Publisher's Weekly, Sisters in Crime 5 (Berkley), and The Chariton Review. She currently serves as Executive Editor of ZinkZine, a quarterly literary magazine which she created, available online at www.zinkville.com . Susan grew up in Iowa - which serves as the setting for much of her work - has lived in Los Angeles for many years, and spends as much time as possible in Keystone, Colorado, where she is the owner of inxpot, a coffeehouse, bookstore, and bar.
Jim Daniels (Poetry) won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize for his book, Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007). Two other books were published in 2007, his third collection of short fiction, Mr. Pleasant (Michigan State University Press), and his eleventh book of poems, In Line for the Exterminator (Wayne State University Press). In 2005, Jim Daniels wrote and produced the independent film “Dumpster,” and Street, a book of his poems accompanying the photographs of Charlee Brodsky, won the Tillie Olsen Prize from the Working-Class Studies Association. In addition, he has edited or co-edited four anthologies, including Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has received the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Thomas Stockman Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program. At Carnegie Mellon, he has received the Ryan Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Teaching and Educational Service.
Ben Doller (né Doyle)'s (Poetry) first book of poems, Radio, Radio (LSU Press 2001) was selected by Susan Howe as winner of the 2000 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second book, a collection of lyrical prose entitled FAQ is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in March 2009, and Fence Books will be publishing his third book, Dead Ahead in 2010. His poems have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, The New Republic, Boston Review, and Tin House. Since receiving his MFA degree from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2000, Doller has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, West Virginia University, Denison University, University of California-San Diego. and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Boise State University in 2007. Doller is co-editor of the Kuhl House Contemporary Poetry Series at the University of Iowa Press.
Jenny Factor (Poetry, Core Faculty) graduated from Harvard College in 1991 and the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2000. Her first collection, Unraveling at the Name (Copper Canyon Press), was a finalist for the 2002 Lambda Literary Award. Her second collection will be complete later this year. Factor is the youngest poet anthologized in California Poets from the Gold Rush to the Present, a 2004 Los Angeles Times Notable Book. She is a member of the core faculty at Antioch University Los Angeles. She lives in San Marino, California, with her partner and son. Jenny Factor's personal Web site: www.jennyfactor.com.
Kate Gale , founding Editor/Director of Red Hen Press (Publishing Arts) has a BA/MA in English with emphasis on Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Claremont Graduate University. She is a poet and writer with four books of poetry, a novel, a bilingual children's book, editor of three literary anthologies, and has recently completed the libretto for the opera "Rio de Sangre" by Don Davis.
Richard Garcia (Poetry) is the author of four books of poetry, including The Flying Garcias (University of Pittsburgh Press), Rancho Notorious (BOA Editions), and The Persistence of Objects (BOA Editions, 2006). He is also the author of a bilingual children's book, My Aunt Otilia's Spirits (Children's Book Press). His poetry has appeared in many journals, such as Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, The Cortland Review and The Colorado Review. His work is also included in anthologies, among them, The Best of the Prose Poem, Mother Songs, Urban Nature, Touching the Fire and Best American Poetry 2005. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, several fellowships and grants from the California Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize, the Mudfish Prize from Mudfish Magazine, the Greensboro Award from the Greensboro Review, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and the Georgetown Prize from the Georgetown Review. He was poet-in-residence at the Long Beach Museum of Art for three years and at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles for twelve years, where he conducted workshops in art and poetry for hospitalized children. More information on his publications, a bio, new writing, links to web publications and comments by his students can be found on his website at www.richardgarcia.info.
Eloise Klein Healy (Professor Emerita, poetry) is the author of six books of poetry: Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation); A Packet Beating Like a Heart (Books Of A Feather Press); Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/re-released by Red Hen Press); Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), nominated for the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by New Alliance Records; and her collections from Red Hen Press, Passing and most recently, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho. The Inevitable Press published her chapbook Women’s Studies Chronicles in the Laguna Poets Series. Healy’s work has been widely anthologized in collections including The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave; The Geography Of Home: California’s Poetry of Place; Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals; Grand Passion: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond; California Poetry: From The Gold Rush to the Present; and Another City: Writing From Los Angeles. She has also published bio-bibliographic reviews of the poets Muriel Rukeyser and Elsa Gidlow. Ms. Healy has been awarded artist residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony. She was the Grand Prize winner of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival Competition, and she has received grants from The California Arts Council, the CSUN Merit Award Program, and a COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. She directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. Healy is the Founding Chair of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy is also the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an ecotourism/arts venture and Guest Poet at the Idyllwild Summer Poetry Festival. Her imprint with Red Hen Press, Arktoi Books, established in 2006, specializes in publishing the work of lesbian authors.
Steve Heller (Fiction, Program Chair), an award-winning novelist and short story writer, grew up on a small acreage in the wheat country around Yukon, Oklahoma, where many of his fictions take place. He earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing and English from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and his Ed.D. in English Education from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. A former Yaddo and NEA Fellow, Heller is best known for his novel The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, originally published by Chelsea Green and subsequently reprinted by Anchor/Doubleday. Lucky Kellerman was a selection of both Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. Lucky Kellerman also received the Friends of American Writers First Prize Award. A sequel, Father’s Mechanical Universe, was recently published by BkMk [BookMark] Press. According to W. D. Wetherell, “Father's Mechanical Universe combines the sharp, concentrated focus of a novel with the tender, lyrical quality of the best memoirs to create one of the most moving accounts of family love I've read in years." Novelist Jonis Agee calls Heller "an authentic American voice who teaches us about the human heart haunted by misdeeds, mysteries, and longing." Heller's short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and national anthologies, and twice have received O. Henry Awards. Many of Heller's stories have been set in Hawai`i, where he has lived for several extended periods, including the spring and summer of 1995 when he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hawai`i. His first collection, The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers (Chariton Review Press), has been called "a Hawaiian Winesburg, Ohio.” Hawai`i is also the focus of his most recent fictions, including new stories in Nebraska Review, Bamboo Ridge, South Dakota Review, Spirit of Aloha, an in-flight magazine, and RainTiger, an online journal. Heller's creative nonfiction appears in such places as Manoa, New Letters, Colorado Review, and online journals such as Living Waters and Oklahoma Review. He is completing a book-length memoir called Walking Through the Moon, a Story of Ghosts. Heller is currently professor & Chair of the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
Tara Ison (Fiction) received her M.F.A. in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College. She has taught Fiction and Screenwriting at Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, Ohio State University, Goddard College, the UCLA Writers' Program, and is currently Core Faculty at Antioch University's M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. Her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly, Another City (City Lights Books), Bestial Noise (Bloomsbury Press), Lost on Purpose, (Seal Press/Avalon), the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and ZinkZine. She is the recipient of two Yaddo Fellowships, Pushcart Prize nominations, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Study, a Brandeis National Women's Committee Award, and a Thurber House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship. The Feminist Bookstore News called A Child Out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber, Inc.), "disturbing, dark, and original. A stunning first novel.” Alcatraz was a CINCH Librarian's Choice Award winner and a Finalist for the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Awards, "Best First Fiction." In Spring 2006 she served as the Blattner Fellow at Northwestern University. Her new novel, The List, was recently released by Scribner and is in bookstores now. For more information visit www.taraison.com.
Alistair McCartney (Fiction) is the author of The End of the
World Book: a Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, April, 08). The End
of the World Book is both a novel and an encyclopedia (A to Z) of
memories, obsessions and philosophical fixations, working in and
building upon the same metafictional terrain as Roberto Bolano and W.G.
Sebald. Praising this novel, Dennis Cooper, author of Frisk, wrote, “If
I’ve read a more deeply impressive, beautiful, sweeping, mindful, and
innovative first novel than Alistair McCartney’s The End of the World
Book, I have no memory of it. McCartney is a writer of peerless,
brilliant originality and pure, giant talent.” Publishers Weekly
described it as ". . . a surreal and self-referential encyclopedia for
the 21st century... fans of alternative literature and Borges may
discover a kindred spirit." And The Los Angeles Times characterized it
as "...a giddy literary jape...'The End of the World Book' ...is an
interrogation of literature -- how we think about writing, what we
choose to write about and why." The book was recently chosen to be
featured on Critical Mass, the blog for the National Book Critics
circle.
Bernadette Murphy (Creative Nonfiction) has published three books of creative nonfiction: The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate (with LA novelist Michelle Huneven), a nonfiction narrative following the lives of six women (herself included) as they put Tao principles to work navigating the red-hot real estate market (Bloomsbury USA, 2007); The Knitter’s Gift (2004), an anthology of creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction; and the bestselling Zen and the Art of Knitting (2002) in which she uses memoir and reportage to explore the connection between fiber arts, creativity, and spirituality. She is currently at work on a novel about music, motherhood and madness tentatively titled "Grace Notes." In addition, she is a contributing book critic for the Los Angeles Times and has published hundreds of reviews there. Her personal narratives and essays on literature have appeared in BOOK Magazine, Ms. Magazine, LA Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times Magazine and elsewhere. A fiction writer as well, her work “Venice Street” was a finalist for the Heekin Group Foundation’s James Jones Novel-In-Progress award. She has taught at the UCLA Extension Writers Program and National University’s M.F.A. Program, as well as in private writing workshops. A proud graduate of the Antioch Los Angeles M.F.A. Program, she was a member of the inaugural year’s class, graduating with the Orange cohort. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
Aino (Ino) Paasonen (Translation + Adaptation) Growing up in post World War II Europe, Aino lived in several European countries whose languages she learned, one after another, becoming orphaned of any mother-tongue but adapting, willy-nilly to the frequent changes. Translator, memoirist, poet, storyteller, critic, editor, Aino considers herself primarily a teacher who loves teaching and interacting with students, learning a great deal from them. She holds a UCLA Ph.D. in Comparative Literature; a License es Lettres from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland; and is also a Tai Chi instructor. She has taught at Northwestern University, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Art Center College of Design, and UCLA. She has published family chronicles, interviews with architects, essays, poems and poetry translations. She is working on a memoir (Fatherland, Mother Tongue) about her sense of recovered identity as a would-be Finn and Hungarian, which she is "by birth." She has eclectically researched and imagined herself into becoming a little more like the person she might have been -- were it not for WWII. She considers herself a citizen of the world, a "naturalized" American , as well as a French, Swiss, Italian, Swedish and Spanish impersonator. As translator of poetry, Aino has worked primarily with Swiss poet, writing in Italian, Remo Fasani. Individual translations can be found online at www.brinding.com, as well as in the journals Gradiva, and Fife Lines. Her translations of poems by Remo Fasani were read during UNESCO's World Poetry Week in 2002 at the National Library in Edinburgh, Scotland. She and Andrea Paganini have published a book of interviews with Remo Fasani, in Italian (2005). Aino is currently teaching in the Antioch Los Angeles BA and MFA programs, and is an Associate of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her translations of poems by Inger-Mari Aikio-Arianaick, from Finnish Lapland is due to be published this Spring (This Beloved Homeland, 2008), with Beatrice Lewin Dumin. Aino is currently translating a selection of poems in Finnish, Swedish and Sami -- in collaboration with her Finnish cousin Hannes-- for a book illustrated with "healing" photographs (Suomi, Land of the Finns).
Carol Potter (Poetry) received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1982, and has taught at Indiana University, University of Redlands, UCLA Extension Writers’ program, Antioch University, Ohio State University, Champlain College, and at community colleges in California and in Massachusetts. Potter’s most recent book of poems, Otherwise Obedient (Red Hen Press, 2007) was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards 2008 for LGBT poetry. Her third book of poems, Short History of Pets, won the 1999 Cleveland State Poetry Center Award, and the Balcones Award. Previous books are Upside Down in the Dark, 1995, and Before We Were Born, 1990—both from Alice James Books. Potter’s poems have appeared in Field, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books and many other journals. Emily Rapp’s (Creative Nonfiction) first book, Poster Child: A Memoir was published by Bloomsbury in January 2007 and released in paperback in January 2008. A former Fulbright scholarship recipient, she was educated at Harvard University, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Cimarron Review, The Clackamas Literary Review, Body + Soul, Goodhousekeeping, Terminus, The Sun, The Texas Observer, Segue, StoryQuarterly, and other journals. She has received awards and recognition for her work from The Atlantic Monthly, StoryQuarterly, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award for emerging women writers and the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at Bucknell University. Her story, "November," was recently published in Narrative, and her essay, "Okahandaja Lessons," appears in the Spring 2008 edition of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is currently at work on a novel set in Northern Ireland.
Rob Roberge (Fiction) is the author of the upcoming book of stories Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life (Black Arrow Press, scheduled for NOV, 2008), the neo-noir novels More Than They Could Chew (Perennial Dark Alley/Harper Collins, February 2005) and Drive (re-issue, Hollyridge Press, 2006). His stories have been featured in ZYZZYVA, Chelsea, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Ten Writers Worth Knowing Issue of The Literary Review. His work has also been anthologized in Another City (City Lights, 2001), It’s All Good (Manic D Press, 2004) and SANTI: Lives of the Modern Saints (Black Arrow Press, 2007). New work is scheduled to appear in OC Noir part of the series that includes San Francisco Noir, LA Noir and Las Vegas Noir. He writes columns for myrareguitars.com and sandmcom. Rob also teaches writing at a number of programs in the Los Angeles area, including the Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA in Creative Writing and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where he received the Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing in 2003. In his spare time, he plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles area garage/punk bands The Violet Rays, The Danbury Shakes and LA’s legendary punk pioneers, the Urinals. He also restores and rebuilds vintage amplifiers and quack medical devices. For news and more info, visit & or email at www.myspace.com/robroberge or www.robroberge.com
Sharman Apt Russell (Creative Nonfiction) received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and her BS from the University of California at Berkeley. Currently, she teaches at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico. This fall she led the Environmental Writing Institute in Missoula, Montana and a weekend workshop for Whitman College. She has a book forthcoming in spring called Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist (Basic Books). Her most recent nonfiction is Hunger: An Unnatural History (Basic Books, 2005) which Kirkus Reviews described as “an engrossing account of the myriad aspects of hunger” and Publishers Weekly called “haunting." Her An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect (Perseus Books, 2003) was a pick of independent booksellers in their Summer 2003 Book Sense 76, and her Anatomy of a Rose: The Secret Life of Flowers (Perseus Books, 2001) has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Spanish, and German. Her other books include the novel The Last Matriarch (UNM Press, 2000); When the Land Was Young: Reflections on American Archeology (reprinted University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Kill The Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology In The New West (reprinted University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life In the Southwest (reprinted University of Nebraska Press, 2002); a children’s fantasy, The Humpbacked Fluteplayer (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1994); and Frederick Douglas (Chelsea House, 1987). Her essays have been published in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, among them: Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening (North Point Press, 2007); Nature Writing (Norton, 2003); Sisters of the Earth (2003); At Home on the Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s Nature Writing (2002); The Sweet Breathing of Plants (Farrar, Straus, and Gireaux, 2001); and Writing Home: Award-Winning Literature from the New West (Heydey Books, 1999). Professor Russell has been awarded a Writers at Work Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Henry Joseph Jackson Award in Nonfiction, a Pushcart Prize, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and a Fellowship at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.
Cheryl Strayed (Fiction) writes fiction and memoir. Her debut novel, Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006. Torch was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers from the Pacific Northwest. Strayed’s personal essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Allure, Self, Brain Child, and The Sun. Widely anthologized, her personal essays have twice been selected for inclusion in the Best American Essays and three times they’ve been short-listed. Joyce Carol Oates chose Strayed’s short story “Good” for the opening spot in the Best New American Voices 2003. She has received more than a dozen grants and awards for her work, six Pushcart Prize nominations, and has been a writer-in-residence at several artist colonies. In 2001, she was selected to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a Scholar and in 2006, she returned to Bread Loaf as a Fellow. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is at work on a memoir.
Alma Luz Villanueva (Fiction) is the author of three novels. The Ultraviolet Sky won The American Book Award in 1989, and was chosen for New American Writing, 1990. It is also listed in Five Hundred Great Books By Women, edited by Holly Smith, which includes 500 novels from the 13th century to the present. Naked Ladies won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 1994. Both novels are used as textbooks in this country and abroad. She has also published a short story collection, Weeping Woman, La Llorona And Other Stories (which is being translated into Japanese and Spanish). Her newest novel, Luna's California Poppies, was published in 2002. Villanueva is also the author of six books of poetry, most recently Planet, which won The Latin American Writers Institute Poetry Award (New York City, 1994), and Desire (poetry from this collection was chosen for The Best American Poetry, 1996). A film titled, Who Called Me to This Dance? by filmmaker and dancer Tonia Shimmin, features her poetry as script. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and her poetry appears in Prayers For A Thousand Years: Inspiration From Leaders and Visionaries Around The World. Her new book of poetry, VIDA, was published in 2002. Her essays and book reviews have also appeared in Letters To My Mother (Pocket Books), Hot Flashes (Faber and Faber), Contemporary Authors, Autobiography Series, Volume 24 (Gale Research Publications), Visions Across The Americas (College textbook, Harcourt Brace), Letters to J.D. Salinger (University of Wisconsin Press), and Ms. magazine. Villanueva's poetry and short stories have also been included in upcoming grammar, junior high and high school textbooks geared for the new century (she's especially proud of that). A bronze plaque with her poetry has been installed on the Waterfront in San Francisco (where she fished as a girl), as part of the San Francisco Art Commission's Poetry Project. Her work, both fiction and poetry, is included in numerous anthologies- most recently, an excerpt of Naked Ladies appeared in Caliente! The Best Erotic Writing in Latin American Fiction, as well as the anthologies: It's A Woman's World- A Century of Women's Voices In Poetry, and Under The Fifth Sun (a story from Weeping Woman, La Llorona and Other Stories). More information can be found on her website at http://www.almaluzvillanueva.com
Marcos M. Villatoro (Creative Nonfiction) is the author of eight books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. His crime novels featuring FBI Agent Romilia Chacón have been translated worldwide. His book The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones is his coming-of-age, autobiographical novel. After living several years in Central and South America, Marcos settled his wife and four children in Los Angeles, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Writing at Mount St. Mary’s College. He also performs essays for National Public Radio and is a columnist for Tu Ciudad Los Angeles Magazine.
Amy Sage Webb (Associate Faculty/Pedagogy Specialist) earned her M.F.A. in fiction from Arizona State University. As a specialist in creative writing pedagogy, she has served as Director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ pedagogy forums, and as editor of the national pedagogy papers. She is a contributing author to Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Poetry and Fiction (Prentice Hall 2001 and 2004) and to Power and Identity: The Authority Project (Multilingual Matters, 2006). Her creative work appears most recently in Fourth River Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Eclipse. She directs the Creative Writing program at Emporia State University, where she teaches introductory creative writing, fiction writing, special topics and studies in creative writing, and literary editing. She currently serves as managing editor of Bluestem Press and Flint Hills Review, and serves on the boards of Woodley Memorial Press and the Kansas Arts Commission. She recently completed her first collection of short fiction, Save Your Own Life.
Terry Wolverton (fiction) is the author of six books. Of her most recent, the poetry collection Shadow and Praise, poet Gerald Locklin wrote, “These poems vibrate with controlled breathing, like American mantras infused with Eastern scriptural spirituality. I have the highest admiration for this achievement by a poet and human being who has spent a lifetime in preparation for such a crowning achievement.” Embers is a novel-in-poems about which poet Anne Waldman has said, “…this book is a commitment to the beauties and scintillating particulars of a generous language. This is a tremendous weave of site and humanity.” Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Book Award. Insurgent Muse: life and art at the Woman’s Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the “Best Books of 2002” by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publisher’s Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award. Her novel, Bailey’s Beads, was a finalist in the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Awards for 1997; Kirkus Reviews said of it, “her ambitious debut…features…a stark but melodious prose style…confident style and affecting characters.” She has also published two other collections of poetry: Black Slip, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 1993, and Mystery Bruise. A new novel, The Labrys Reunion, will be published by Spinsters Ink in 2009. Her fiction, poetry, essays and drama have been published in periodicals internationally, including Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train Stories, The Stinging Fly, and Zyzzyva, and widely anthologized.Two additional novels will be published by Spinsters Ink: The Labrys Reunion (2009) and Stealing Angel (2010.) She has also edited several successful compilations: Harbinger: poetry and fiction by Los Angeles writers; Indivisible: short fiction by West Coast gay and lesbian writers; Blood Whispers: L.A. Writers on AIDS, Volumes 1 and 2; the Lambda Literary Award-winning His: brilliant new fiction by gay men and Hers: brilliant new fiction by lesbians, volumes 1, 2, and 3; the series Circa 2000: Lesbian Fiction At the Millennium and Gay Fiction At the Millennium, and the poetry anthology, Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies. Most recently, she co-edited, with Sondra Hale, the anthology From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in contemporary culture, published on the internet at http://www.womansbuilding.org/fromsitetovision/ . In 2000, she began collaborating as a writer with choreographer Heidi Duckler and Collage Dance Theater on the site-specific performances subVersions, Under Eden, After Eden, and Cover Story. She is currently working on adapting Embers as a jazz opera. Terry has taught creative writing for over twenty-five years; in 1997, she founded Writers at Work, a center for creative writing in Los Angeles, where she offers several weekly workshops in fiction and poetry. She is currently an Associate Faculty Mentor for the M.F.A.Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She spent thirteen years at the Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, eventually serving as its executive director. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards for her artistic and community contributions, most recently, a California Arts Council Artist Fellowship for Poetry and a COLA Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She is also a certified instructor of Kundalini Yoga. Website: www.terrywolverton.xbuild.com
Guest Artists and Lecturers:
Dorothy Allison (Creative Nonfiction) was born in Greenville, South Carolina and makes her home in Northern California, with her partner Alix, and her teenage son, Wolf Michael. Her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina, was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. Her second novel, Cavedweller (Dutton, 1998), was a New York Times Bestseller, won the 1998 Lambda Literary Award for fiction and was a finalist for the Lillian Smith Prize. A chapbook of her performance work in the form of a memoir: Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, was published in 1995. Trash, first published in 1987, was republished in an expanded edition in 2002. “Compassion,” a short story from that edition, appeared in The Best American Short Stories: 2003, edited by Walter Mosley (Houghton Mifflin), and was selected for The Best of the South: 2003, edited by Shannon Ravenel (Algonquin). Recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction in 2007, Ms. Allison is a member of the Board of the Southern Fellowship of Writers, the Advisory Boards of the Full Frame Initiative, the Macondo Foundation, and the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. She was Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry’s Distinguished Visiting Professor, 2008, and Writer in Residence at Columbia College in Chicago in 2006. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Penguin.
Mark E. Cull (Publishing Arts) is the publisher of Red Hen Press, which he founded in 1994 with poet Kate Gale. He has co-edited two anthologies of contemporary American fiction, and is the author of the short fiction collection, One Way Donkey Ride, which was published in 2002 by Asylum Arts (Paradise, CA).
Mark Doty (Poetry), the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of six books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis(1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001), and the most recent critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (2005), HarperCollin. He is the author of the memoirs Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007). His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001). Among his many awards are two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty teaches in the graduate program the University of Houston, and is a frequent guest at Columbia University, Hunter College, and NYU. He lives in Houston and in New York City.
Tananarive Due (Guest Fiction Faculty) — pronounced tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo — is the American Book Award-winning author of books ranging from mysteries to supernatural thrillers to a civil rights memoir. Due also collaborates with her husband, novelist and screenwriter Steven Barnes. They recently sold their screenplay adaptation of her novel The Good House to Fox Searchlight studios. In the summer of 2007, Due and Barnes published their first mystery, Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel, which they wrote in collaboration with actor Blair Underwood. The series continued with In the Night of the Heat, published in September. Due co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights with her mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. The book was named 2003's Best Civil Rights Memoir by Black Issues Book Review. (Patricia Stephens Due took part in the nation's first "Jail-In" in 1960, spending 49 days in jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter). Due has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. In addition to Antioch, Due has also taught at the Hurston-Wright Foundation's Writers' Week, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, and the summer Imagination conference at Cleveland State University. She is a former feature writer and columnist for The Miami Herald. Due lives in Southern California with her husband, Steven Barnes; their son, Jason; and her stepdaughter, Nicki.
Charles Flowers, a fifteen year-plus veteran of publishing and arts administration (Publishing Arts Guest and Commencement Speaker) has worked with such authors as Urvashi Vaid, E. Lynn Harris, Joan Larkin, Michelangelo Signorile, Sarah Schulman, Andrew Holleran, Keith Boykin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Stacey D’Erasmo, among many others. During 1998-2004, he served as the co-chair of the Publishing Triangle, the association of lesbians and gay men in publishing, and from 2001 to 2005, he was Associate Director of the Academy of American Poets. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt University and received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Oregon. He is the co-author of Golden Men: The Power of Gay Midlife (with Harold Kooden, Ph.D.), and his poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, and Puerto del Sol. Flowers is also the founding editor of BLOOM, a journal for lesbian and gay writing that Edmund White has called “the most exciting new queer literary publication to emerge in years" (http://www.bloommagazine.org). Flowers became Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation (www.lambdaliterary.org) in January 2006, and he coordinates the following programs: Lambda Book Report (the only print publication devoted to LGBT books and authors), the Lambda Literary Awards (the largest & most comprehensive awards program for LGBT books), and the Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers (a week-long residency of craft workshops, lectures, readings, panels, and community building).
Ed Frankel (Critical Paper Seminar; Teaching Academic Writing) received his BA from Antioch in 1974 and his M.A. in Applied Linguistics from UCLA in 1981. He is on the English Department Writing Programs faculty at UCLA. As Adjunct faculty at Antioch he teaches Introduction to Modernism and Post-Modernism, Literary Nonfiction and Advanced Stylistics, Literature and Literary Criticism. He has coauthored two instructional college English texts. His poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Americas Review, The Dogwood Journal of Poetry and Prose, The Litchfield Review, Fugue, and other journals. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Mark Lieberman (publishing arts) is Manager, Regional Economic Development for the Community Development Commission of Los Angeles County. Dr. Lieberman’s responsibilities include the Business and Technology Incubator programs, loan programs and enterprise zones. This includes the world class Business Technology Center of Los Angeles County (BTC) and LA Boost, a small business incubator. Dr. Lieberman is a founder and co-chair of Los Angeles County Technology Week, a series of events that promote technology in Los Angeles County. Prior to joining the BTC, Dr. Lieberman was employed by a strategy and organization change consulting company, an international investment bank and as an international banker. Dr. Lieberman teaches Technical Entrepreneurship, Introduction to New Ventures and Management of Small Ventures at USC. He holds a Doctor of Organization Change from Pepperdine University and an MBA from the Presidential/Key Executive Program at Pepperdine University. He recently published an article in the prestigious journal Cytotechnology, “Commercializing Medical Technology.” Dr. Lieberman has consulted for a number of governments in entrepreneurship, incubation, angel and venture capital. He is a member of the Pasadena Angels and the Tech Coast Angels. He is an active member in Professionals Network Group (PNG), and serves on the Executive Committee of the Pasadena group. Dr. Lieberman is also a member of the Advisory Committee for the Center for Technology Commercialization at the University of Southern California, the Advisory Board for the School of Business of Woodbury University, the Executive Committee for the Caltech MIT Forum and the Strategic Advisory Council for Entretech.
David L. Ulin (ACS I) is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, which was recently published by Viking Penguin. He is also the author of Cape Cod Blues (Red Dust, 1992), a book of poems, and the editor of two anthologies of Southern California literature: Another City: Writing from Los Angeles (City Lights, 2001), selected as a Best Book of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, (Library of America, 2002), which won a California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club of California, and was selected as one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He teaches at the University of Redlands. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He was recently named Book Editor for the Los Angeles Times.
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