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Suzanne Buffam

Suzanne Buffam is the author of two collections of poetry, Past Imperfect (House of Anansi), which won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 2005, and was named one of 2005's Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail, and The Irrationalist, published in 2010 by Canarium Books in the U.S. and House of Anansi in Canada. Her poems have appeared in various journals in the U.S. and Canada, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her work appears in several international anthologies and has been translated into French, German, Spanish and Slovenian. She won the 1998 Canadian Literary Award for Poetry and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in Canada, she received an MA in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Garin Cycholl

Garin Cycholl’s recent work has appeared with Admit2, Rain Taxi, Exquisite Corpse, New American Writing, and Seven Corners.  He is author of Blue Mound to 161 (winner of the 2003 Transcontinental Prize), Nightbirds, Levitations, and Raeftown Georgics.  Since 2002, he has been a member of Chicago’s Jimmy Wynn fiction collaborative. Email.

 

Rachel DeWoskin

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of the forthcoming novel Big Girl Small (FSG 2011), the award-winning novel Repeat After Me (Overlook 2009), and a memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing (W.W. Norton, 2005), which has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Rachel has published poetry in magazines including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, The New Delta Review, New Orleans Review, Nerve Magazine, New Orleans Review and The Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Conde Nast Traveler, Departures, Gourmet Magazine, Teachers & Writers Magazine and anthologies including Found Magazine’s Requiem for a Paper Bag and Wanderlust. Her awards include a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship, and an American Academy of Poets Award.

 

Paul Durica

Paul Durica has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language & Literature at the
University of Chicago. His writing has appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, and
Mid-American Review among other places and is forthcoming in ACM and The
Chicagoan. He is the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell, a series of tours and
reenactments that have been written about in the New York Times, Huffington
Post, ReadyMade, and Vice. He lives in Chicago with his two cats.

Paul Hornschemeier

Paul Hornschemeier is the author of the series "Forlorn Funnies," and the graphic novels "Mother, Come Home," "The Three Paradoxes", and "Life with Mr. Dangerous," as well as the short story collections "Let Us Be Perfectly Clear" and "All and Sundry." His work has been translated into multiple languages and has won international acclaim and awards, including Rolling Stone's "Next List" of up-and-coming artists and performers and honors at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. His prose and comics stories have appeared in Life Magazine and The Best American NonRequired Reading and he has provided illustrations for clients ranging from Intel to The Wall Street Journal to This American Life. He lives and works in Evanston.

Mickle Maher

Mickle Maher is a cofounder of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck and the author of numerous plays, including An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening, and The Hunchback Variations. Recent plays include The Strangerer, Spirits to Enforce (Theater Oobleck), Cyrano (translator) and The Cabinet (Redmoon Theater), and Lady Madeline (Steppenwolf). His plays have appeared Off-Broadway and in numerous theaters around the world. He is published by Hope and Nonthings. He has been the recipient of a Creative Capital grant (for The Strangerer) and, recently, an NEA grant to develop his Hunchback Variations into an opera. He currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

Frank Maugeri

Frank has served as a director, designer, and performer with Redmoon since 1996, becoming the Artistic Director in 2009. He is a recipient of the prestigious NEA/TCG Career Development Award for Directors, where he worked extensively with Dogtroepe and Groupe ZUR in Europe. He was a founding member of Theater DANK, a collaboration of puppet directors and designers who led the successful Chicago Puppet Festivals in 1998 and 1999, as well as many events and gatherings featuring DANK’s own work and the work of many national puppet theater makers. Frank has served as an instructor and guest artist to Gallery 37, Project LEAP, UIC, Northwestern University, The Jung Institute, Chicago Park District, and Department of Cultural Affairs. He teaches at Columbia College.

Jeff McMahon

Jeff McMahon has written for daily newspapers including the Arizona Republic, alternative weeklies including New Times and Newcity, and innovators in online journalism including The New York Times Company's Lifewire syndicate, Forbes Media's Trueslant.com, and The Weather Channel's climate site, Forecast Earth. A specialist in environmental reporting, he has won dozens of awards for news writing and commentary, including top honors from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. A graduate of Chicago's Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, he is a founding editor, along with other MAPH alumni, of Contrary magazine. He also serves as MAPH's writing advisor.

Peter O'Leary

Peter O’Leary graduated from the College and the Divinity School. He has published three books of poetry, Watchfulness (Sputen Duyvil), Depth Theology (Georgia), and Luminous Epinoia (Cultural Society), as well as a book of literary criticism, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (Welseyan). As Ronald Johnson’s literary executor, he has edited three books: To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems (Talisman), The Shrubberies (Flood), and Radi os (Flood). Two new Ronald Johnson books, The Outworks and a new edition of ARK are both forthcoming from Flood. Likewise, a selected poems of John Taggart, Is Music, which he edited, has been published by Copper Canyon. He is a longtime editor of LVNG, an advisory editor for the Cultural Society, and an integral member of the Chicago Poetry Project.

Daniel Raeburn

Daniel Raeburn is the author of The Imp, a series of booklets about underground cartoonists. He also wrote the book Chris Ware. His other essays and memoirs have appeared in The Baffler, Tin House, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He earned his BA at the University of Iowa and his MFA from Bennington College.

Srikanth Reddy

Srikanth Reddy's first collection of poetry, Facts for Visitors, was published by the University of California Press in Spring 2004. His poems have appeared in various journals, including APR, Grand Street, Fence, and Ploughshares, and his critical writing has been featured in publications such as the New Republic, the Chicago Tribune, and American Literature. He has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation (in the Humanities), and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Holding an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a PhD from Harvard University, Reddy is an Assistant Professor in English and the College. Email.

Augustus Rose

A native of San Francisco, Augustus Rose's fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Berkeley Fiction Review, Readymade Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and F Magazine, where he won the Novel-in-Progress Award. He has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Writers' Conference and the Eastern Frontier Society Foundation. He earned his MA in creative writing at UC Davis and currently teaches fiction writing at University of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago.

 

Donna Seaman

Donna Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist, a book critic for Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ), and a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Bookforum and other venues. A recipient of the Writer Magazine Writers Who Make a Difference Award, the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, and several Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, Seaman was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Seaman’s essays and interviews have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, F Magazine, and Creative Nonfiction. A contributor to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, Seaman created the fiction anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, and her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books.

Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009), and of several chapbooks. She is now at work on Exit 43—an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups—for the cross-genre publishing project Atelos Press. Excerpts of that book appear in Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, featuring her pop-ups and prose and new writing by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna, 2009). Pop-ups are also being adapted for a performance work called PARK, in collaboration with choreographer Kathy Westwater and architect Seung Jae Lee, with an initial showing at Dance Theater Workshop in February 2010; a site-specific instantiation was developed for performance at Freshkills, Staten Island in June 2010. A selection of Neosuprematist Webtexts, filmed verse stills, was installed at Infusoria, an exhibit of visual poetry in Ghent in 2009. Scappettone was guest editor of the feature section of Aufgabe 7, presenting contemporary Italian poetry "of research" (2008), and is at work on a range of translations from Italian, with a focus on the “Babeling deeply felt” of the postwar polyglot author Amelia Rosselli. Her poetry, translations, and prose appear in a range of journals and anthologies, most recently in boundary 2, Jubilat, and the forthcoming anthology La alteración del silencio: Poesía norteamericana reciente (Das Kapital). Her critical book-in-progress, Modernism in Venice, is a study of the obsolescent city as a crucible for twentieth-century aesthetic experiment. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing and affiliate of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Center for Gender Studies. A range of readings are available for download at her PennSound author page. She will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow in 2010-11. Email.

Megan Stielstra

Megan Stielstra is a writer, storyteller, and the Literary Director of 2nd Story, a personal narrative storytelling series set in wine bars. She’s told stories for the Goodman, the Steppenwolf, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Poetry Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, Story Week, Wordstock, the Neo-Futurarium, and numerous other theatres, festivals, and conferences, as well as regularly on Chicago Public Radio. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in recent issues of Other Voices, Cell Stories, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Perigee, Annalemma, and In the Fray, and have been performed by Chicago’s Theatre Seven and Bohemian Archeology in NYC. She holds an MFA from Columbia College where she currently teaches in the Fiction Writing Department and serves as Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence; she's also a lecturer at the University of Chicago and a teaching artist with the Goodman Theatre.

Vu Tran

Vu Tran’s short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2009, the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, A Best of Fence, The Southern Review, and Harvard Review.  He has also received honors from Glimmer Train and the Michigan Quarterly Review and is a 2009 recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.  His first novel, This Or Any Desert, is forthcoming from WW Norton.  Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, and his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was the Glenn Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.  

John Wilkinson

John Wilkinson's most recent books of poetry are Lake Shore Drive (Salt 2006) and Down to Earth (Salt 2008). Born in London and educated at Cambridge, he worked in mental health services in the industrial West Midlands, South Wales and the East End of London before moving to the University of Notre Dame as Writer in Residence in 2005. He joined the English Department at Chicago in 2010. As well as nine books of poetry and several chapbooks, he has also published a critical collection, The Lyric Touch (Salt 2007) and critical essays on modernist and contemporary British and American poetry.

Leila Wilson

Leila Wilson's The Hundred Grasses is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in the fall of 2011. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, The Canary, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. She received her MFA from Indiana University and her MA from University of Chicago. A former editor at Chicago Review, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Faculty from Previous Years

Elizabeth Crane, Miranda Mellis, Walter Kirn, Margaret Sloan, Jonathan Harr, Nic Pizzolatto, Ed Roberson, Alane Rollings, Carol Felsenthal, Tim McNulty, Ivan Brunetti, Rob Morris, Jerome Perzigian, cin Salach, Achy Obejas, Greg Allen, Claudia Allen, Beau O'Reilly, Susan Fromberg-Schaeffer, see Vare Nonfiction Writers in Residence.

University Creative Writing Advisory Committee

Kelly Austin, Heidi Coleman, Bradin Cormack, Theaster Gates, Leela Gandhi, Saeed Ghahremani, Jason Grunebaum, Janice Knight, Larry McEnerney, Mark Payne, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Bozena Shallcross, Christina von Nolcken.