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Ivan Brunetti

Ivan Brunetti was born in a small town in Italy on October 3, 1967. At the tender age of 8, he moved from his grandparents' farm in Italy to the industrial South Side of Chicago; he has lived in this fair city ever since, rarely venturing outside of its bittersweet confines. He currently works as a web designer and in the past has taught classes on editorial illustration and comics at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Chicago. In 2005, he curated The Cartoonist's Eye, an exhibit of 75 artists' work, for the A+D Gallery of Columbia College Chicago; the exhibit was a preview for An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (Yale University Press, 2006), which he edited. A second volume of this Anthology is scheduled for Fall 2008. In addition to all of the above, he has contributed sporadic comic strips for The Chicago Reader (and a handful of other alternative weekly newspapers) and has drawn comics and illustrations for The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Spin, Mother Jones, Fast Company, The Baffler, The Comics Journal, In These Times, and (inexplicably) Scooby-Doo. His comics have been featured in McSweeney's Number 13 as well as Houghton-Mifflin's Best American Comics 2006 and 2007. To date, Fantagraphics Books has published four issues of his comic book series, Schizo, and two collections of his morally inexcusable gag cartoons, HAW! and its miniature companion, HEE! Moreover, in 2007 Fantagraphics published Misery Loves Comedy, which collected the first three issues of Schizo as well as a host of early and obscure work. Mr. Brunetti's comics have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Czech, Dutch, Swedish, and (soon) French. In 2007 Buenaventura Press published Mr. Brunetti's Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice booklet, included as a supplement to the magazine Comic Art, Number 9. Recently, he drew a comic-strip sequence for the city of Las Vegas, on the theme of "Thirst," for The Aerial Gallery, which consists of fifty serialized artworks printed onto banners along Las Vegas Boulevard. The exhibit will be on display from February 28, 2008 to February 2009. For more biographical information about Mr. Brunetti as well as his various "theories" about everything, please consult both his interview in issue 264 of The Comics Journal, published by Fantagraphics Books, and In The Studio, edited by Todd Hignite and published by Yale University Press (2006). He lives in Chicago with his wife and their three cats.

Suzanne Buffam

Suzanne Buffam's first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect (House of Anansi), 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. Her poems have appeared in various journals in the U.S. and Canada, including Poetry, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, A Public Space and The Canary. 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 M.A. in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. ON LEAVE 2007-2008

Elizabeth Crane

Elizabeth Crane is the author of two collections of short stories from Little, Brown: When the Messenger is Hot and All this Heavenly Glory. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Other Voices, Nerve, Sycamore Review, Mississippi Review, Florida Review, Bridge, Sonora Review, the Chicago Reader and The Believer, and anthologies including McSweeney's Future Dictionary of America, Altared, Loser, The Show I’ll Never Forget, and The Best Underground Fiction. She is also a regular contributor to Writer's Block Party on WBEZ Chicago and her stories have been featured on BEZ’s Stories on stage and NPR’s Selected Shorts. She received the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award in 2003. In 2007, Steppenwolf presented a theatrical adaptation of When the Messenger is Hot, which will be seen in New York in October.  A short film based on her story ‘Stealer’ will be released in fall 2007.  Her third collection of stories, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, will be released by Punk Planet Books in February 2007.

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, and the forthcoming Levitations.  Since 2002, he has been a member of Chicago’s Jimmy Wynn fiction collaborative.

Jonathan Harr

Please visit varewir.uchicago.edu for more information about Jonathan Harr, the 2008 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence. Mr. Harr will be on campus in Spring 2008.

Jeff McMahon

Jeff McMahon worked as a reporter, editor, and columnist for daily newspapers and alternative weeklies in Arizona and California. His work has appeared in New Times, Newcity, the Arizona Republic, and other publications. A specialist in environmental reporting, his assignments also included coverage of Congress, the counterrevolutionary war in Nicaragua, forest fires, earthquakes, and the occasional spelling bee. His commentaries have been honored as California's best by the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the nation's best by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In 1999 he won the Golden Quill, an international prize awarded to a single commentary judged best among English-language weeklies. In 2000 he became the first writer to win the Golden Quill twice. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he has been reviewing books and films for two decades. He currently serves as the writing advisor for the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.

Nic Pizzolatto

Nic Pizzolatto received his MFA from the University of Arkansas in 2005, where he was awarded the $10,000 Walton Foundation Fellowship in Creative Writing two years in a row and received a Lilly Peter Fellowship in Poetry. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Oxford American, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and various other literary journals. In 2004, his work was among the finalists for the National Magazine Award in Fiction. His first book, Between Here and the Yellow Sea, was published in May, 2006. It was long-listed for the International Frank O’Connor Award, and named by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the top five fiction debuts of the year. He is currently at work on novels and stories.

Daniel Raeburn

Daniel Raeburn is the author of Chris Ware, published by Yale. His book The Imp of the Perverse is forthcoming from WW Norton. His essays have appeared in The Baffler, Tin House, and The New Yorker, as well as in anthologies published by Norton, Princeton Architectural Press, and Yale. He has won several fellowships and honors, for which he is most grateful. He graduated from the University of Iowa and from Bennington College, where he earned an MFA in Writing and Literature.

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. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Reddy is an Assistant Professor in English and the College. ON LEAVE 2007-2008

Ed Roberson

Ed Roberson’s seventh book of poetry, “City Eclogue” was published spring 2006, Number 23 in the Atelos series. His collection, “Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In” was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; his book “Atmosphere Conditions” was a winner of the National Poetry Series and was nominated for the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award for best book of 2000. He was a recipient of the Lila Wallace Writers’ Award. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2004 and 2005, Callaloo, Hambone and The Chicago Review and many other journals. He is currently Visiting Artist at Northwestern University for the 2007 Fall quarter and will teach workshops in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago as a Visiting Professor in Winter and Spring 2008.

 

cin Salach

Poet of page & stage, cin salach has been poet-ing in Chicago and around the country for a long time now. She has collaborated with musicians, painters, poets, video artists, dancers and photographers in such groups as The Loofah Method, Betty’s Mouth and ten tongues with whom she recorded the CD, A Wide Arc. Her first book, Looking for a Soft Place to Land, was published by Tia Chucha Press. Her new manuscript is titled When I am Yes. During the day she is a consultant for Words@Play, an after-school poetry program she co-founded with the Chicago Park District and Children’s Humanities Festival, a Ragdale teaching artist and an arts seminar leader with Chicago Semester—an urban studies program for college students. At night, she writes.

Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (poems, forthcoming from Litmus Press), and is now at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill & opera of pop-ups, commissioned by Atelos Press. Chapbooks include Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e chap kollectiv), Err-Residence (Bronze Skull), and Abluvion Almanac (graphic stills, from Outside Voices), all out in 2007. Her work in translation from Italian currently encompasses Locomotrix: Selected Poems of Amelia Rosselli and a special issue of Aufgabe she is guest-editing, devoted to contemporary Italian experiment. Her poems are part of the anthologies Bay Poetics, Enough, The Best American Poetry 2004, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, The Outside Voices Anthology of Younger Poets, Viz.Inter-Arts, and War & Peace, and her writing appears in journals such as 2nd Avenue Poetry, American Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, Boston Review, Chain, Chicago Review, Circumference, GAMMM, The American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Canary, The Poker, Volt, and Zoland Annual. She has collaborated with musicians as performer and lyricist, has exhibited visual work in California, Virginia, and Nagoya, and is now writing for The Last Performance [dot org], a constraint-based writing, archiving, and text-visualization project, in collaboration with Goat Island Performance Collective. She is Assistant Professor of English and the College.

Mary Margaret Sloan

Mary Margaret Sloan is the author of two books of poetry, The Said Lands, Islands, and Premises (Chax Press, 1995), and Infiltration (Queriendo Press, 1989). She edited the anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998), which surveys poetry as well as trans-genre and multi-media works from the nineteen sixties to the mid nineteen nineties. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and has been anthologized in Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Talisman House, 1996) and the Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets (Potes & Poets Press, 1994). Recent work can be seen at the online journals Fascicle and Titanic Operas. Essays have appeared in A Grand Permission, edited by Brenda Hillman, (Wesleyan 2003) and The World in Time and Place: Toward a History of Innovative American Poetry (Talisman, 2002). She serves on the board of The Chicago Poetry Project and curated the CPP’s 2006/2007 reading series.

Mark Slouka

Mark Slouka is the author of four books: a critique of the digital revolution, War of the Worlds, a collection of stories, Lost Lake, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and two novel, God's Fool and The Visible World. A contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, his essays "Hitler's Couch," "Listening for Silence," and "Arrow and Wound" were selected for inclusion in Best American Essays of 1999, 2000, and 2003, respectively. His story, "The Woodcarver's Tale," won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. A National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he has taught at Columbia, the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard, where he twice received the Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching. ON LEAVE 2007-2008

Megan Stielstra

Megan Stielstra is a writer, storyteller and Director of Story Development for 2nd Story, Chicago’s urban storytelling series held in wine bars. She’s performed for The Chicago Poetry Center’s No Love For Love show featuring Ira Glass, Neo-Solo at the Neo-Futurarium, Storyweek Festival of Writer’s, 20% Theatre’s Snapshots, Undershorts Film Festival, The Dollar Store, WBEZ’s Writer’s Block Party and 2nd Story; her fiction has appeared in recent issues of Other Voices, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Perigree, In the Fray and Punk Planet. Currently, Megan teaches fiction writing at Columbia College and The University of Chicago, and has presented papers for The Associated Writing Programs National Conference, The National Association of Writing in Education in London and the Center for Art in Public Life in San Fransisco, as well as judging Chicago Public Radio’s 2007 Third Coast International Audio Festival. She spent 2004 in Prague, teaching Kafka and working on a novel.

Faculty from Previous Years

Alane Rollings, Carol Felsenthal, Tim McNulty, Ivan Brunetti, Rob Morris, Jerome Perzigian, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, cin Salach, Achy Obejas, Greg Allen, Claudia Allen, Beau O'Reilly, see Vare Nonfiction Writers in Residence.

University Creative Writing Advisory Committee

Kelly Austin, Heidi Coleman, Bradin Cormack, Jason Grunebaum, Oren Izenberg, Janice Knight, Larry McEnerney, Mark Miller, Mark Payne, Srikanth Reddy, Mario Santana, Bozena Shallcross, Lisa Ruddick, Mark Slouka, Christina von Nolcken.