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Faculty and Visiting Lecturers

2008–09

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 MA in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Email.

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, and, most recently, one from Punk Planet titled You Must Be This Happy to Enter. 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 WBEZ’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" was released in fall 2007. Email.

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.

 

Jeff McMahon

Jeff McMahon has 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. Email.

 

Miranda Mellis

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press) andMaterialisms (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs). Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and publications including Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, Modern Painters, The Believer, Fence, Cabinet, and Denver Quarterly. She is an editor at The Encyclopedia Project.

 

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. Email.

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.

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. ON LEAVE 2008–09. Email.

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 novels, 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. Email.

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. Email.

Faculty from Previous Years

Walter Kirn, Mickle Maher, Margaret Sloan, Peter O'Leary, Jonathan Harr, Nic Pizzolatto, Ed Roberson, 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, Theaster Gates, Leela Ghandi, Saeed Ghahremani, Jason Grunebaum, Janice Knight, Larry McEnerney, Mark Payne, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Bozena Shallcross, Mark Slouka, Christina von Nolcken.