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Faculty and Visiting Lecturers

2000–10

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.

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.

 

 

Paul Durica

Paul Durica's short stories and essays have appeared in the Seattle Review, Tin House, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review and other places. He is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council fellowship. He is the fiction editor of Chicago Review and the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours.

 

 

 

Judith Goldman

Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), which won a Book of the Year award from Small Press Traffic, DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), and The Dispossessions (chapbook; Atticus/Finch 2009). A new book, l.b.; or, catenaries, will be published by Krupskaya in the summer of 2010. The Wall on Terra: A Tragi-Comic Border Novel-Policy on BioPiracy, a play about political, economic, and environmental issues surrounding the Mexico-U.S. border, was performed at the New Langton Arts Gallery in San Francisco in 2005 and will also be published as an Atelos book. Her work has been anthologized in (for example) The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (&Now [forthcoming 2009]), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Make Now Books [forthcoming 2010]), Bay Poetics (Faux Press 2005), and An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman 1996), among other collections. Her interests and current research directions in poetry and poetics include contemporary American avant-garde poetry; and thinking through lyric (in history) as an economy among voice, sound, metrics, meaning, and noise. She received a doctorate from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature (2007). She worked with poet and publisher Jocelyn Saidenberg and poet, playwright, novelist Kevin Killian as a coeditor of Krupskaya press for the 2002 and 2003 seasons; with Leslie Scalapino, she currently edits the annual journal War and Peace. Currently, she is a Harper Schmidt Fellow at U of C.

 

Jason Grunebaum

Jason Grunebaum’s short stories have appeared in One Story, Southwest Review, Third Coast, WebConjunctions, and 5_Trope. Salman Rushdie selected his Maria Ximenes da Costa de Carvalho Perreira for a Best American Short Stories 2008 honorable mention. His translation from Hindi of Uday Prakash’s novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India) won a 2005 PEN Translation Fund award, and he has received fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, and has taught at the University of Chicago since 2004.

 

Mickle Maher

Mickle Maher is a cofounder of Theater Oobleck, and has been a playwright/adaptor/translator for 20 years. He has authored eight plays for Oobleck, including The Strangerer (funded by a grant from Creative Capital), Spirits to Enforce, and The Hunchback Variations. Other plays include Cyrano (translator) and The Cabinet for Redmoon Theater, and Lady Madeline for Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Maher's works have been produced throughout the country and in Europe. His children’s book, Master Stitchum and the Moon, is published by Bollix Books. His plays are published by Hope and Nonthings (hopeandnonthings.com). He is currently working with Redmoon's Frank Maugeri on a shadow/slide theater work about a very old Superman.

 

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 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.

Peter O'Leary

Peter O’Leary graduated from the College and the Divinity School. He has published two books of poetry, Watchfulness (Sputen Duyvil) and Depth Theology (Georgia), 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, which he edited, is forthcoming from 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 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.

Augustus Rose

Augustus Rose earned his MA in creative writing at University of California, Davis, and has published fiction and non-fiction in f7, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Readymade Magazine, Whole Earth Review, and Publishers Weekly, among others. He won F Magazine’s first novels-in-progress contest for an excerpt from his novel Revolutionaries. Rose has received fellowships to the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference and the Eastern Frontier Society’s Norton Island Residency. A native of California, Rose is currently a part-time faculty member in the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department. Email

Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009), and of several chapbooks: Ode oggettuale/Thing Ode, a bilingual poemetto translated into Italian with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, 2008); Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007); and Beauty (Is the New Absurdity) (dusi/e kollectiv, 2008). 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 pop-ups and prose by Scappettone, a lyric sequence by Etel Adnan, and an essay by Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna, 2009). Pop-ups are now being adapted for performance in collaboration with choreographer Kathy Westwater as LAND at Dance Theater Workshop and Movement Research in Winter 2010. A selection of Neosuprematist Webtexts, filmed phrasal stills, was installed at Infusoria, an exhibit of visual poetry curated by Helen White for the Festival Le Off in Brussels and Het Zilverhof in Ghent, in 2009, and are coming up in the journal speechless. Scappettone was guest editor of the feature section of Aufgabe 7, presenting poetry and criticism by thirteen contemporary Italian poets (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 War and Peace, Volume IV (O Books, 2009), Wild Orchids: A Journal of Devotional Criticism (2009), and Washington Square (2009). Her critical book-in-progress is a study of the city of Venice as a crucible for modernist experimentation; other recent critical publications address ambient poetics and traffics of historicism. 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 her readings, a talk on poetry and landscape, and a podcast dialogue with Al Filreis are available for download at her new PennSound author page. Email.

 

James Shea

James Shea is an accomplished Chicago poet who visited the University in the fall of 2008 as a guest of the Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series. His book, Star in the Eye, was selected by Nick Flynn for the 2008 Fence Modern Poets Series. His chapbook, Straits, is comprised of translations from the Japanese of Ozaki Hosai. He has taught creative writing, East Asian literature, and translation courses at DePaul, Columbia, and the University of Iowa.

 

 

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. On leave 2009-10.

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

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, Mark Slouka, Christina von Nolcken.