Faculty

Jeffrey Brown was born in 1975 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. While earning his studio MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brown abandoned painting and began drawing comics with his first autobiographical book 'Clumsy' in 2001. Since then he's drawn more than a dozen books for publishers including TopShelf, Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, McSweeney's, Chronicle Books and Simon & Schuster. Brown has also directed an animated video for the band Death Cab For Cutie,  had his work featured on NPR's 'This American Life,' and co-wrote the screenplay of the film 'Save The Date.' In 2012, his book 'Darth Vader and son' was a NYTimes #1 bestseller. His art has been shown at galleries in New York,  Los Angeles, Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.  He lives in Chicago with his wife Jennifer and their son.

Rachel DeWoskin’s most recent novel, Big Girl Small, (FSG 2011) is the recipient of the 2012 American Library Association’s Alex Award and was named one of the top 3 books of 2011 by Newsday. DeWoskin’s memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton 2005) about the years she spent in China as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Her debut novel Repeat After Me, which follows the unexpected romance between a young American ESL teacher and a troubled Chinese radical, won a Foreward Magazine Book of the Year Award. Her next novel, Blind, is forthcoming from Viking Penguin in 2013. Rachel has written essays and articles for Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Teachers and Writers, and for anthologies including Found: Requiem for a Paper Bag, and Wanderlust. She has published poems in journals including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, New Delta Review, Nerve Magazine and The New Orleans Review. She teaches memoir and fiction at the University of Chicago, and divides her time between Chicago and Beijing with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two little girls. 

Baird Harper’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Tin House, The Chicago Tribune, Mid-American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, CutBank, and Printers Row Journal. His stories have been anthologized in Best New American Voices 2009 and 2010, and won the 2009 James Jones Fiction Contest and the 2010 Nelson Algren Award. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Montana and an M.F.A. in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently living in Oak Park with his wife and two kids, he teaches writing at Loyola University and The University of Chicago.

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.

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 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, Tim 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.

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.

Jeremy Smith is a cartoonist and illustrator living in Chicago and working under the name, "Onsmith." His work has appeared in The Chicago Reader, The Portland Mercury, Oxford American Magazine, Hotwire Comics (Fantagraphics Books), Vice Magazine, both volumes of Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories (Yale University Press), and may be viewed at here. He has exhibited in several galleries, including Hyde Park Art Center, Western Exhibitions, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Roger Brown Study Collection, Columbia College (where he also teaches), and others.  Also, see the collaborative artwork made with fellow artist, Paul Nudd, at WesternXeditions.The majority of which was made during artist residencies at Anchor Graphics and Spudnik Press.

Vu Tran’s fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, A Best of Fence, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and other publications.  He has received honors from Glimmer Train Stories and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a recipient of a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2011 Finalist Award for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.  His first novel, This Or Any Desert, is forthcoming from WW Norton.  Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow in fiction at the Black Mountain Institute.  

Leila Wilson's The Hundred Grasses is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. 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.