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    Program Faculty

     

    Download Printable Version of Faculty Listings

    Faculty Mentors

    Candace Black     Pope Brock     David Carkeet     Richard Duggin     Charles Fort   

    Teri Youmans Grimm     Amy Hassinger     Allison Adelle Hedge Coke     Patricia Henley

    Art Homer     Steve Langan     Patricia Lear     Jim Peterson     John Price

    Richard Robbins     Lee Ann Roripaugh      Catie Rosemurgy     Karen Gettert Shoemaker

         Mark Haskell Smith     Brent Spencer      Mary Helen Stefaniak     Catherine Texier    

    William Trowbridge     Leigh Allison Wilson     Charles Wyatt

     

    Recent Teaching and Visiting Faculty Include:

    Megan Daum   Richard Dooling    Beth Ann Fennelly  

    Ted Kooser    Tom Franklin    Nance Van Winckel

    Current teaching and visiting residency faculty, listed alphabetically:

    (Poetry) CANDACE BLACK grew up on U.S. Marine Corps bases in southern California.  She graduated from California State University, Chico and earned a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana.  Her poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Chariton Review, Harpur Palette, Iron Horse Literary Review, Iowa Woman, Milkweed Chronicle, poemmemoirstory, Quarterly West, The Seattle Review, and War, Literature and the Arts.  The Volunteer, her first book of poems, won the Minnesota Voice Poetry Prize in 2000 and was published by New Rivers Press in 2003.  The recipient of a Loft Literary Center Creative Nonfiction Residency, a SASE/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a McKnight Individual Fellowship and a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she is an assistant professor.

    “I’m a teacher who tries to stay out of my students’ way.  I’m very involved—encouraging, listening, responding, reacting, questioning, suggesting—but I try to remind myself that it’s their poem, their voice, their discovery, their discipline.  My students’ way to making art is not through me or because of me.  I think writing comes out of your life, but you have to make your life hospitable to and supportive of writing. That means living fully—doing what you’re passionate about, but also giving yourself time for silence, for observation, for reflection, for listening.  That means reading: wide and deep, old and new, what you love and what challenges you.  That means trying:  failing, trying again, risking, surprising yourself.”

     

    (CNF/Fiction) POPE BROCK received his BA in English from Harvard University and his MFA in Drama from New York University School of the Arts. He is author of the New York Times bestseller Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Crown, 2008), an account of the improbable career of John Brinkley, the most successful quack in U.S. history. (More information, including audio clips of Brinkley’s 1930s radio talks and commercials for dangerous products, at www.popebrock.com). Brock is also the author of Indiana Gothic (Doubleday/Nan Talese), the story of the murder of his great-grandfather in 1908. His profiles, investigations, travel writing, and humor have appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Talk, The New Yorker, London Independent, Life, People, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. He has taught creative writing workshops, both fiction and nonfiction, at Marymount College and Eastern Washington University, the Beekman School in New York City, and in the Westchester County public school system.


    “Great nonfiction writers come in all styles and colors, but what unites them is relentless curiosity. You have to love over-researching; if you don’t leave a lot on the cutting room floor, you haven’t gone deep enough. I think that to write good subjective or creative nonfiction, you have to be objective first – to park your opinions going in. Being surprised is part of the job and a lot of the fun. I think that making discoveries on old microfilm can be as valuable, and as big a kick, as seeing and doing strange new things. A good journalist also needs to learn how to interview people. It may not be as complicated as playing the violin, but it is an art, not to mention a privilege.”

     

     

    (Fiction/CNF) DAVID CARKEET has written five novels, most recently The Full Catastrophe (Simon & Schuster) and The Error of Our Ways (Holt), as well as a memoir, Campus Sexpot (University of Georgia Press), which won the 2004 creative nonfiction award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Equally active in fiction and nonfiction, he has published work in Carolina Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, The New York Times Magazine, TheNorth American Review, The Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and The Village Voice. He has won an Edgar nomination, an O. Henry Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and citations in Best American Essays. He founded the MFA program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and edited its literary magazine, Natural Bridge. He was born and raised in northern California, lived for many years in the Midwest, and now lives in Middlesex, Vermont. http://www.geocities.com/davidcarkeet/

    “When I began writing creatively, I had no audience—readers who could have helped me see what worked in my writing and what didn’t—and I’m sure my isolation slowed my progress. My goal as a writing teacher is to give students what I lacked: to be an educated, objective, alert, and demanding audience for them. The ideal reader of early work is supportive and constructive but also absolutely direct. He or she appreciates what the writer is attempting without always succeeding and can see the work both in its tiny details and in its grand potential. As for other instructional goals, I try to help writers cultivate a professional temperament. This includes appreciation of the importance of reading and research, openness to ideas, creative flexibility (trying new things; not being a slave to a premature self-conception), habits of observation and note-taking, and a perspective on the challenges and cruelties of the writing marketplace. It is also important for students to become ideal readers and editors, though some succeed in this more than others. Finally, as a writer and reader, I value originality, honesty, clarity, conciseness, and humanity.”

     

    (Program Director) RICHARD DUGGIN was raised in New England and received his bachelor’s degree in literature and writing from the University of New Hampshire. He received his MFA degree in fiction writing from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he has taught fiction writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha for the past forty years. He is founder of the UNO Writer’s Workshop, a BFA degree program in creative writing within the College of Fine Arts. Duggin’s published work includes the novel The Music Box Treaty and numerous short stories which have appeared in such periodicals as American Literary Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Laurel Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Sun, Playboy, and elsewhere. His work has been cited by Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Playboy Magazine Best Fiction. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Merit Awards, and he has been awarded several artist’s residencies at Ragdale, Yaddo and the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. He has recently finished his third novel and is currently at work on a stage play.

    "Stories live inside yourself. The craft of fiction gives a story existence outside, so others may know it too. What shapes any tale is language. Before all else, students need to love language in all its possibilities and recognize when it is used well by others. The job of the writer is to make the reader believe in the world of the story—that it lies beyond where he sits reading—and what discrepancies exist between his external realities and those of the internal world of the story become integrated in his imagination. To accomplish this in his work, a writer must pay attention to the smallest matters of craft with the same attention to the details of construction that any artisan pays toward wedding form with functionality. The rudiments of craft can be learned in a group, but to master it you are better served working one on one with a mentor: a book by a writer you admire, a friend whose judgments you trust, a teacher whose experience you absorb. I see my job as the latter. My approach to teaching fiction is to determine where each student is, then goad him to go where he wants to be. It has always been my approach with students to persist in reminding them that a story, a poem, an essay are made objects. They have their own existence outside their authors. Find the right form and the subject takes on life and substance of its own. Find the proper voice—the most advantageous point of view—and the lives of the characters are illuminated, so that even their most mystical, magical moments become real as flesh."

     

     

    (Poetry) Born in New Britain, Connecticut, poet CHARLES FORT is a 1994 winner of the Open Voice Award, given yearly to writers who have never read at The Writer's Voice, a literary arts project housed in YMCAs throughout the country. He is also the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, and The Mary Carolyn Davis Memorial Award, and he held the Paul W and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Chair in Poetry at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His books include Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press, 1985; reprinted in the Classic Contemporary Edition in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 1991) and Darvil (St. Andrews Press, 1993). His most recent books are We Did Not Fear the Father, As the Lilac Burned the Laurel Grew, Immortelles (all Reynolds Chair Books, University of Nebraska at Kearney Press, 1999). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2003, Best of Prose Poem International, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry, and other places, including eleven anthologies. He holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and was the founder and director of the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has taught on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Creative Writing in Poetry and Fiction, Harlem Renaissance, Twentieth Century British and American Literature, Comtemporary Poetics, and Seminar in Prosody. Fort's research projects include the completion of a book-length poem and a documentary based in part on the author's hometown. His newest collection, Frankenstein Was a Negro, is from Loganhouse Press, 2002. Fort also has two books forthcoming: We Did Not Fear The Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press) and Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz (Backwaters Press), Fort’s third prose poem sequence, with elements of fiction and creative non-fiction.


    “I meld traditional and contemporary poetics. I teach what I write. You will study and write ‘forms of resistance.’ We might begin with a medievalist echo-verse followed by the sonnet, villanelle, the mysterious sestina, contemporary uses of rhyme and meter, Melodic Poetics, New Formalism, prose poem, poetry-of-witness, the long poem, and gender-class-race switching. I study the creative process to counter the few antecedents that exist for critiques and discussions on forms that I have invented (medievalist echo-verse-poems-on-film). I am at my best when I write comments on student manuscripts, and my comments are supportive and provocative. My expertise is teaching students how to gain confidence in their ability to write well.”