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Faculty Mentors
Michael Anania
Michael Anania is the author of Selected Poems, The
Sky at Ashland, In Plain Sight: Essays, the novel The
Red Menace, the collection In Natural Light, and Heat
Lines, his most
recent book. His work has been included in the Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry. A former poetry editor of Swallow Press, director of Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and member of the National Education Association literature panel, he is a contributing editor for TriQuarterly magazine. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has taught poetry workshops in the MCW program. He received his BA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Email Michael at anania@uic.edu.
Sefi Atta
Sefi Atta is a graduate of the creative writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her short stories have appeared in journals like Los Angeles Review and Mississippi Review and have won prizes from Zoetrope and Red Hen Press. Her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC. She is the winner of PEN International's 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize and in 2006, her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Contact Sefi at sefiatta@yahoo.com.
Steve Bogira
Steve Bogira began his journalism career with the Chicago
Tribune. He has been a staff writer for the Chicago Reader
since 1981, writing mainly about the urban poor. His stories
have won many awards, and in 1993 he received an Alicia Patterson
Fellowship. His first book, Courtroom 302, was published by
Knopf in 2005. Email Steve at boge59@yahoo.com.
Brock Clarke
Brock Clarke received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.
He is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Cincinnati. He has been published in various journals including
The Georgia Review, The
Southern Review, New England
Review, New Stories from
the South: Best of 2003, Five
Points, Massachusetts
Review, Mississippi Review,
American Fiction and Greensboro
Review. His books are The
Ordinary White Boy (Harcourt Books), a novel, and What
We Won't Do (Sarabande Books), a short story collection
and winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Email
Brock at clarkeba@uc.edu
John Dufresne
John Dufresne attended Worcester State College and the MFA
program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas.
Dufresne is the author of the story collection The
Way That Water Enters Stone. His novel Louisiana Power
& Light was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great
New Writers selection. It was also a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was his second
novel, Love Warps the Mind a
Little. His most recent novel is Deep
in the Shade of Paradise. He has a new book on fiction
writing titled The Lie That Tells
a Truth. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program
at Florida International University. Visit his web site at
www.johndufresne.com.
Email John at
johndufresne@mindspring.com.
Gina Frangello
Gina Frangello is the author of the novel My Sister's Continent as well as the founding editor of Other Voices Books and served as executive editor of Other Voices literary magazine. Frangello's short fiction has been published in magazines such as Swink, StoryQuarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blithe House Quarterly, and in the anthology Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader. She guest-edited the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters. Her short story collection, Slut Lullabies, will be released in May 2010. She is the fiction editor of the new online literary collective The Nervous Breakdown. Frangello also teaches fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago.
Baird Harper
Baird Harper's fiction has appeared in Tin House, Mid-American Review, CutBank, and Best New American Voices 2009 and 2010. His stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received an award in The Ledge 2008 Fiction Contest, and won the 2009 James Jones Fiction 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. Email Baird at harperbr@hotmail.com.
Patricia Henley
Patricia Henley's first novel, Hummingbird
House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award
and the New Yorker Fiction Prize (2000). Her second novel,
In the River Sweet, was
named a Best Fall Book by the St.Louis
Dispatch, the Chicago
Tribune, and the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer. She has also published three collections
of stories, Friday Night at Silver
Star, winner of the 1985 Montana Arts Council First
Book Award, The Secret of Cartwheels,
and Worship of the Common Heart.
Her work has been anthologized in The
Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best
American Short Stories, Love
Stories for the Rest of Us, and Circle
of Women. Patricia has taught in the MFA program at
Purdue University for eighteen years. Email Patricia at phenley15@hotmail.com.
Marya Hornbacher
Marya Hornbacher is the author of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the novel The Center of Winter, and the memoir Madness: A Life. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. Besides work as a journalist, she also lectures widely on writing and mental health. She has taught literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and writing the novel. Contact Marya at MARYAHB4@aol.com.
Tara Ison
Tara Ison, visiting assistant professor in the English department
at Northwestern, received her MFA in fiction & literature
from Bennington College. She has taught fiction and screenwriting
at Washington University in St. Louis, Ohio State University,
Goddard College, the UCLA Extension Writers' Program,
and
Antioch University's MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her
short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared
in Tin
House, the Kenyon Review,
the Mississippi Review,
LA Weekly, and Another
City, among others. She is the recipient of Pushcart
Prize nominations, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for
International
Study, a Brandeis National Women's Committee Award, a Thurber
House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, two Yaddo
Fellowships,
and the Simon Blattner Fellowship from Northwestern. A
Child Out of Alcatraz was a CINCH Librarian's Choice
Award winner and a Finalist for the 1997 Los Angeles Times
Book Awards, "Best First Fiction." Her new novel,
The List, is forthcoming
from Scribner's in March 2007. Email Tara at taraison@aol.com.
Angela Jackson
Angela Jackson, poet, dramatist, and fiction writer, was born in Greenville, Mississippi and raised on Chicago's South Side. She earned her MA at the University of Chicago. Her first collection of poems is Voodoo/Love Magic. In the late 1970s and the 1980s Jackson turned to fiction, publishing short stories and a novel, and adapted her poetry for the stage. Two of her most recent publications are Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, winter of a Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award and Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry, All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems New and Selected, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and the novel Where I Must Go. Contact Angela at angelarjackson@aol.com.
Amy Leach
Amy Leach received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. Before studying at Iowa she taught piano, violin, and English as a Second Language in Texas, Peru, and Paraguay. Amy currently teaches literature at the University of St. Francis, and her
essays have been published in the Iowa Review, A Public Space, and the Wilson Quarterly. She is working on a collection of essays about Eta Carinae (a star), Love-Lies-Bleeding (a flower), the takahe (a bird), and Phobos (a moon), among other things. Contact Amy at amykleach@gmail.com.
Cris Mazza
Cris Mazza, Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
received her M.F.A. from Brooklyn College, City University
of New York. She is well known for her novels and short story
collections; her latest novel Homeland
(Red Hen Press) was published in 2004. She is also the editor
of Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction
and Chick-Lit 2 anthologies,
and has numerous creative nonfiction pieces in Another
Chicago Magazine, Sycamore
Review, North American
Review, and The San Diego
Reader, among others. She has received an Illinois
Arts Council Literary Award and a PEN American Center Nelson
Algren Award for book-length fiction (How
to leave a Country), and was an NEA grant recipient
in 2000-2001. Visit her web site at www.cris-mazza.com.
Email Cris at cmazza@uic.edu
Michael McColly
Michael McColly holds an M.A. in Religious Studies form the
Divinity School at University of Chicago and an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing—Fiction from the University of Washington.
Before beginning his writing and teaching career, McColly
was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, actor in Chicago,
and director of adult education at the Field Museum of Natural
History in Chicago. His memoir Parables
of the Body, which chronicles his journey through several
countries effected by the AIDS epidemic—South Africa,
India, Thailand, Vietnam, Senegal and urban America, will
be out in the fall of 2005. He has published in the New
York Times, Salon,
Chicago Tribune, the Sun,
Ascent, the Chronicle
of Higher Education, and other literary journals. He
has won numerous honors for his writing and work including
the Lisagor Journalism Award for a series on Chicago’s
neighborhoods for WBEZ Public Radio, two PEN Grants for writers
living with HIV/AIDS, and prose awards from the Illinois Arts
Council and Illinois Humanities Council. Contact Michael at
michaelmccolly@hotmail.com.
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller has received three Pushcart Prizes for her work
in creative nonfiction, and her essays have been published
in such periodicals as The Sun,
Utne Reader, Prairie
Schooner, The Georgia
Review, Seneca Review,
and Fourth Genre: Explorations
in Nonfiction. Her collection of essays, Season
of the Body (Sarabande Books), was a finalist for the
Pen American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She
is the co-author of Tell it Slant:
Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction and is the
editor-in-chief of The Bellingham
Review. She teaches at Western Washington University.
Email Brenda at madrone2@earthlink.net.
Peter O'Leary
Peter O'Leary is author of a book of poetry, Watchfulness
(Spuyten Duyvil), and a book of criticism, Gnostic
Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness
(Wesleyan). A graduate of the Divinity School of the University
of Chicago, he is currently working on a book about the difficulties
and potencies of writing religious poetry, and has poetry
forthcoming in Octopus Magazine,
Conjunctions, and Gastronomica.
He is an editor of the literary journal LVNG,
The Cultural Society,
and an advisor and board member of the Chicago Poetry Project,
which hosts a popular reading series at the Harold Washington
Library. His editorial work on Ronald Johnson's poetry earned
him a Best American Poetry 2002 publication. Email Peter at
peter@culturalsociety.org
Sharon Solwitz
Sharon Solwitz' first collection of stories, Blood
and Milk (Sarabande, 1997), won the 1998 Carl Sandburg
Prize from Friends of the Chicago Public Library, the prize
for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, and
was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her short
stories, published in such magazines as TriQuarterly,
Mademoiselle, and Ploughshares,
have won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the
Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and grants and fellowships from
the Illinois Arts Council. Her novel Bloody
Mary was published by Sarabande in 2003. Sharon is
a fiction editor of Another Chicago
Magazine. She is an Associate Professor of English
(fiction) at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Email
Sharon at ssolwitz@sla.purdue.edu
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