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.

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.

Anne Calcagno
Anne Calcagno, Writer-In-Residence at DePaul University, has also taught at The School of The Art Institute and The Ragdale Foudation. She is currently at work on two novels. For her short story collection, Pray for Yourself, variously set in Italy and the US, she won the James D. Phelan Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Illinois Arts Council awards. Her most recent novel about Italy and Eritrea during WW II is titled Travelers Tales. Her fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. Her travel writing has appeared in The New York Times. Email Anne at acalcagno1@artic.edu

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

Ricardo Cruz
Ricardo Cruz received his Ph.D. in English from Illinois State University, where he is an Associate Professor of English. His two novels are Straight Outta Compton (Fiction CollectiveTwo and University of Colorado) and Five Days of Bleeding (Fiction Collective Two/Black IceBooks). Ricardo's fiction has been appeared in journals from High Performance and Black Ice 7 to The Iowa Review and The Kenyon Review. His awards include the Illinois Arts Council 2001 Literary Award. Email Ricardo at Delacruz94@aol.com

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 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 and has taught at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Email Gina at gfrangello@ameritech.net.

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.

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.

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

Lisa Stolley
Lisa Stolley received an M.A. in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English and Fiction Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has taught at University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia College, DePaul and Roosevelt University, and is a contributing editor at Other Voices. Her fiction has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Florida Review, Hawaii Review, Washington Review, and Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Chicago Reader, Greenwich Review, and Today's Chicago Woman. She has received numerous awards for her fiction, including an Illinois Arts Council Award. Email Lisa at LAStolley@aol.com