Information for:
Faculty NewsMFA Faculty to Participate in 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago
The Art of Writing a Joke | panel discussion with Stephen Goodwin, Richard Bausch, Robert Bausch, Jill McCorkle, and Alan Shapiro
Politically Incorrect and Scary as Hell: Sex, Violence, and Bigotry in the Workshop | panel discussion with
Beverly Lowry, Marion Winik, Ava Chin, Jane Delury, and Christine Lincoln
Is the Midwest Reshaping Creative Nonfiction: A Tribute to Fourth Genre | reading featuring Kyoko Mori, EJ Levy, Maureen Stanton, and Ryan Van Meter
The Necessity of Duende: Letting the Demon on to the Page | panel discussion with Eric Pankey, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Kelli Allen, and Steven Schreiner
Faculty Bios
Jennifer Atkinson | Poetry
Jennifer Atkinson is the author of three collections of poetry, The Dogwood Tree, which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City, which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and, most recently, Drift Ice from Etruscan Press. Her individual poems and her nonfiction have appeared in Poetry, Field, The Yale Review, The New England Review, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Image, Witness, and elsewhere. Both her poetry and her nonfiction have been honored with the Pushcart Prize. She received a BA in English from Wesleyan University, and an MFA in poetry writing and an MA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She taught in Nepal and Japan, at the University of Iowa, and at Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason.
Sally Keith | Poetry
Sally Keith graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2000, was for a year an extended studies student in creative writing at George Mason, and holds a BA from Bucknell. She has published two books of poetry, Dwelling Song and Design, the latter of which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry in 2000.She has published individual poems in journals and anthologies, including Colorado Review, Conjunctions, New American Writing, and A Public Space. Sally has been awarded fellowships to the BreadLoaf Writers’ Conference, a Pushcart Prize, and the Denver Quarterly’s Lynda Hull Award. Prior to joining Mason’s MFA faculty, she was awarded the year-long Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College, after which she taught at the University of Rochester.
Eric Pankey | Poetry
Eric Pankey (MFA, University of Iowa, 1983) is the author of eight collections of poetry. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Antaeus, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, New Republic, The New Yorker, The Quarterly, Shenandoah, and many others publications. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Pankey has received numerous grants supporting his work, including fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has taught poetry writing at several schools, including Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Iowa. His newest book of poetry is THE PEAR AS ONE EXAMPLE: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008. A new collection, Dissolve, is forthcoming in 2013.
Susan Tichy | Poetry
Susan Tichy (MA, University of Colorado, 1979) is the author of four volumes of poetry, The Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan), The Hands in Exile (Random House) which was selected for the National Poetry Series, Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta), and Gallowglass (Ahsahta) which received a Bronze in ForeWord Review's Book of the Year awards, placing it as one of the top six small-press poetry books of 2010. Her poems, collaborations, and mixed-genre works have appeared in 42opus. Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cerise Press, Chapman, Colorado Review, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Fascicle, Feminist Studies, Five Fingers Review, Green Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, and other journals. She has received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the NEA, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the Indiana Review Prize, the Runes Poetry Prize, a Pushcart, and and innovative prose award from Quarter After Eight.
Courtney Brkic | Fiction
Courtney Brkic (MFA, New York University, 2001) is the author of Stillness, a short fiction collection about the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her memoir The Stone Fields records her work on mass grave sites around Srebrenica, as well as her family’s history during the Second World War in Sarajevo. She has worked as a forensic archeologist, a translator, and for the United Nations International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, a New York Times Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award, and her work has appeared in Zoetrope, Harpers & Queen, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic, Dissent and The Alaska Quarterly Review, among others.
Alan Cheuse | Fiction
Alan Cheuse (PhD, Rutgers University, 1974) is the author of Song of Slaves in the Desert (Sourcebooks, 2011), his latest book, and the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers' Club, The Light Possessed and To Catch the Lightning (winner of the 2009 Grub Street National Prize for Fiction); three collections of short fiction, Candace and Other Stories, The Tennessee Waltz, and Lost and Old Rivers; as well as the novellas The Fires, the memoir Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey, a volume of essays, Listening to the Page, and the travel essay collection A Trance After Breakfast. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered". Cheuse has co-edited two volumes of short stories, The Sound of Writing and Listening to Ourselves, co-edited Writers Workshop in a Book, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction, and edited Seeing Ourselves: Great Stories of America's Past.
His short fiction has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and Ploughshares, among other places. His articles, magazine journalism and reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times book reviews, New York Times Travel Section, The Nation, Boston Globe Magazine, and Gourmet. (He is the author, with Nicholas Delbanco, of the three volume text-book Literature: Craft & Voice).
- Excerpt from The Fires, (Santa Fe Writer's Project)
- A Little Death, (The Southern Review)
- A Merry Little, (Another Chicago Magazine)
Stephen Goodwin | Fiction
Stephen Goodwin (MA, University of Virginia, 1969) is the author of three novels, including The Blood of Paradise and Breaking Her Fall, and two books of nonfiction. His short fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, and Gentleman's Quarterly; his essays and nonfiction, in the Washington Post, USA Today, Preservation, Poets and Writers Magazine, and several sports magazines. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Goodwin is a former director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has twice served as president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
Helon Habila | Fiction
Helon Habila is currently completing his PhD dissertation at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French. His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize 2001; the Commonwealth Writers Prize, African region, 2003; and the Emily Balch Prize, 2008.
He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in 2007, it won the Virginia Literary Foundation Fiction Award, 2008, and was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, 2008. His third novel, Oil on Water, was published in the US in 2011. HIs stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in various magazines and papers including Granta, AGNI, and the London Guardian. His short story, "The Hotel Malogo", was selected for The Best American Non-required Reading Anthology. Habila is the editor of the Granta Book of African Short Story, 2011.
Susan Richards Shreve | Fiction
Susan Shreve (MA, University of Virginia, 1969) is the author of thirteen novels, most recently, A Student of Living Things, and a memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood in FDR's Polio Haven published in 2007. She is the editor or coeditor of five anthologies, including Skin Deep with Marita Golden, Tales Out of School with Porter Shreve and Dream Me Home Safely. She has written twenty nine books for children. Susan has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEA fellow, and a Jenny McKean Moore Fellow. She has served as president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Beverly Lowry | Nonfiction
Beverly Lowry has been teaching nonfiction in the MFA program since its inception, in 1999. Her most recent book, "Harriet Tubman, Imagining a Life," a biography, was published in June, 2007. Other nonfiction books are: "Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C.J. Walker" published in 2004, and the 1992 "Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir," about her friendship with Karla Faye Tucker, a confessed murderer who was executed by the state of Texas in 1998. Her short stories have appeared in the Boston Globe, Playgirl, the Mississippi Review, Redbook, Houston City Magazine, and the Texas Humanist. Lowry's essays, profiles, and book reviews have been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Granta, and many other journals. Lowry has received awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Black Warrior Review, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She received her bachelor of arts from Memphis State University in 1960 and has taught at the University of Houston, the University of Montana, and the University of Alabama. Most recently in 2007, Lowry won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. Kyoko Mori | Nonfiction
Kyoko Mori (MA and PhD, University of Wisconsin) is the author of two nonfiction books, The Dream of Water: A Memoir, and Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Two Cultures, and her essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Best American Essays. She has also published three novels, the most recent being Stone Field, True Arrow. She was born in Kobe, Japan, and moved to the United States in 1977. Prior to joining the faculty at Mason, she was a Briggs-Copeland lecturer in creative Writing at Harvard University.