George Mason University

Jennifer Atkinson

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 B.A. in English from Wesleyan University, and an M.F.A. in poetry writing and an M.A. 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

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 B.A. 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 two books of poetry, Dwelling Song and Design (selected by Allen Grossman for the 2000 Colorado Prize). 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

Eric Pankey (M.F.A. 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, THE PEAR AS ONE EXAMPLE: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008.

Selected Poems by Eric Pankey

Susan Tichy

Susan Tichy (M.A., University of Colorado, 1979) is the author of three volumes of poetry, A Smell of Burning Starts the Day, The Hands of Exile, which was selected for the National Poetry Series, and Bone Pagoda. Her poems, collaborations, and mixed-genre works have appeared in 42opus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chapman, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Fascicle, Feminist Studies, Five Fingers Review, Green Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Quarter After Eight, and other journals. She has received the Eugene M. Kayden Award for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the NEA. She also serves as Poetry Editor of Practice: New Writing + Art.

Courtney Brkic

Courtney Brkic (M.F.A., 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 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.

Gathering up the Little Gods, Courtney Brkic

Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse (Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1974) is the author of 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 nonfiction work Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey, a volume of essays, Listening to the Page, and the forthcoming 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, Alan Cheuse (Santa Fe Writer's Project)

A Little Death, Alan Cheuse (The Southern Review)

A Merry Little, Alan Cheuse (Another Chicago Magazine)

Stephen Goodwin

Stephen Goodwin (M.A., 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.

Transgressions, Stephen Goodwin

Helon Habila

Helon Habila is currently a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2003. He has edited, with Lavinia Greenlaw, the British Council Anthology, New Writing 14, and with Khadija George, the anthology of new fiction from Africa, Miracles, Dreams, and Jazz. Habila is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review where he has published numerous essays and short stories. His stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in various magazines and papers including Granta and the London Guardian. In 2001 he won the Caine Prize for his short story, Love Poems. His second novel, Measuring Time, came out in February 2007. He is currently working on his third novel.

The Hotel Malago, Helon Habila

Susan Richards Shreve

Susan Shreve (M.A., 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

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

Kyoko Mori (M.A. and Ph. D., 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.

Pullovers, Kyoko Mori