Faculty // 2013

Steve Almond is the author of a bunch of books, some which he makes himself.  His latest collection, “God Bless America,” was published by Lookout Books.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of Hunger, a novella and stories, and the novels Inheritance and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost. She is the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories; Orphans, a collection of essays; and The Dead Fish Museum.  He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, and, most recently, Memory Wall. Doerr’s fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. He also writes the “On Science” column for the Boston Globe.

Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette in May 2013) and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh  and The Language of Elk. He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.

Karen Russell is the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, as well as the novel Swamplandia!. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College. Her latest short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, will be published in February.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was nominated for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad, coming out in March. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, the New Yorker and Playboy. He teaches at Williams College.

Karen Shepard is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, and, most recently, Don’t I Know You? Her short fiction has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Bomb, Ploughshares, Failbetter, Glimmertrain, Mississippi Review, and Southwest Review, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in Self, More, The Boston Globe, and USA Today, among others.  She teaches at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

Dana Spiotta is the author of Stone Arabia, a National Book Critics Award Finalist, Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Lightning Field, a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband and daughter.

Luis Alberto Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres and is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 13 books, including Queen of America, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction, and The Devil’s Highway, which won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Jess Walter is the author of eight books, most recently the story collection We Live in Water and the bestselling novel Beautiful Ruins. He’s been a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/USA Literary Award, and won the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe Award. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, Harpers, McSweeney’s, Esquire, Playboy and others.

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, a finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of three books poetry, Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books. She has studied creativity and education at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught poetry at New York University, Columbia University, and Wesleyan University. She currently lives in New York City.

Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon, and she has co-authored a handbook on writing, The Poet’s Companion. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke. Recent poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and Orion Magazine. Laux teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Maggie Nelson’s books of nonfiction include The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, and The Red Parts: A Memoir. Recent books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes , and Jane: A Murder, a finalist, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, and a 2011 NEA grant in poetry. Since 2005, she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.

David Shields is the author of eleven books, including How Literature Saved My Life (forthcoming from Knopf on February 5, 2013), Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller, and Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives with is wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.

Cheryl Strayed is the bestselling author of the memoir Wild, the novel Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of the “Dear Sugar” advice columns she writes for The Rumpus. Her personal essays have been published in Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Sun, Vogue and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Claudia Ballard has been an agent at WME since 2008. She represents mainly fiction, from established short-story writers to debut novelists and beyond. She works with a variety of authors including Amelia Gray, Patricio Pron, Marjorie Celona, Ben Nugent, and screenwriters Seth Grahame-Smith and Charlie Kaufman. She is interested in taking on exciting new voices, risk-takers, and storytellers of all kinds.

Matthew Dickman’s poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New Yorker. He won the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem (2008), chosen by Tony Hoagland and published by Copper Canyon Press.  All American Poem also won the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. His latest collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, was published by Norton. He is the poetry editor at Tin House.

Heather Hartley is Paris editor at Tin House. She’s the author of Knock Knock, released by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in or on PBS NewsHour, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She has been Co-Director of the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop literary festival and lives in Paris.

The founder of Ayesha Pande Literary, Ayesha has worked in the publishing industry for over twenty years. Before becoming an agent, Ayesha was a senior editor at Farrar Straus & Giroux. She has also held editorial positions at HarperCollins and Crown Publishers. She enjoys working with writers who dare to innovate, take risks, and try to express something meaningful about our world.

D. A. Powell most recent volume, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, was published by Graywolf in 2012. Chronic (Graywolf, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell’s honors include a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship  and awards from the California Commonwealth Club, the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of four books of poetry—most recently Portuguese (Tin House & Octopus Books) and O Bon (Litmus Press)—as well as several limited editions of collaborations, drawings, writings and songs. He is currently working on his first book of nonfiction, and co-editing, with poet-critic Thom Donovan, the selected writings of Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan. Born in California, he has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, and Arizona.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a book of criticism. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock and Salon, among other periodicals. He is a senior editor and founding member of The Los Angeles Review of Books.