Faculty // 2012

Dorothy Allison is the best-selling author of Bastard out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.  She is the author of Trash, a collection of short stories; The Women Who Hate Me, a collection of poetry; and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, a collection of essays.

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

Aimee Bender is the author of 4 books, the most recent being the novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.  Her short fiction has been published in Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, GQ, the Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s This American Life.  She teaches creative writing at USC and lives in Los Angeles.

Robert Boswell’s latest book is a collection of stories , The Heyday of The Insensitive Bastards, was published by Graywolf in 2009.  His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and many other magazines. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

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.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound, and six short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.

Elissa Schappell is the author of the collection Blueprints For Building Better Girls, as well as the novel Use Me, which was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway award. She is co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is co-founder and editor-at-large of Tin House magazine, and teaches creative writing at NYU and in the the low-residency MFA program at Queens in Charlotte, NC.

Wells Tower’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is the recipient the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, a National Magazine Award for Fiction, and was also included in the New Yorker’s list of the twenty promising fiction writers under the age of forty. His first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, was a finalist for The Story Prize. He lives in North Carolina.

Jonathan Dee is the author of five novels, most recently The Privileges (Random House, 2010). He is a Contributing Writer for New York Times Magazine, a frequent critic for Harper’s, and a former Senior Editor of the Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and The New School.

Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He has taught writing at Harvard, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Grinnell College. His second novel, Enon, is forthcoming.

Dana Spiotta is the author of Stone Arabia, 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.

D. A. Powell’s most recent volume 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.

Mary Szybist’s first collection of poems, Granted, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her second collection, Incarnadine, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2013. Szybist has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010). His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Bomb, Slate, Poetry, Paris Review, and The Believer, He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently he works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. He lives in San Francisco.

John D’Agata is the author of About a Mountain and Halls of Fame and the editor of the anthologies The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay.  He teaches creauve writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.  His new book, The Lifespan of a Fact, will be published in February.

Ann Hood is the author of the novels The Red Thread, and, The Knitting Circle, as well as the memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and chosen as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train and many other publications. She has won a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction and two Pushcart Prizes.

Christopher R. Beha is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Believer, Tin House, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Whole Five Feet, and the co-editor, with Joyce Carol Oates, of the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. His novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder (Tin House), will be published in 2012.

Matthew Dickman’s poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New Yorker and Tin House. He has received fellowships for his work from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. 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.

Kate Lee is a literary agent at ICM. She joined ICM’s literary department ten years ago, after two years of working as a reporter at a weekly magazine. While still an assistant, she gained notice for being the first agent to scout for and develop authorial talent from the web. Lee represents a range of fantastic authors who write engaging and fresh nonfiction — entrepreneurial, journalistic, memoir, and everything in between — new commercial and literary voices in fiction, pop culture and young adult.

PJ Mark is an agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, and is most interested in literary fiction.  Recent titles include No One Is Here Except All Of Us by Ramona Ausubel, The Guardians by Sarah Manguso, Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events by Kevin Moffett, Blueprints Of The Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot, The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels, Habibi by Craig Thompson. Clients include Dinaw Mengestu, Samantha Hunt, Ed Park, Stuart Nadler, Ismet Prcic and others.

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Best New Poets 2009, Southern Review, New England Review, Narrative Magazine, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

Pauls Toutonghi’s second novel, Evel Knievel Days, will be published by Random House in Summer 2012. His first — Red Weather – was published in 2006. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story Magazine, The Boston Review, Glimmer Train, and numerous other periodicals. He teaches at Lewis and Clark College.

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City) and the novel The Listeners, forthcoming from Tin House in 2012. Zumas lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University.