Faculty // 2011

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 latest collection, “God Bless America,” was published by Lookout Books.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Rock is the author of five novels, most recently My Abandonment, and a story collection, The Unsettling.  He teaches at Reed College and lives with his wife and two fierce young daughters in Portland, Oregon.

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.

Joy Williams is the author of four novels–the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001–and two earlier collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the short story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Key West, Florida, and Tucson, Arizona.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebellion, which appeared from Knopf in January 2011. His Jelly Roll: A Blues, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of five volumes, including last year’s The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury). He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.

Lee Montgomery is executive editor at Tin House magazine and editorial director of Tin House Books. She is the author of The Things Between Us, A Memoir (Free Press, August 2006), Whose World Is This? stories (University of Iowa Press, September 2007), and Searching for Emily: Illustrated (Nothing Moments Press, October 2007). The Things Between Us received the 2007 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction and Whose World Is This? the 2007 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award.

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.

Sarah began her career on the editorial side of publishing, first at Houghton Mifflin, then in the Knopf Group, and last at Little, Brown. She became an agent in 2001, joining The Gernert Company in 2005. She now represents adult fiction writers (Alice McDermott and Larry Doyle among them); children’s fiction writers (The New York Times bestsellers Gayle Forman and Pseudonymous Bosch); and journalists and critics (Fast Company’s Jon Gertner and Granta’s John Freeman).

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.

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.

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur, presently launching Cursor, a start-up portfolio of social publishing imprints the first of which, Red Lemonade, will launch in May 2011. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press. In 2006, Publishers Weekly picked him as one of the ten editors to watch in the coming decade. Last year the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing.

Denise Shannon formed her own agency in 2002 after sixteen years representing authors at Georges Borchardt, Inc. and International Creative Management (ICM). She is a frequent guest at writers’ conferences and publishing institutes, delivering talks and conducting workshops.

Scott Sparling grew up near railroad tracks in Michigan. He now lives outside Portland, Oregon, with his wife and son. Wire to Wire is his first novel.

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.

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.