Taylor Brorby
Education
- MFA Creative Writing and Environment, Iowa State University, 2017
- MA Liberal Studies, Hamline University, 2013
- BA English, St. Olaf College, 2010
Bio
Taylor Brorby’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council.
Taylor’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, LitHub, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press.
Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change.
Books Authored
Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York: Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2022.
Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience. North Liberty, IA: Ice Cube Press, 2017.
Crude: Poems. North Liberty, IA: Ice Cube Press, 2017.
Joel Brouwer
Education
- MA, Creative Writing and English Literature, Syracuse University, 1993
- BA, Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, 1990
Bio
Professor Joel Brouwer teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in creative writing and criticism. He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Syracuse University, and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Books Authored
Off Message. New York: Four Way Books, 2016.
And So. New York: Four Way Books, 2009.
Centuries. New York: Four Way Books, 2003.
Exactly What Happened. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1999.
Chapbooks
Flag Factory. New York: Artichoke Yink Press, forthcoming.
Snow. New York: Salamandra Editions, forthcoming.
Lt. Shrapnel. New York: Artichoke Yink Press, 2002.
Think of It This Way. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Fame or Shame Press, 2000.
This Just In. Los Angeles: Beyond Baroque Books, 1998
(see Joel’s faculty profile here)
Brooke Champagne
Education
- MFA, Creative Writing (Creative Nonfiction), Louisiana State University, 2005
Bio
Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans. For ten years she served as the Assistant Director of First-Year Writing at UA, and received the Instructor Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2017; she received the Instructor Award for Excellence in Diversity Efforts in 2022. Her essays have been selected as Notables in several editions of Best American Essays and have been honored with various awards, including the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her work “Exercises.” She won the 2022 March Faxness National Championship Essay Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” She is also the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. Current projects include an essay collection entitled Your Bones Are My Bones, and a memoir-in-profiles entitled Lives of the Aints.
Books Authored
Nola Face. University of Georgia Press, forthcoming.
(See Brooke’s faculty profile here)
John Estes
Education
- PhD, Creative Writing, University of Missouri, 2009
Bio
John Estes joined the faculty in 2016 and directs the Creative Writing Program. He studied poetics and ecological literature at the Univeristy of Missouri, and is author of three books of poetry—Kingdom Come (C&R Press, 2011), Stop Motion Still Life (forthcoming) and Sure Extinction which won the 2015 Antivenom Award from Elixir Press—as well as two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve, which won a 2008 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America.
Books Authored
The Irrelevant Self: Short Fictions, Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming.
Sure Extinction. Elixir Press, 2017.
Kingdom Come. C&R Press, 2011.
Swerve. Poetry Society of America, 2009.
(see John’s faculty profile here)
Kwoya Fagin Maples
Education
- MFA, Creative Writing, University of Alabama, 2008
- BS, Human Environmental Sciences, University of Alabama, 2005
Bio
Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, S.C. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. She is the author of Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) which was named a 2019 Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and a 2019 Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award for Poetry. A collection of historical persona poetry, Mend tells the story of the birth of obstetrics and gynecology in America and the role enslaved black women played in that process. Prior to publication, Mend received a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and was finalist for AWP’s Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.
In addition to a chapbook entitled Something of Yours (Finishing Line Press 2010) her work is published in several journals and anthologies including Poetry, pluck!, Blackbird Literary Journal, Tin House Review Online, Obsidian, Puerto del Sol, Berkeley Poetry Review, Cave Canem Anthology XIII and The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.
Maples is devoted to teaching as it is integral to her writing. Whether teaching composition, developmental writing, argumentation, literature, or creative writing, she has valued her role as facilitator. In addition to poetics and process, her writing interests include historical persona, hybrid memoir, magical realism, speculative writing, and visual poetry.
Books Authored
MEND. University Press of Kentucky, 2018
Something of Yours. Finishing Line Press, 2010
(see Kwoya’s faculty profile here)
Nana Nkweti
Education
- MFA, Creative Writing, University of Iowa, 2014
- BA, Political Science, Rutgers University, 1999
Bio
Nana Nkweti is a Cameroonian-American writer, Caine Prize finalist, and Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumna. Nana served as the fall 2017 Phillip Roth Writer-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University, fall 2016 Hub City Writer-in-Residence and additionally received fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Ucross, Kimbilio, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Byrdcliffe, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Nana’s writing has been published in journals and magazines such as Brittle Paper, New Orleans Review, and The Baffler, amongst others. Her short story collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells, is forthcoming from Graywolf on June 1, 2021. The book focuses on the lives of hyphenated-Americans who share her multi-cultural heritage in the United States and Africa. It spans genres – literary realism, horror, mystery, YA, science fiction – and features complex, fully-embodied characters: tongue-tied linguistic anthropologists, comic book enthusiasts and even rebellious African orphan Annie’s. She hopes her stories entertain readers while also offering them a counterpoint to prevalent “heart of darkness” writing that too often depicts a singular “African” experience plagued by locusts, hunger, and tribal in-fighting.
As a Professor of English, her pedagogy explores her eclectic literary interests including sci-fi poetry, graphic novels, speculative fiction, medical humanities, the African diasporic experience, and works by female authors in genres such as horror, western, Afrofuturism, and mystery.
Select Publications
“Marginalia” Hunger Mountain Review: Everyday Chimeras: Issue 22. March 2018.
“The Devil is a Liar” Masters Review: Fall 2017, *winner, Master Review Short Story Award for New Writers, 2nd Prize.
“It Takes a Village Some Say” The Baffler: No. 36. Fall 2017, *finalist, 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing.
“It Just Kills You Inside” The New Orleans Review: The African Literary Hustle: Issue 43 //2017.
“Schoolyard Cannibal” Brittle Paper: Summer 2017, *short-listed for the Anniversary Awards – honoring works that represent a “vision of the dynamism of literature.”
“My Own Flesh and Blood” Killens Review of Arts & Letters. Fall/Winter 2012: 64-74.
“Petty Thefts” Two Lines: World Writing in Translation. Landmarks: No. 20. Fall 2013.
(see Nana’s faculty profile here)
Wendy Rawlings
Education
- PhD, Creative Writing, University of Utah, 2000
- MFA, Creative Writing, Colorado State University, 1996
Bio
Professor Wendy Rawlings grew up in New York and received her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah in 2000. She also completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Colorado State University in 1996. The recipient of residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo, Rawlings was awarded the John Farrar Fellowship in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Rawlings’ teaching interests include: form and theory of fiction, short fiction by women, narrative voice in the American short story, and the comic novel. A collection of her short stories, Come Back Irish, won the 2000 Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction and was published in December 2001 by Ohio State University Press. Her novel, The Agnostics, won the Michigan Literary Award from the University of Michigan Press.
Books Authored
Time for Bed. Louisiana State University Press. 2019.
The Agnostics. University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Come Back Irish. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2001.
(See Wendy’s faculty profile here)
Kellie Wells
Bio
Kellie Wells is the winner of the 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize. She is also the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Richard Sullivan Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers, and the Baltic Writing Residency. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, Château de Lavigny, and Hawthornden Castle. She is the author of four books: Compression Scars; Skin; Fat Girl, Terrestrial; and God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna.
Her research and writing interests include Victorian spiritualism and stage acts; crime scene dioramas; dystopian/apocalypse literature; speculative/fabulist/slipstream lit; disability and chronic illness in the Anthropocene/Symbiocene/late Capitalist medical-industrial hellscape; the New Realism, anomalous experience, and local spirits; the doomed illusion of spacetime; fairy tales and folktales; and Crones.
(See Kellie’s faculty profile here)