Professor Rick Mulkey is the author of Before the Age of Reason, Bluefield Breakdown, Greatest Hits: 1994-2004, and Toward Any Darkness. His work appears in the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry anthology, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. Individual poems and essays have appeared in a variety of venues such as Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Connecticut Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review and Verse Daily. He has received several awards including the Hawthornden Fellowship and the Literary Review's Charles Angoff Award. Formerly the director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Wichita State University, he has taught at a number of universities and writing workshops in the United States and Europe. His teaching interests at Converse include Creative Writing: poetry, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Science and Literature. Professor Mulkey directs both the BFA program in Creative & Professional Writing and the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing. He has been a visiting writer at Michigan State University, Wichita State University and Radford University, among others. Mulkey also received Converse College's O'Herron Award for Faculty Excellence.