Stephen Corey, editor of THE GEORGIA REVIEW, has worked with this journal since 1983. Since the mid-1970s, Corey has published ten poetry collections, including There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003), and six chapbooks. His poems, essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies, among them The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Yellow Silk, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

The 2008 Julia Peterkin Award winner, Suzanne Cleary is the author of several poetry books, including Trick Pear (2007) and Keeping Time (2002), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her collection Blue Cloth was chosen by Marilyn Nelson and Robert Cording as winner of the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry. She is Professor of English at SUNY Rockland and also teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is a regular contributor for Bloomsbury Review.

Sarah Kennedy is the author of six books of poetry, including Home Remedies (LSU Press), A Witch’s Dictionary (Elixer Press), Consider the Lilies (David Robert Books) and Double Exposure (Cleveland State University Press). Individual poems, essays and reviews have appeared widely in literary journals, including Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, VQR, and The Southern Review. She is the co-editor of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia, and she is a contributing editor for Pleiades and West Branch. Among her writing awards are The Strousse Award, the Paterson Prize, a Virginia Commission for the Arts grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts award. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Mary Baldwin College, and a member of the low-residency MFA faculty at Converse College.

Dan Wakefield, a pioneer in a field which became known as "New Journalism," is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter whose best-selling novels Going All The Way and Starting Over were produced as feature films. He also created the NBC prime time TV series James at 15, and a documentary film has been produced of his memoir New York in the Fifties. His non-fiction books include Island in the City; Revolt in the South; Between The Lines; Returning: A Spiritual Journey; Creating from The Spirit; The Story of Your Life; and The Hijacking of Jesus, among others. Wakefield has been the recipient of a Neiman Fellowship in Journalism, a Rockefeller Grant for Creative Writing, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been a staff writer for The Nation Magazine, a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a Contributing Writer for GQ, a Contributing Editor of The Yoga Journal, and is on the advisory board of Image: A Journal of The Arts and Religion. Wakefield is Writer-in-Residence at Florida International University. In June 2009, he will join the low-residency MFA faculty at Converse College.

The Sara Lura Mathews Self Writer-in-Residence
In addition to the permanent creative writing faculty, the Converse College program features the Sara Lura Mathews Self Writer-in-Residence, a visiting writer who serves on the faculty for one semester (January Term) each year. The writer’s primary responsibility is to teach the Advanced Tutorial in Creative Writing, a course that combines weekly one-to-one tutorials with a series of masterclass workshops.

The Sara Lura Mathews Self Writer-in-Residence reading will feature Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon), a novel about four generations of Polish-American women, and Year and a Day (William Morrow), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Her short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. She has stories in several new anthologies, New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond (W.W. Norton), The Dictionary of Failed Relationships (Three Rivers Press) and The Bottom of the Ninth (Southern Illinois University Press). In addition, her work has received a number of awards and fellowships, including Shenandoah's Jean Charpiot Goodheart Prize, the Frank O'Connor Memorial Award, and fellowships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. Pietrzyk has taught at a number of colleges and universities as a visiting writer and writer-in-residence, and she currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University and starting in 2009 she’ll teach in the low residency MFA at Converse.

Elizabeth Cox is the author of numerous works of award-winning fiction including The Slow Moon, Night Talk (recipient of the Lillian Smith Award given by the Southern Regional Council) The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love, Familiar Ground, and the story collection Bargains in the Real World. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared widely, including in The Atlantic Monthly, the O.Henry Collection. Ms. Magazine, Lears, and in The Southern Review. She has taught at a number of colleges and universities including the MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Richard Tillinghast is the author of seven books of poetry including Sleep Watch, The Knife and Other Poems, Sewanee in Ruins, Our Flag Was Still There, The Stonecutter’s Hand, and Today in the Café Trieste, new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland. Richard’s most recent books are Six Mile Mountain (Story Line Press), and Poetry and What Is Real, a collection of literary essays (University of Michigan Press).

In 2008 three new books are scheduled for publication. Finding Ireland, subtitled “A poet’s explorations of Irish literature and culture,” is due out from the University of Notre Dame Press. The New Life, poems, will be published by Copper Beech. In collaboration with his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast, Richard will publish a book of translations from Turkish called Dirty August, selected poems of Edip Cansever.

For twenty years Tillinghast reviewed poetry for the New York Times Book Review. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland Review.

A former member of the faculty at Harvard, Sewanee, and Berkeley, he moved to Ann Arbor in 1983 where he taught in the University of Michigan MFA program. He now lives and writes in County Tipperary, Ireland.