Faculty

Robert Olmstead (Fiction) is the author of six  books, including most recently the award-winning novel Coal Black Horse published by Algonquin Books. He also has published a textbook for fiction-writing workshops (“Elements of the Craft”) and a non-fiction memoir (“Stay Here with Me: A Memoir”), plus numerous individual stories and essays in some of our nation’s finest magazines. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant. He has taught in numerous colleges, universities and writing workshops, including Dickinson College, UC Irvine, Boise State University and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. Currently, he lives in Ohio, where he is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.

coalblackhorse.com

Leslie Pietrzyk (Fiction) is the 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.

lesliepietrzyk.com
workinprogressinprogress.blogspot.com

Dan Wakefield (Nonfiction and Fiction), 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; The Addict: An Anthology; Between The Lines; Supernation at Peace and War; Returning: A Spiritual Journey; Creating from The Spirit; The Story of Your Life; Writing a Spiritual Autobiography, and The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate, among others.

Wakefield has been the recipient of a Neiman Fellowship in Journalism, the Bernard DeVoto Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 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.

He has taught in the writing programs at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Emerson College, The Iowa Writers Workshop, and is presently Writer in Residence at Florida International University in Miami.

Wakefield has also interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show with Kurt Vonnegut. To access the video go to www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5371.

danwakefield.com

Susan Tekulve (Fiction and nonfiction) is the author of the story collection, My Mother's War Stories, which received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize.   Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as Shenandoah, New Letters, Denver Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, ACM, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Puerto Del Sol and Black Warrior Review, and featured in a number of anthologies, most recently in Writers on the Job. Her journalism  and book reviews have appeared widely in newspapers and magazines throughout the U.S. In addition to the Winnow Press prize, she has received the Eric Hoffer Editor’s Choice award in fiction, a Bread Loaf scholarship, and has been a finalist for a number of book prizes, including the G.S.Charat Book prize from BKMK press. In 2004, she received the Kathryn Amelia Brown Teaching Award from Converse College. She recently published a short story collection, Savage Pilgrims, from Serving House Books and a chapbook entitled Wash Day on WebdelSol.Com.

webdelsol.com

R.T. Smith (Fiction and Poetry), the author of 14 volumes of poetry and fiction including Messenger, Trespasser, Brightwood, and a highly praised, recent collection of short stories entitled Uke Rivers Delivers (LSU Press).  
Smith’s fiction has appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories, as well as Missouri Review, Southern Review, Zoetrope and Quarterly West, and his poems have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, and Gettysburg Review. He has received the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares, the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Humanities Review and the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest. Split the Lark was awarded the International Poetry Prize from Salmon Publishing, Messenger was named Poetry Book of the Year by the Library of Virginia and in 2004 Li-Young Lee chose The Hollow Log Lounge as winner of the Maurice English Prize.
Since 1995 Smith has served as editor of Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he also teaches creative writing and literature.

rtsmith.org

Albert Goldbarth (Poetry) is one of the most prolific and influential poets writing in America today. The only poet to have twice been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award (in 1991 & 2001), Professor Goldbarth’s work includes more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and a novel.  This varied body of work includes some of the most heavily anthologized poems and essays of the day.
His books include Heaven and Earth, A Cosmology (1991, poetry, winner of National Book Critics Circle Award),The Gods (1993, poetry), Marriage, and Other Science Fiction (1994, poetry), Great Topics of the World, Essays (1994, essays), Adventures in Ancient Egypt (1996, poetry), Beyond (1998, poetry), Many Circles (2001, essays, winner of  a Pen Prize for nonfiction), Pieces of Payne (2001, novel), Combinations of the Universe (2003, poetry), Budget Travel through Space and Time (2005, poetry), and most recently, Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007 (2007, poetry).
In his review of Kitchen Sink, David Baker of The Kenyon Review says: “Albert Goldbarth is . . . a contemporary genius with the language itself . . . There is simply no contemporary poet like him.”

poetryfoundation.org
poets.org
PBS Interview

Denise Duhamel (Poetry) is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent titles are Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh, 2005) and Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005).
Her other books currently in print are Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999); Kinky (1997); Girl Soldier (1996); and How the Sky Fell (1996).
Duhamel has also collaborated with Maureen Seaton on three volumes: Little Novels, Oyl, and Exquisite Politics. She co-edited with Nick Carbó the anthology Sweet Jesus: Poems About the Ultimate Icon. A winner of an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry.
She is currently an associate professor at Florida International University.

poets.org
upress.pitt.edu

Nick Carbó (Poetry) is the author of Andalusian Dawn, El Grupo McDonald's, and Secret Asian Man, which won the Asian American Literary Award.  His work has appeared widely in journals, magazines and anthologies, including Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets and New Young American Poets. He has edited three anthologies of Philippine literature: Pinoy Poetics: Essays on Filipino and Filipino American Poetics; Returning a Borrowed Tongue and Babaylan. He also edited an anthology, Sweet Jesus, with Denise Duhamel. Among his awards are grants in poetry from the NEA and NYFA, and residencies from Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Carbo’s visual poetry has appeared in visual arts shows in New York, Florida, Massachusetts and the Philippines. He has taught at a number of colleges and writing workshops including the University of Miami, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Pittsburgh.

carbonator.blogspot.com

Sarah Kennedy (Poetry) 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 in Staunton, Virginia.

elixirpress.com

Rick Mulkey (Poetry, Director of the MFA Program) is the author of four collections including Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. His work appears in the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume I, 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. Recently he has been a visiting writer at Michigan State University, Wichita State University and Radford University, among others. 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.  He currently directs the creative writing program at Converse College.

word-press.com/mulkey.html