Core and Visiting Faculty
Core Faculty
Marlin Barton
Marlin Barton (Fiction) is from the Black Belt region of Alabama. His most recent book is a novel, Children of Dust, which was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. He’s published two earlier novels, The Cross Garden and A Broken Thing, and three collections of short stories: The Dry Well, Dancing by the River, and Pasture Art. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. He’s also been awarded the Truman Capote Prize for short fiction by an Alabama Writer. He teaches in, and helps direct, the Writing Our Stories project, a program for juvenile offenders created by the Alabama Writers’ Forum, and he’s been teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Converse University since 2010.
Suzanne Cleary
Suzanne Cleary’s (Poetry) The Odds will be published in 2025 by New York Quarterly Books, selected by Jan Beatty as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Her previous books are Beauty Mark and Crude Angel (BkMk Press), and Keeping Time and Trick Pear (Carnegie Mellon UP).
Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, the John Ciardi Prize, and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America. She has enjoyed fellowships from the NY Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Her publication credits include anthologies, journals, and websites including PBSNewshour.org, PoetryDaily, Best American Poetry, The Atlantic, Southern Review, and Poetry London. Her website is www.suzanneclearypoet.com.
Tyree Daye
Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections, River Hymns 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner and Cardinal published by Copper Canyon Press.
Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work is published in Prairie Schooner, New York Times, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award.
Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel (Poetry and Creative Nonfiction) is, most recently, the author of Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which are CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015) and Tilt (Bridwell Press, 2025). Her other titles include Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and her book of lyric essays with Julie Marie Wade is The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, she is a distinguished university professor at Florida International University in Miami.
Geoff Herbach
Geoff Herbach (YA Fiction, MFA Director) is the author of nine novels and a picture book. His books include those in the Stupid Fast trilogy (Sourcebooks), The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (Crown), and Hooper (HarperCollins). His work has received numerous awards, including the Cybil’s Award for best YA fiction, the Minnesota Book Award, and The Burr/Worzalla Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement. His books have been listed among the year’s best by the American Library Association, the International Literacy Association, the American Booksellers Association, and Bank Street. In the past, Geoff wrote and performed comedy and traveled around the country telling weird stories in rock clubs. He lives in St. Peter, Minnesota.
Cary Holladay
Cary Holladay has published eight volumes of fiction, including Brides in the Sky, Horse People, and The Deer in the Mirror, winner of the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. The Quick-Change Artist was a finalist in the Virginia Literary Awards.
Holladay’s stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Epoch, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Los Angeles Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. She is the author of Images of America: Glen Allen, a nonfiction pictorial history of Glen Allen, Virginia. She earned an A.B. from the College of William & Mary and an M.A. from Pennsylvania State University. Her awards include an O. Henry Prize for “Merry-Go-Sorry,” based on the case of the West Memphis Three, and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis, where she directed the creative writing program and was named a First
Tennessee Professor. She lives in Rapidan, Virginia.
Ashley M. Jones
Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow.
She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series.
Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine.
Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! is forthcoming in Fall 2021 from Hub City Press. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Jones is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author Award from the Alabama Library Association. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She is also a member of the Core Faculty at Converse University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Jones recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.
Rick Mulkey
Rick Mulkey (Poetry) is the author of six collections including Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, Bluefield Breakdown, and All These Hungers. His work appears in the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume I and Volume II, 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, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review and Poetry Daily. His awards include the Hawthornden Fellowship for Writing, the Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review, the Editor’s Choice Award from Still: the Journal, and the Gearhart Prize from Southeast Review. An Associate Professor of English and director of creative writing, Mulkey is co-founder of the Low Residency MFA in creative writing at Converse College.
Sheila O’Connor
Sheila O’Connor is a multi-genre writer who writes books for both adults and young people. Her novels Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth, Tokens of Grace, Where No Gods Came, Sparrow Road, and Keeping Safe the Stars have received wide critical acclaim and awards, including the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, Minnesota Book Award, International Reading Award, and Midwest Booksellers Award, among others. Her new hybrid novel, Reconstructing V will be forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in October 2019. Her books have been included in Best Books of the Year by Booklist, VOYA, Book Page, Bank Street, Chicago Public Library, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers. Sheila’s work has been anthologized in Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers, The Next Parish Over, Mothers and Daughters, and Best of Helicon Nine. Her short stories, poems, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies including Bellingham Review, Minnesota Monthly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Baltimore Review, Great River Review, Blue Earth Review, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Sheila O’Connor has been awarded Bush Fellowships (2003, 2009), Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships (2004, 2015), and a McKnight Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of artist residencies from The Studios of Key West, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tyrone Guthrie Center, and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. She is a professor in the MFA program at Hamline University where she serves as fiction editor for Water~Stone Review.
Robert Olmstead
Robert Olmstead (Fiction) is the author of nine books, including Savage Country which was published by Algonquin in September 2017, and was an Amazon “Best Book of October 2017.” Other recent award-winning novels include The Coldest Night, and 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. His novel Far Bright Star is in production as a feature film directed by Casey Affleck, starring Joaquin Phoenix, and adapted for the screen by Damien Ober.
Leslie Pietrzyk
Leslie Pietrzyk’s (Fiction and nonfiction) collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 from Unnamed Press, the publisher of her 2018 novel Silver Girl. Her first collection of short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the author of two additional novels, Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon) and A Year and a Day (William Morrow). Her award-winning short fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, The Hudson Review, Southern Review, Split Lip Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Sun, LitHub, Cincinnati Review, and The Washington Post Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020 and the 2020 Creative Arts Prize from the Polish American Historical Association. Organizations awarding fellowships include the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Arts, the Hambidge Center, and Hawthornden International Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She lives in North Carolina.
Read “In the End,” in The Los Angeles Review.
Susan Tekulve
Susan Tekulve’s (fiction and creative nonfiction) newest book, Bodies of Light, is forthcoming in 2024 from Serving House Books and will be her first full-length poetry collection. She is the author of Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press) and In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press). Her photo essay, “White Blossoms,” appeared in Issue 12 of the KYSO Flash Anthology.
Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appeared in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series, and her story collection, My Mother’s War Stories, received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.
Richard Tillinghast
Richard Tillinghast (Poetry and Nonfiction) is the author of twelve books of poetry and five of creative nonfiction. He studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard while getting his PhD there and later wrote a critical memoir, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur. With a Sinclair-Kennedy travel grant from Harvard he traveled in Europe in 1966-67, and again in 1990-91 with an Amy Lowell travel grant, also from Harvard.
His Selected Poems came out in 2010, and in 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry in addition to a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in translation for Dirty August, his versions of poems by the Turkish poet, Edip Cansever, written in collaboration with his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast. Poems of his have appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Best of Irish Poetry, and many other places. His 2012 travel book, An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul, was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. He has been a faculty member at Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the college program at San Quentin prison, and Sewanee. Beginning in 2005 Richard lived in Ireland for six years, moving back to this country in 2011. He currently teaches part-time in Converse College’s low-residency MFA program and divides his time between Sewanee, Tennessee, and the Big Island of Hawaii.