Faculty
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- Interim Chair and Associate Professor
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Jerald Walker has published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, The Missouri Review, The Harvard Review, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, and The Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including multiple times in The Best American Essays. Walker is the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, recipient of the 2011 PEN New England/L.L. Winship Award for Nonfiction and named a Best Memoir of the Year by Kirkus Reviews.
Read More - Professor and Associate Chair
Professor Skoyles is the author of four books of poems, A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul and The Situation. He has also published a book of personal essays, Generous Strangers, and a memoir, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education.
Read More - Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for the M.F.A. Program
Frederick Reiken is the author of three novels, most recently Day For Night, published by Reagan Arthur Books of Little, Brown. The London Daily Telegraph recently listed Reiken as one of the "10 rising literary stars of 2010."
Read More - Electronic Publisher-In-Residence and Graduate Program Director for the M.A. Program
John Rodzvilla has worked on a variety of editorial, production, and subsidiary rights endeavors in publishing. He acquired and developed non-fiction titles for Da Capo Press, Perseus Publishing, and Basic Books, including titles on business writing, weblog development, forensic science, and general non-fiction. At Perseus, Rodzvilla was responsible for a print-on-demand program that took out-of-print backlist titles and put them back into print as paperbacks. Rodzvilla also worked in the subsidiary rights department of the Perseus Books Group where he licensed titles for translation in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Additionally, at Perseus, he was part of the digital rights team that developed digital initiatives with Google, Amazon, Sony, and Microsoft.
Read More - Associate Professor
Jonathan Aaron is the author of three collections of poems, Second Sight, Corridor, and Journey to the Lost City. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation.
Read More - Associate Professor
Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of four books for adults and six books for children. His most recent works are What Obama Means...For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future (William Morrow, 2009) and A Taste of Honey: Stories (Broadway, 2010).
Read More - Publisher/Writer-In-Residence
Bill Beuttler teaches courses in magazine writing, editing, and publishing. Before joining Emerson, he spent the previous three years covering jazz for the Boston Globe and teaching journalism at Boston University.
Read More - Writer-In-Residence
Ben Brooks is the author of the novel, The Icebox, and has published over 75 short stories in literary journals, including Sewanee Review, Chicago Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Notre Dame Review, Epoch, The Chicago Tribune, The Mississippi Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Seattle Review, Writers' Forum, Crab Orchard Review, The Florida Review, among others.
Read More - Writer-in-Residence
Christine Casson is the author of After the First World, a book of poems (Star Cloud Press, 2008). She was recently named "Poet of the Month" at PoetryNet.org.
Read More - Assistant Professor
Yu-jin Chang teaches European literature and philosophy and has recently completed a study of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot titled "Disaster and Hope."
Read More - Associate Professor
Lisa Diercks has taught book design and production, magazine design and production, and design software courses at Emerson since 1996. She also acts as design advisor for the department's student publications.
Read More - Associate Professor
William Donoghue is a specialist in the history and theory of the novel. His book, Enlightenment Fiction in England, France and America (UP Florida 2002), examines the relationship of the novel to aesthetics and philosophy in the eighteenth-century. He reviews books for The Scriblerian, has published articles on literary theory (SubStance), seventeenth-century poetry, Ben Jonson and the Marquis de Sade, and is currently writing a new book on the poetics of space in Mannerist art and literature.
Read More - Associate Professor
David Emblidge has over two decades of experience as a book editor and publisher. He has edited Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities; My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt's Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936-1962; The Appalachian Trail Reader; The Providence and Rhode Island Cookbook, and many other books. He authored Exploring the Appalachian Trail: Hikes in Southern New England and book packaged the four other volumes in this series.
Read More - Associate Professor
Robin Riley Fast's interests include American Indian literatures, poetry, women writers, and 19th century American literature. Her most recent book is The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry (U of Michigan Press, 1999). She has also co-edited Teaching Dickinson's Poetry (MLA, 1989).
Read More - Distinguished Writer-in-Residence
Maria Flook, a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award recipient, is the author of the nonfiction books, My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, (Pantheon, 1998) and New York Times Best Seller Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod (Broadway Books, 2003).
Read More - Professor
Dr. González's teaching interests include Latin American fiction and non-fiction, the literatures of the Caribbean and feminist writing. She has published widely on the topic of the Latin American novel since the 1960s, including her book Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place (Wayne State UP, 1995) (Chile).
Read More - Writer-in-Residence
Lise Haines is the author of three novels: Girl in the Arena, published in the US (Bloomsbury) and soon to be published in Turkey (Alfa-Artemis Yay?nevi); Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten "Best Book Picks for 2006" by the NPR station in San Diego; and In My Sister's Country (Penguin / Putnam), a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize, which The Boston Globe called "an authoritative fictional debut."
Read More - Professor
DeWitt Henry is the author of Sweet Dreams: A Family History and Safe Suicide, a memoir in linked essays, and of The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts (winner of the inaugural Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel) as well as the editor of anthologies, including Breaking Into Print, Sorrow's Company: Writers on Loss and Grief, Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men (with James Alan McPherson), Other Sides of Silence: New Fiction from Ploughshares, and The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the 80's (winner of the Editor's Book Award).
Read More - Lecturer
Steve Himmer is author of the novel The Bee-Loud Glade (2011) and the ebook novella The Second Most Dangerous Job In America (2012), both published by Atticus Books. He also edits the webjournal Necessary Fiction.
Read More - Writer-in-Residence
Richard Hoffman is author of Half the House: a Memoir, the poetry collections Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2009 New England Poetry Club Sheila Motton Book Award, and Emblem, as well as the short story collection Interference & Other Stories.
Read More - Assistant Professor
Dr. Kamada is a specialist in British and multi-ethnic American literatures whose interests include poetry, contemporary poetics and postcolonial, transnational and diasporic studies.
Read More - Associate Professor
Maria Koundoura is the author of The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities (I. B. Tauris, 2007; paperback edition 2012). Her latest book, Transnational Cultures, Transnational Identities: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange is forthcoming in 2012 by I B. Tauris. She has written articles and book chapters on nationalism, multiculturalism, postcolonial cultures, and globalization.
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Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Lecturer- Distinguished Writer-in-Residence
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She is the author of a collection of stories and six novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture and most recently The House on Fortune Street, which won the L.L.Winship/PEN New England Award.
Read More - Publisher-in-Residence
Gian Lombardo has had over 30 years of experience in a wide range of publishing environments—trade, association, literary, and consumer magazines as well as professional, literary, and textbook publishing. His clients have included Reed Business Information, Ploughshares, Agni, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston Society of Civil Engineers, and Transitions Abroad.
Read More - Lecturer
Tamera Marko specializes in multi-lingual, multi-media community literacy projects in the Americas (Spanish, Portuguese, Maya, Quechua, English). She channels her work as a historian of Latin America and her 14 years of teaching writing to combine genres of new media, composition and traditional historical memory to research and publish in "the approach and form called for by each project."
Read More - Assistant Professor
Megan Marshall is the author of two nonfiction books and has published numerous essays and reviews in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate Online, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Boston Review, and elsewhere. Her biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005; Mariner Books, 2006) won the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians; the Mark Lynton History Prize, awarded by the Anthony Lukas Prize Project jointly sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard's Nieman Foundation; the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir.
Read More - Distinguished Writer-in-Residence
Gail Mazur is author of six books of poems. Her fifth collection, Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems (Chicago, 2005), won the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Mazur has authored four earlier books of poetry: Nightfire, The Pose of Happiness, The Common, and They Can't Take That Away from Me (University of Chicago Press), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Figures in a Landscape, Mazur's sixth book of poems, will be published in spring 2011 by University of Chicago Press.
Read More - Assistant Professor
Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down (1999), Meeting of the Waters (2001), and Jump at the Sun (2006), all published by William Morrow Inc. McLarin is also co-author of the memoir Growing Up X with Ilyasah Shabazz. Jump at the Sun was chosen as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. The novel was also nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and selected by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book.
Read More - Professor
Pablo Medina is the author of eleven books, among them the poetry collection Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo (2005) and the novel The Cigar Roller, which was a Book Sense Notable for 2005.
Read More - Writer-In-Residence
William Orem writes in multiple genres. His stories and poems have been published in over 100 journals, including in The Princeton Arts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and The New Formalist, and have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His first collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, previously given to Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford and Alice Munro. His second collection, Across the River, won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. His historical novel Killer of Crying Deer was published in September of 2010. Meanwhile his first collection of poems, Our Purpose in Speaking, has been honored three times as a finalist in national competitions including, most recently, the Neruda Prize.
Read More - Professor
Pamela Painter's first collection of stories, Getting to Know the Weather, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was reissued as A Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary in 2008. Her second collection of stories, also from Carnegie Mellon, is titled The Long and Short of It. Painter is co-author, with Anne Bernays, of the widely-used textbook What If? Fiction Exercises for Fiction Writers. Painter's individual stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Ploughshares, and in numerous anthologies, including Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and Microfiction.
Read More - Writer-In-Residence
Jon Papernick is the author of three works of fiction: The Ascent of Eli Israel, Who by Fire, Who by Blood, and There Is No Other (Spring 2010). His fiction has appeared in Confrontation, The Reading Room, Night Train Magazine, Exile Quarterly, Nerve, Zeek, and the anthologies Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge and Scribblers on the Roof.
Read More - Lecturer
Elizabeth Parfitt writes nonfiction and fiction with interests in personal identity, education, and popular culture. She has written for publications including Boston Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education online, Research/Penn State and The Writing Lab Newsletter.
Read More - Director & Editor-In-Chief of Ploughshares and Distinguished Publisher-In-Residence
Ladette Randolph is the Director/Editor-in-chief of Ploughshares magazine. She is the author of the novel, A Sandhills Ballad and the award-winning short story collection This is Not the Tropics, as well as the editor of two anthologies: The Big Empty and A Different Plain.
Read More - Professor
Dr. Schwartz is a specialist in Shakespeare whose interests include literary theory, psychoanalysis, and Holocaust studies. He co-edited Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays.
Read More - Interim Dean of the School of the Arts and Professor
Daniel Tobin is the author of five books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), and Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010). Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Narrows, Second Things, and Belated Heavens were featured books on Poetry Daily. Most recently, he was named a recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for 2009.
Read More - Associate Professor
Jessica Treadway, who holds a Master's in creative writing, is author of Please Come Back To Me, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (September 2010). Her previous books are the novel And Give You Peace (Graywolf Press, 2001) and the collection Absent Without Leave and Other Stories (Delphinium Books/Simon & Schuster, 1992). A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Treadway has published individual stories in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, and Five Points, among other journals, and her work has been cited multiple times in The Best American Short Stories annual anthology.
Read More - Professor
John Trimbur is a specialist in composition and writing studies, with interests in cultural studies of literacy and the politics of language in the United States and South Africa. He has published widely on writing theory and has won a number of awards, including the Richard Braddock Award for Outstanding Article (2003) for "English Only and U.S. College Composition," the James L. Kinneavy Award (2001) for "Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism," and the College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award (1993) for The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary.
Read More - Associate Professor
Dr. Wendy W. Walters specializes in African American Literature, in the larger context of diaspora studies. She is the author of At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. In 2001-2002 she was a non-resident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.
Read More - Publisher/Editor-In-Residence
Dan Weaver has been the editor in chief of Nation Books in New York City, Faber & Faber, Inc. in Boston, senior editor at Viking Penguin and McGraw-Hill in New York City, run several book clubs, and taught at Hofstra University.
Read More - Associate Professor
Douglas Whynott teaches courses in nonfiction writing and literature. His book Following the Bloom is an account of travels with commercial beekeepers. Giant Bluefint is a story of the bluefin tuna harpoon fishery on Cape Cod, and was a highly recommended selection in "The New York Review of Books Reader's Catalog". His book about a Maine boatyard, A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time, was an independent bookstore bestseller, and read in entirety on "The Book Club" at an NPR affiliate in Ames, Iowa.
Read More - Professor
Steve Yarbrough is the author of eight books. His newest novel, Safe from the Neighbors, will be published by Knopf in January of 2010. His 2006 novel The End of California (Knopf) was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction and is slated for publication soon in Polish translation.
Read More - Associate Professor
Mako Yoshikawa's first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, was published by Bantam in 1999. A national bestseller in the States, it has been translated into six languages, including Swedish and Hebrew.
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WLP Associate Professor Jabari Asim explains how Emerson's program combines academic study with creative work.WLP Dept. News
WLP students, faculty, and alumni bring creativity and unparalleled passion to the study and craft of writing, literature, and publishing.
