Writing, Literature & Publishing
Associate Professor (1988)
B.A. University of Chicago; Ph.D. Yale University;
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. In Fall 2007 he was visiting poet-in-residence at Williams College. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and in several Best American Poems anthologies.
William Beuttler
Publisher/Writer-In-Residence (2006)
B.A. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; M.S. Columbia University;
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.
His more than two decades of magazine work include stints as a senior editor at the Discovery Channel, Men's Journal, and Boston Magazine, and as an associate editor at Down Beat and American Way magazines. He has also written for Atlantic Online, Best Life, Chicago Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Outside, Playboy, GQ, National Geographic Traveler, Cooking Light, American Health, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. His assignments have taken him to Cuba, the Moroccan Sahara, and the Mall of America, and have brought him face to face with artists and writers including Saul Bellow, Sonny Rollins, and John Kenneth Galbraith.
Beuttler, a Chicago native, broke into journalism as a police reporter at the legendary City News Bureau of Chicago. His first teaching job was as a visiting professor of magazine journalism at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. He also spent a summer at the American University of Beirut supervising a journalism program designed by journalist and former hostage Terry Anderson.
Bernard Brooks
Writer-In-Residence (1998)
B.A. Harvard University; M.F.A. University of Iowa;
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. His short stories have received numerous awards, most notably an O. Henry Prize for "A Postal Creed" and a Nelson Algren Award for "Reptiles Take Over the World". He has also received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Massacusetts Artists Foundation, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and elsewhere. In addition to his fiction, he is the author of numerous published essays on art, history, building design, and travel.
Christine Casson
Writer-in-Residence (2004)
B.A. New York University; M.A. University of Virginia; M.F.A. Warren Wilson College;
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. Her work has appeared in Agenda (England), Stand (England), The Dalhousie Review, Natural Bridge, Slant, South Dakota Review, and Alabama Literary Review, among others, and in the anthologies Fashioned Pleasures (Parallel Press, 2005), Never Before (Four Way Books, 2005), and Conversation Pieces (Everyman's Library, 2007). She has also published critical essays on the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and the poetry of Linda Hogan. Ms. Casson is currently writing a book of non-fiction that explores the relationship between trauma and memory, and is at work on a study of the poetic sequence entitled Sequence and Time Signature: A Study in Poetic Orchestration. Photo credit: Star Black
Yu-jin Chang
Assistant Professor (2007)
B.A. Yale University; M.Phil. Yale University; Ph.D. Yale University;
Yu-jin Chang teaches European literature and philosophy and has recently completed a study of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot titled "Disaster and Hope" which examines the closely related aesthetic conceptions of time and history by these two writers, arguably the two most influential literary theorists of the last century, down to their philosophical origins in, respectively, Leibniz's monadology and Nietzsche's concept of eternal return.
Lisa Diercks
Graduate Program Director for the M.A. Program and Associate Professor (2001)
B.A. Tufts University; M.S. Boston University;
Lisa Diercks has taught courses in book design and production, magazine design and production, and desktop publishing at Emerson since 1996. She also acts as design advisor for the department's student publications.
Her students have received multiple awards for design work. Four projects from her book design course have been accepted into the New England Book Show: Ascenders & Descenders (2000), Hot Metal (2003); Foul (2004); and Errata (2005). Two student publications, Gauge and Stork, have been recognized with design awards from Graphis New Talent, How International, and the Society of Publication Designers.
Ms. Diercks is a publishing industry veteran and continues to be active in her field, working primarily in book design. She began her career at Houghton Mifflin/Trade and later established her own design studio. Her publishing clients have included the Atlantic Monthly; Beacon Press; Boston Common Press; Candlewick Press; Charlesbridge; Da Capo; HarperCollins; Houghton Mifflin; Little, Brown; the Museum of Fine Arts; and University of Minnesota Press. Several of her own design projects have appeared in the New England Book Show, including Chocolate on the Brain. She serves on the advisory board for Kahani, a multi-award-winning magazine for children from the South Asian community in the U.S.
William Donoghue
Associate Chair and Associate Professor (1997)
B.A. University of Calgary; M.A. McGill University; Ph.D. Stanford University;
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. His courses cover the British, American and French novel, narratology, literary theory and European modernism. He has published a translation of French poetry, Lead Blues (Guernica), by the award-winning Quebecois poet, Anne-Marie Alonzo, made a film, Amateurs, at the National Film Board of Canada, and published his own short fiction in TriQuarterly, Grain, and other journals in the United States and Canada.
David Emblidge
Associate Professor (2003)
B.A. St. Lawrence University; M.A. University of Virginia; Ph.D. University of Minnesota;
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. He co-authored Writer's Resource: The Watson-Guptill Guide to Workshops, Conferences, Artists' Colonies and Academic Programs. He organized the 4th International Conference on the Book and serves as Associate Editor of The International Journal of the Book, both for Common Ground Publishing. His articles and essays have appeared in Southwest Review, The New Republic, Saturday Review, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe. For The World Book Encyclopedia, he wrote the article on book publishing. Among his awards have been a First Union Fellowship (International Center for Jefferson Studies), a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship (Univ. de Toulouse, France), a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (Yale), and a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy. Prior to joining the Emerson faculty, he was Editor in Chief at The Mountaineers Books, Seattle.
Robin Riley Fast
Associate Professor (1989)
B.A. University of California, Berkeley; M.A. Hunter College; Ph.D. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities;
Dr. 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). She has published many journal articles and book chapters, including work on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Luci Tapahonso, Simon J. Ortiz, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Carter Revard; nonfiction by John Edgar Wideman, and Thomas King's novel Green Grass, Running Water.
Maria Flook
Distinguished Writer-in-Residence (2001)
B.A. Roger Williams College; M.F.A. University of Iowa;
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). Her fiction includes the novels Open Water, Family Night, which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, Lux, (Little, Brown and Company, 2004), and a collection of stories, You Have the Wrong Man (Pantheon, 1996). She has also published two collections of poetry, Sea Room and Reckless Wedding, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, TriQuarterly, and More Magazine among others.
Flora Gonzalez
Professor (1986)
B.A. California State University, Northridge; M.A. Pennsylvania State University; Ph.D. Yale University;
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). In collaboration with Rosamond Rosenmeier, she edited and translated In the Vortex of the Cyclone: Selected Poems by Excilia Saldana (UP of Florida, 2002) (Cuba). She has published non-fiction in The Americas Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review and anthologized in RE-Membering Cuba (U of Texas P, 2002). In 1997-1998 she was a Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and is presently an affiliate of the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard. Professor González has taught at Dartmouth College, Middlebury College and The University of Chicago. She is a member of the greater Boston Latino Consortium and her latest book is Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts (U of Virginia P, 2006). She is currently at work on a memoir about her Cuban-American experience entitled On the Other Side of the Glass.
Lise Haines
Writer-in-Residence (2002)
B.A. Syracuse University; M.F.A. Bennington College;
Lise Haines is the author of three novels, Girl in the Arena (Bloomsbury, October, 2009, to be published in the US, the UK and Turkey); Small Acts of Sex and Electricity, a Book Sense Pick in 2006; and In My Sister's Country, a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals and she was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award. Tom Robbins writes about Girl in the Arena: "What Lise Haines has wrought is a kind of comic book without pictures, a wild pop novel about neo-Roman gladiators that—rocking with violent energy and bopping with social satire—can generate suspense, horror, laughter, and even twinges of tenderness." The Boston Globe called In My Sister's Country "An authoritative fictional debut." Margot Livesey wrote about Small Acts Of Sex And Electricity, "Here is an author who writes like no one else. Our world is the richer for her glittering work." Haines was Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and other teaching credits include UCLA, UCSB, and Stonecoast. She grew up in Chicago, lived in California for many years, and now resides in the Boston area.
DeWitt Henry
Professor (1983)
A.B. Amherst College; M.A. Harvard University; Ph.D. Harvard University;
DeWitt Henry is the author of 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) and editor of 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). The Founding Editor of Ploughshares, and for the first twenty years its Executive Director (for which he won a Massachusetts Commonwealth Award in 1992), he also served as Interim Director/Editor-in-Chief for fifteen months prior to the appointment of the new Director/Editor-in-Chief in the fall of 2008.
Steven Himmer
Lecturer (2005)
B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.F.A. Emerson College;
Steve Himmer has published fiction in Night Train, Pindeldyboz, Reed Magazine, Amoskeag, and NANO Fiction, among other journals, and in anthologies including Brevity & Echo, What Happened To Us These Last Couple Years?, and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany. His critical essays have appeared Into The Blogosphere: The Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, Journal of Ecocriticism, and elsewhere. He is also editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction.
Richard Hoffman
Writer-in-Residence (2001)
B.A. Fordham University; M.F.A. Goddard College;
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 the short story collection Interference & Other Stories. His work, both verse and prose, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Witness, and other magazines. He has been awarded a number of fellowships and prizes, including two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships in fiction, The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Prize for the essay, and a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellowship Award.
Roy Kamada
Assistant Professor (2006)
B.A. University of Oregon; M.F.A. University of Virginia; Ph.D. University of California, Davis;
Dr. Kamada is a specialist in British and multi-ethnic American literatures whose interests include poetry, contemporary poetics and postcolonial, transnational and diasporic studies.
He has received grants from the James Irvine Foundation, Poets and Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf. He has received the Celeste Turner Wright award from the Academy of American Poets, the David Noel Miller Fellowship at UC Davis and a Henry Hoyns Fellowship at the University of Virigina.
Maria Koundoura
Associate Professor (1993)
B.A. University of Melbourne; M.A. University of Melbourne; Ph.D. Stanford University;
Maria Koundoura is the author of The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities (London: IB Tauris 2007). Among her publications are articles and book chapters on nationalism, multiculturalism, and globalization, diasporic identities, the critical discourse on modernity, the intersections of Philhellenism and Orientalism, women's travel writing, translation, and the discourse on rights. Currently she is at work on her second book Desire Lines: Metaphors of the Global City. Dr. Koundoura was the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University and was one of the founding editors of the Stanford Humanities Review. She was the Project Director of the inaugural Antipodes Festival, an arts festival funded by the Ministry of Culture of Greece and the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, Australia. Her translations of the Greek poet Yiorgos Chouliaras have appeared in Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and Translation.
Margot Livesey
Distinguished Writer-in-Residence (1996)
B.A. University of York, England;
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. She has taught in numerous writing programs including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Boston University, and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Gian Lombardo
Publisher-in-Residence (2001)
B.A. Trinity College; M.A. Boston University;
Gian Lombardo has over 25 years of experience in a wide range of publishing environments -- trade, association, literary and consumer magazines as well as professional, literary and textbook publishing. As a freelance consultant, he has provided expertise in editing, design, production and project management. His clients have included Reed Business Information, Ploughshares, Agni, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston Society of Civil Engineers and Transitions Abroad. He serves as Contributing Editor for Sentence, a literary journal, and slope.org, an online literary journal. Lombardo also directs Quale Press, which publishes both literary and technology-oriented works.
In addition to his diverse publishing background, Lombardo is the author of Between Islands, a collection of poems and verse translations (Dolphin-Moon Press, 1984); and three collections of prose poetry -- Standing Room, Sky Open Again (Dolphin-Moon Press, 1989 & 1997) and Of All the Corners to Forget (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2004). His translation of the first half of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit was published in 2000; his translation of Eugène Savitzkaya's Les règles de solitude came out in 2004.
Tamera Marko
Lecturer (2008)
B.S. Pepperdine University; M.A. University of California, San Diego; Ph.D. University of California, San Diego;
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." Marko's several academic and media publications and translations explore relationships between youth movements and nation-building projects in post-abolition and peace process contexts. Her work has also debuted in film festivals, theaters and cafés in Medellín, Rio de Janeiro, Durham, and Boston. While a Faculty Fellow at Duke University, Marko co-founded DukeEngage Colombia, which she still directs. In a collaboration between Emerson College, MIT, Duke University, and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, this project is called "Medellín: la violencia is not the whole story . . ." http://rw121emersonmedellin.blogspot.com
Her poetry, in a publication-ready collection entitled Coming to Consciousness: In Brazil my name is a fruit, explores the power and pitfalls of white privilege, gender, and interracial relations. Before academia, she worked as a journalist covering human rights in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States.
Megan Marshall
Assistant Professor (2007)
A.B. Harvard University;
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 (2005) 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.
Marshall has been the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and she has been a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 1991. During 2006-2007 she was a fellow in creative nonfiction writing at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she began work on a biography of Ebe Hawthorne, Nathaniel's brilliant and reclusive older sister.
Photo credit: Gail Samuelson
Gail Mazur
Distinguished Writer-in-Residence (1996)
B.A. Smith College; M.A. Lesley College;
Gail Mazur is author of four books of poetry, Nightfire, The Pose of Happiness, The Common, and the 2001 collection, They Can't Take That Away from Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals, including the Atlantic, the Paris Review, the New Republic, Ploughshares, and on-line in Slate. Her work has been widely anthologized, including The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s, The Handbook of Heartbreak, and The New Norton Introduction to Literature. Mazur is on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has served as committee chair. She also teaches in the FAWC summer Workshop Program.
Kimberly McLarin
Writer-in-Residence (2003)
A.B. Duke University;
Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down, Meeting of the Waters, and Jump at the Sun. 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. It was also nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and chosen by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book. McLarin is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Greensboro News & Record and The Associated Press, and previously taught at Northeastern University. She is host of Basic Black, Boston's long-running television program devoted to African-American themes on WGBH-TV.
Pablo Medina
Professor (2009)
A.B. Georgetown University; M.A. Georgetown University;
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. In 2008, Medina and fellow poet Mark Statman published a new English version of García Lorca's Poet in New York, which John Ashbery called "the definitive version of Lorca's masterpiece." Acclaimed as "lyrical and powerfully evocative" and "deserving a prominent spot in today's literature of exile," Medina's work has appeared in various languages, among them Spanish, French, German, and Arabic and in periodicals and magazines all over the world. Winner of numerous awards for his writing and teaching, Medina was on the board of AWP from 2002-2007, serving as Board President in 2005-2006.
William Orem
Writer-In-Residence (2007)
B.A. Hampshire College; M.F.A. Indiana University; Ph.D. Indiana University;
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. 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, and he has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. 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.
Orem's play The Seabirds won the Manduzmar New Plays Award at Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo and opened to 3 1/2 star reviews. His play Suspension was one of 14 chosen out of 1,200 submissions for production at City Theatre in Miami, and went on to become a finalist for the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. His play Cabman was performed this summer in the Boston Theatre Marathon and will be appearing in The Best 10-Minute Plays 2009.
Orem also works as a popular science journalist. His science reporting is often heard on NPR's A Moment of Science, and he writes a weekly blog for the Foundational Questions Institute, an MIT-based organization that funds research into mind-bending physics and cosmology. His first novel is under representation and he is currently at work on his second.
Pamela Painter
Professor (1987)
B.A. Pennsylvania State University; M.A. University of Illinois;
Pamela Painter's first collection of stories, Getting to Know the Weather, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Her second collection of stories is titled The Long and Short of It. Painter is also the co-author, with Anne Bernays, of the widely-used textbook What If? Fiction Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and Epoch, and in numerous anthologies, including Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and Microfiction, among others. She is the winner of three Pushcart Prizes and Agni's John Cheever Award for Fiction, is a founding editor of StoryQuarterly, and has received grants from the Massachusetts' Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories have been produced by Word Theatre, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, Stage Turner, and "Reading in His Wake" was recorded for Love Hurts, by W.W. Norton.
Jon Papernick
Writer-In-Residence (2007)
B.A. York University; M.F.A. Sarah Lawrence College;
Jon Papernick is the author of the short story collection The Ascent of Eli Israel (Arcade Publishing) and a novel, Who by Fire, Who by Blood (Exile Editions). His fiction has appeared in Confrontation, The Reading Room, Night Train Magazine, Exile Quarterly, Nerve.com and the anthologies Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (Harper) and Scribblers on the Roof (Persea). He recently completed his second collection of short stories, There is No Other, and is at work on his second novel.
Elizabeth Parfitt
Lecturer (2004)
B.A. Pennsylvania State University; M.F.A. Emerson College;
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. She is also a forum member contributor for the professional women's network Damsels in Success (www.damselsinsuccess.com).
Ladette Randolph
Director & Editor-In-Chief of Ploughshares and Distinguished Publisher-In-Residence (2008)
B.A. University of Nebraska, Lincoln; M.A. University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Ph.D. University of Nebraska, Lincoln;
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. Before joining the staff at Emerson, she was executive editor and associate director at University of Nebraska Press, and prior to that served as managing editor of Prairie Schooner magazine. She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Rona Jaffe grant, a Norcroft fellowship, a Virginia Faulkner award, and has been reprinted in Best New American Voices.
Frederick Reiken
Graduate Program Director for the M.F.A. Program and Associate Professor (1999)
B.A. Princeton University; M.F.A. University of California, Irvine;
Frederick Reiken has published two novels, The Odd Sea and The Lost Legends of New Jersey. The Odd Sea won the Hackney Literary award for a first novel, was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and was selected as one of the best first novels of the year by Booklist and Library Journal. The Lost Legends of New Jersey was a New York Times "Notable Book" and was cited on "Best Books" lists for both the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. Reiken's short stories have appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker. New stories have either recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Western Humanities Review and Glimmer Train. He has also been a frequent contributor of essays on the craft of writing to The Writer's Chronicle, and his personal essay "Horizon House" was published last year in the anthology Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey writers take on the Garden State.
He has appeared on radio shows including NPR's Weekend All Things Considered with Scott Simon, The Kathy and Judy Show (Chicago), and The Book Show with Gretchen Grezina (Albany). Prior to the publication of his first novel, he worked as a reporter, columnist, and nature writer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. His diverse background also includes having worked as a wildlife biologist in the Negev Desert, Israel.
John Rodzvilla
Electronic Publisher-In-Residence (2007)
B.A. Skidmore College;
John Rodzvilla has worked in editorial, production, subsidiary rights and operations for the past decade. While at the Perseus Books Group he helped to negotiate e-book licenses with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Sony and developed a print-on-demand program for backlist titles. He has worked with a variety of technology writers and edited the first collection of weblog writings, We've Got Blog, in 2002. He is finishing a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science at Simmons College. He lectures across the country on the role of new technology in library science and academic scholarship.
Murray Schwartz
Professor (1997)
B.A. University of Rochester; M.A. University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley;
Dr. Schwartz is a specialist in Shakespeare whose interests include literary theory, psychoanalysis, and Holocaust studies. He co-edited Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Other major publications include Memory and Desire: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Aging (with Kathleen Woodward), A Thematic Introduction to Shakespeare, Erik Erikson, Where is Literature?, and Know Thyself: Delphi Seminars (with Norman Holland), as well as many essays on Shakespeare, theoretical and applied psychoanalysis, and poets such as Sylvia Plath. His essays on Shakespearean Romance appeared in Psyart, an online journal he co-edits with Holland. Dr. Schwartz is currently at work on a psychoanalytic study of the Holocaust, an essay on theories of trauma, and the completion of a biography (with Peggy Schwartz) of the African-American dancer and anthropologist, Pearl Primus.
Jeffrey Seglin
Associate Professor (1999)
B.A. Bethany College; M.T.S. Harvard University;
Jeffrey L. Seglin writes "The Right Thing," a weekly column on general ethics syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate. He is the author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business. He is also the author of The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart.
He was an ethics fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in 2001 and a resident fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard in 1998-99. He lectures widely on business ethics.
He is the author or co-author on more than a dozen books on business and writing. He has written for publications including the New York Times, Fortune, FSB, Salon.com, Time.com, Sojourners, MIT's Sloan Management Review, Harvard Management Update, Business 2.0, ForbesASAP, CIO, CFO, MBA Jungle, among others. Prior to 1998, he was an executive editor at Inc. magazine.
John Skoyles
Professor (1994)
B.A. Fairfield University; M.A. University of Iowa; M.F.A. University of Iowa;
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. He has been awarded two individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the New York State and North Carolina Arts Councils. He currently serves as the poetry editor of Ploughshares.
Tracy Strauss
Lecturer (2006)
B.A. State University of New York, Geneseo; M.F.A. Boston University;
Tracy Strauss teaches in the first-year writing program. Her scholarly interests include trauma and the bildungsroman, the screenplay as dramatic literature, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Literature and Film of both the Civil War and Cold War, among other topics. Her critical essay "Sense and Sensibility: Hopkin's Word-Journey to Hell and Back" has been published in The Hopkins Quarterly (2005) and "Trauma's Dialectic in Civil War Literature and Film" is forthcoming (2008) in War, Literature & The Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.
Her creative work earned her the 2005 Somerville Arts Council Literary Fellowship Award. Her poems have appeared in Solas, Lyrical Somerville, and Spoonful. She has also published in The Writing Center Journal, Through Smoked Glass, Equal Opportunity Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her original screenplay, Where the Streets Have No Name, received semi-final honors at the 1999 Boston Film Festival Screenplay Competition. She has previously served as a full-time instructor in the Writing Program at Boston University where she was also co-director of the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Center.
She attended the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference for nonfiction.
Daniel Tobin
Chair and Professor (2002)
B.A. Iona College; M.T.S. Harvard University; M.F.A. Warren Wilson College; Ph.D. University of Virginia;
Daniel Tobin is the author of four 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) and Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008). 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 was a featured book on Poetry Daily as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book Award. Most recently, he was named a recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for 2009.
His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad.
Photo credit: Star Black
Jessica Treadway
Associate Professor (1998)
B.A. State University of New York, Albany; M.A. Boston University;
Ms. Treadway is the author of the novel And Give You Peace, published by Graywolf Press in 2001. Her collection Absent Without Leave and Other Stories won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 1993. A former fellow at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute and recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she also reviews fiction for The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune.
John Trimbur
Director of the First Year Writing Program and Professor (2007)
B.A. Stanford University; M.A. State University of New York, Buffalo; Ph.D. State University of New York, Buffalo;
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. He has also published three textbooks The Call to Write (4th ed. 2008), Reading Culture (6th ed. 2007), and A Short Guide to Writing About Chemistry (2nd ed. 2000) and edited the collection Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics (2001). Previously he was a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Higher Education Development and a Resident Fellow at the Centre for Rhetorical Studies, both at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Wendy Walters
Associate Professor (1999)
B.A. Brown University; M.A. University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D. University of California, San Diego;
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. She has published articles in the journals African American Review, Novel, Critical Arts, and MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.). She has published chapters in the books Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, and Diasporic Africa: A Reader, as well as entries in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Black Writers, and The Critical Response to Chester Himes.
Daniel Weaver
Publisher/Editor-In-Residence (2007)
B.A. Earlham College;
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. He has edited and published Gore Vidal, Vincent Bugliosi, Arthur Danto, John Sayles, Phyllis Chesler, Garry Marshall, Julian Barnes, Carolyn See, Norman Lewis, Richard Powers, Fannie Flagg, T.Coraghessan Boyle, Roy Blount, Jr., Peter DeVries, Alan Lelchuk, and Jonathan Schell, among others.
Douglas Whynott
Associate Professor (2000)
B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.F.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst;
Douglas Whynott teaches courses in nonfiction writing. In Norman Sims' new history of literary journalism, True Stories, Mr. Whynott is described as "an accomplished master of the literary journalism of everyday life." Following the Bloom, published in Beacon Press Concord Library Series of Nature Writing and in a Penguin reprint in 2004, was described in the New York Times as a book that "excites our wonder." Giant Bluefin, an account of the bluefin tuna fishery in New England, was described in the New York Times as an eloquent book that "dazzles us" 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, reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle as a book that "becomes a profound look at the human condition," and read in entirety on "The Book Club" at an NPR affiliate in Ames, Iowa. A Country Practice was described in BookList as the "best introduction to the veterinary profession since James Herriot," selected as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2004 by New Hampshire Public Radio, and optioned for development as a television series.
Among his magazine work, Mr. Whynott has written book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Boston Globe, travel stories for Outside, Islands and New England Monthly, and articles about telemetry and robotics for Discover and Smithsonian. As a guest writer for the San Diego Reader he wrote articles about the photographic archives at the Museum of Photographic Arts, a study of the California current at Scripps Institution, and the work of astronomers at Palomar Observatory. An essay about his mother's heart transplant surgery was published in The Boston Globe Magazine and Reader's Digest. He spent a week aboard a cod trawler on Georges Bank for New England Monthly. His essay on nonfiction book structures was published in Writer's Chronicle. An essay about studying music with blues and jazz pianist Sammy Price was published in The Massachusetts Review. For 10 years Mr. Whynott was the concert piano tuner at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He performs as a blues pianist.
Steve Yarbrough
Professor (09/01/09)
B.A. University of Mississippi; M.A. University of Mississippi; M.F.A. University of Arkansas;
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. His novel Prisoners of War (Knopf, 2004) was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award, and his 1999 novel The Oxygen Man (McMurray & Beck) won the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors Award. His other books are the novel Visible Spirits (Knopf, 2001) and the story collections Veneer (University of Missouri Press, 1998), Mississippi History (Missouri, 1994), and Family Men (LSU Press, 1990). His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has also been published in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Japan and Poland.
Mako Yoshikawa
Assistant Professor (2005)
B.A. Columbia University; M.Phil. Oxford University; Ph.D. University of Michigan;
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. Yoshikawa's second novel, Once Removed, also published by Bantam, came out in 2003. Writing awards include fellowships from the Bunting Institute of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony. Active as a scholar as well as a novelist, Yoshikawa has also published articles on incest and race.
