m.f.a. in memphis

{faculty}
	Thomas Russell (Professor, Fiction; Director, Writers Workshop) was born in Wrexham, North Wales, grew up Kansas City, received a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, and had a post-doctorate in the writing program at New York University. He is currently director of the MFA program at the University of Memphis, where he teaches both fiction and poetry. In the past he has been editor of the literary magazine, formerly called River City, and director of the River City Writers Series. His poems and stories are widely published. He has been awarded NEA and Carnegie Foundation fellowships. His work has received two Pushcart nominations, a Pushcart Prize, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and several first prize magazine awards. Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler has said that Russell's novel, Riding With the Magi, is "a remarkably innovative and utterly enchanting novel, and Thomas Russell is one of our most interesting and original fiction writers." E-mail him at trussell@memphis.edu.
	Richard Bausch (Professor, Fiction; Moss Chair of Excellence) was born in Fort Benning, Georgia, and grew up near Washington, D.C. He holds a B.A. from George Mason University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. Bausch is the author of ten novels and seven collections of short stories, including Take Me Back (1981), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Last Good Time (1984); Mr. Field’s Daughter (1989); Violence (1992); The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch (1996); In the Night Season (1998); Hello to the Cannibals (2003); and Thanksgiving Night (2006). His short stories have appeared in numerous prize-winning anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O. Henry, and Pushcart. He has received several awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Previously Professor of English and Heritage Chair of Creative Writing at George Mason University, Richard Bausch holds the Lillian and Morrie A. Moss Chair of Excellence at The University of Memphis. E-mail him at rbausch@memphis.edu.
	John Bensko (Professor, Poetry and Fiction) has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in 20th century poetry and narrative technique from Florida State University. Before coming to the University of Memphis, he taught at the University of Alabama, Old Dominion University, Rhodes College and, as a Fulbright Professor in American Literature, at The Universidad de Alicante, Spain. Dr. Bensko won the McLeod-Grobe Poetry Prize for 2000. His books include Sea Dogs (short stories), The Iron City (poetry), The Waterman's Children (poetry) and Green Soldiers (poetry), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His poems have been included in the following anthologies: The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, A New Geography of Poets and The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets. His fiction has appeared in many journals, including Chelsea, The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, The Madison Review, The New England Review, Quarterly West, The Sonora Review, The Southern Review and TriQuarterly. E-mail him at jbensko@memphis.edu.
	Kristen Iversen (Associate Professor, Creative Nonfiction and Fiction) was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and grew up just outside Boulder, Colorado. She holds a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver. She is the author of "Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth," winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction; "Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction"; and the forthcoming environmental memoir, "Full Body Burden: Living and Dying in the Shadow of America's Nuclear Nightmare," based on the nuclear weaponry facility at Rocky Flats, Colorado. Her recent work includes the NEH-sponsored film "Molly Brown: Biography of a Changing Nation," which premiered in Fall 2007 and is now traveling with the Titanic Exhibit. A remake of the 1960 Broadway play "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" will open in New York in Fall 2008 with new lyrics based on Iversen's work. Iversen is also editor-in-chief of the nationally renowned literary journal The Pinch. She has taught in the MFA programs at San Jose State University and Naropa University. E-mail her at kiversen@memphis.edu.
	Cary Holladay (Associate Professor, Fiction) is a Virginia native and the author of four volumes of fiction, most recently "The Quick-Change Artist: Stories" (Swallow Press / Ohio UP, 2006). Her interests include historical and Southern fiction. "Every story should be about some kind of hardship," she says. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She received an O. Henry Prize for "Merry-Go-Sorry," a story based on a triple murder that took place in West Memphis, Arkansas. Her stories have recently appeared in New Stories From the South, The Georgia Review, and Glimmer Train. A birdwatcher and thrift-shopper, Holladay values Memphis for its folks ("You can make friends easily with all kinds of people here"), its fauna ("Hummingbirds every summer"), and its atmosphere ("a beat-up old river town, with original cobblestones down by the river"). E-mail her at holladay@memphis.edu.
	Rebecca Skloot (Assistant Professor, Creative Nonfiction) is an award-winning freelance writer, contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, and sometimes-correspondent for NPR's RadioLab. She contributes regularly to The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Discover, and others, and writes a monthly column on pets for Prevention magazine. Her work has been anthologized in several textbooks and essay collections, including "The Best Food Writing 2005" and Norton's "Best Creative Nonfiction" anthology. Several of her stories have been selected as notable essays by the "Best American Essays," "Best American Travel Writing" and "Best American Science and Nature Writing" collections. Her first book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," is forthcoming from Crown. Skloot founded and maintains Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors, of which she is a Vice President and judge for its annual book awards. She directs the River City Writers Series. For more information: www.rebeccaskloot.com. E-mail her at rlskloot@memphis.edu.

{staff}
	Jan Coleman (Creative Writing Program Administrator), a native Memphian received her Bachelors of Arts in Education from the University of Mississippi and a Masters of Education in special ed from Memphis State University. More recently, she graduated from the MFA program at the University of Memphis, concentrating in creative nonfiction. She reveals her passion for her hometown in her work-in-progress: River in My Soul: Tales of a Memphis Southern Belle, a collection of personal essays about the history of Memphis during the last fifty years as perceived by a girl born and bred in the city. When she is away from school, she focuses her energy on her family, her dogs, and her one hundred-year-old house. E-mail her at jscolemn@memphis.edu.

{visiting faculty}
	Tom Carlson (Professor Emeritus, Creative Nonfiction) taught American literature and creative nonfiction for thirty-two years at the University of Memphis. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University. His articles and essays on Poe, Melville, Elvis, and American culture have appeared in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. From 1982-84, Carlson taught at the University of Bucharest, Romania, as Senior Fulbright Fellow. He returned there in 1985 to finish his third book of translations of Romanian dissident poets. His first book, on Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, Bas-Relief with Heroes: Selected Poetry of Nichita Stanescu (1988), won the Walter R. Smith Distinguished Book Award. His most recent book, Hatteras Blues: A Story from the Edge of America, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005. He is currently finishing a memoir, Soup to Nuts Lucille and Other True Stories. Carlson has also maintained an active freelance career, writing on subjects ranging from pet cemeteries, pigeon racers, and mallrats, to octogenarian vaudevillians, work-release criminals, and trotline catfishermen. E-mail him at tcarlson@memphis.edu.

{students}
	Zachary Adcock (Sixth Semester, Fiction) grew up in central Illinois and, as such, had never considered himself Southern in any way until the fall of 2007, when 40-degree temperatures suddenly chilled him to the bone. Having gotten over this fact of life, he is now focused on his thesis, a collection of short stories full of secrets, lies and the winter months. He blindly hopes this collection will lead him from rags to riches. If it fails to do so, his alternate career path routinely shifts between teaching, librarianship, and the peddling other people's books to strangers. E-mail him at zack_adcock@yahoo.com.
	Susan Agee (Sixth Semester, Fiction) worked in a family business for twenty years and did freelance writing on the side. She has written for Memphis Woman, The Memphis Downtowner, Mystery Review, and Cat Fancy. Susan hopes to imagine and write many stories for young readers in the coming years. E-mail her at sagee@memphis.edu.
	Darnell Arnoult (Second Semester, Fiction) holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and MA from NC State University. Her novel Sufficient Grace (Free Press/Simon and Schuster), was a SIBA Fiction Book of the Year nominee and Weatherford Award finalist, Book Sense Reading Group Pick, and Borders' Summer Reading Selection. Her collection What Travels With Us: Poems (LSU Press) won a 2005 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature and was named 2006 SIBA Poetry Book of the Year. She teaches creative writing in workshops throughout the southeast. E-mail her at darnell@dtccom.net.
	Corey Clairday (Second Semester, Fiction) is from the second most boringly named town in Arkansas: Jonesboro. In those rare moments when he’s not diligently cranking out stories he can usually be found either playing Street Fighter II on his Super Nintendo or watching Star Trek religiously. Incidentally, he hopes to one day become the next Buddha. On a more serious note, his favorite type of beer is Root Beer. And the most boringly named town is Smithville. E-mail him at cclairus@yahoo.com.
	Greg Conley (Second Semester, Fiction) wanders Memphis in a wash of unreality, muttering Jabberwocky. He used to do this in eastern Kentucky, but he still doesn't know where Swift's silver mine is. E-mail him at gregconley@gmail.com.
	Lisa Cupolo (Sixth Semester, Fiction) a native of Canada, started out as a photographer and photo editor, publishing her travel images and portraits in European and Canadian magazines and newspapers. She has worked as a doctoring screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and was Publicity Director at Brick Magazine and literary publicist at HarperCollins Publishers in Toronto. Her articles and reviews have appeared most recently in The National Post and in Arts AsiaPacific Magazine, where she is currently the Canadian Editor. She has a story forthcoming in Narrative Magazine. E-mail her at lcupolo@gmail.com.
	Wesley Dunning (Second Semester, Poetry) was born in Tennessee, but has also lived in Texas, Colorado, England and New Zealand. Occasionally, he reads foreign travel guides and plays pick-up basketball. Currently, his two main interests are Memphis history and prose poetry. E-mail him at wdunning@memphis.edu.
	Trevor Gore (Fourth Semester, Fiction) is a native of Tennessee whose complexity of character and depth of thought cannot be described in 75 words or less. His mom described his short stories as, "so masterful they would make Flannery O'Connor jealous." Trevor's work has been rejected by such magazines as Crazyhorse and the Black Warrior Review. E-mail him at tgore1@memphis.edu.
	Danna Greenfield (Fourth Semester, Fiction) has written book reviews, profiles of artists, text for photo-essays and articles about small businesses, interior design and architecture; she has done editing for medical and anthropology journals, lifestyle magazines, and relocation guides. All this drove her screaming into the arms of the fiction program, where she is now happily writing about man-made disasters, only some of which are marriages. E-mail her at objective.correlative@gmail.com.
	Lee Griffith (Fourth Semester, Fiction) studied English and Anglo-Irish literature at U.C.C., Ireland and Middlebury College, where he received his B.A. His reporting and profile pieces have appeared in university publications and the Burlington Free Press. Currently he teaches English composition at the University of Memphis and serves as the Senior Fiction Editor for The Pinch.
	Sara Hoover (Fourth Semester, Creative Nonfiction), a native of Philadelphia, now calls Memphis home. Sara studied writing at the University of New Orleans pre-Katrina and at the University of Texas Austin post-Katrina. An active member of the writing community, Sara serves as the Assistant Managing Editor of The Pinch literary journal, and she is also an Editorial Assistant at the nationally-recognized Chicken Soup for the Soul Magazine. E-mail her at smhoover@memphis.edu.
	Jan Kaplan (Creative Nonfiction) is originally from Corinth, Mississippi. She has been writing since she was eight, and has been interested in stories about families. She has been married with three children, has worked in the hospitality and healthcare industries and loves teaching freshman comp. She dreams of going away for the summer to write. E-mail her at jkkaplan@comcast.net.
	DiAnne Malone (Second Semester, Creative Nonfiction) wants hair just like Star Wars' Princess Leia. She truly believes that the secret to writing good creative nonfiction is wrapped up in those spirals and braids somewhere. Otherwise, she spends Friday nights watching 4400 reruns and VeggieTale videos with her family of boys: Myals 7, Quincy 3, and Big Poppa, Isaac 37. E-mail her at dmalone2@memphis.edu.
	Marsha McSpadden (Fourth Semester, Fiction) wears a lot of pink and polka-dots. Don't be fooled. This Junior-League dropout is drawn to odd characters and dark spaces. Publication is forthcoming. She can feel it in her joints. Either that or it's going to rain soon.
	Andrew Medlin (Fourth Semester, Fiction) was born in Shreveport, LA. He moved to Memphis in 1999 and received a B.A. in creative writing from Rhodes College in 2003. He works part-time, goes to school full-time and lives with his fiancée and a dog. He hopes to eventually teach writing on the college level and publish between one and three hundred books. He enjoys sports, books and Mexican food. E-mail him at andrewmedl@bellsouth.net.
	Tonya Parham (Sixth Semester, Fiction) is also a second-year history MA student, so she manages to stay busy with a balance of both fact and fiction. She currently enjoys teaching English composition and is happy to have finally found her calling. E-mail her at missrowanoak@yahoo.com.
	Mike Petrik (Second Semester, Creative Nonfiction) is a Central New Yorker who fled the snow to pursue his MFA in Creative Nonfiction. A recent graduate of St. Lawrence University with majors in Biology and English, he writes about traveling and being outside, and is an aspiring literary journalist. Not known for competence or humility, he has been injected with venom from a long-spined sea urchin, capsized by Class II rapids, and gets lost frequently while refusing to ask for directions. Wherever he goes, he carries a copy of Cannery Row, the book that led him to writing. E-mail him at mdpetr03@stlawu.edu.
	Ty Phillips (Fourth Semester, Fiction) grew up in Starkville, MS and is a graduate of Mississippi State University and The North Carolina School of the Arts. He's on the road between Starkville and Memphis most of the time, but one of these days he plans to make it to Graceland. E-mail him at macti1@bellsouth.net.
	Teresa Poindexter (Second Semester, Poetry), a native Memphian, received her BA in Creative Writing at the University of Memphis in 2006 and has written songs for a recording artist signed to a major record label. The album was released in the Fall of 2004. Her hobbies include photography and pottery. E-mail her at teresa.poindexter@memphis.edu.
	Bethany Reisner (Second Semester, Poetry) was raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she used to wave at Donald Trump's yacht as he cruised into Mar-a-Lago. Now she lives and writes on the wrong side of the tracks in picturesque Memphis. She prefers reading Gaelic over English, list poems over ghazals and Cheerios above all else. She'd love to work for National Geographic someday, once she figures out how to write honestly. E-mail her at breisner@memphis.edu.
	Toriell Sanford (Second Semester, Fiction) is a native Memphian. As and undergrad she chose computer engineering, despite years of study and involvement in performing arts. Five majors later, she found happiness as a photography student. The habit of turning projects into journalistic pieces led her to make a final change. She earned her BA in English from the University of Memphis. Torie is a photographer and currently working on a short story collection despite living with three guys and a dog. (Larry, 30; Khalil, 12; Truth, 6 and Happy 1).
	Rebecca Sharp (Second Semester, Fiction), is originally from Evening Shade, AR. She completed her BA in English at Lyon College in Batesville, AR in 2005, and spent the two years between Lyon and the University of Memphis teaching high school English, journalism, and oral communications for the Wonderview School District in Hattieville, AR. E-mail her at rebeccaannsharp@hotmail.com.
	Laura Snider (Fourth Semester, Fiction) was born in Seattle and raised in Thailand, she loves traveling and writing about other cultures. Laura holds a B.A. in English from Northwest College in Kirkland, Washington and now lives in Memphis, Tennessee with her husband Mark and pug Apple. E-mail her at laura.snider@memphis.edu.
	Wendy Sumner Winter (Sixth Semester, Creative Nonfiction) was a chef, restaurant owner, legal assistant, nanny, bartender, fundraiser, dancer and singer - all before the age of thirty, at which time she decided to try out school for a while. After graduating as the Margaret J. Saither Outstanding Graduate from Christian Brother University, Sumner-Winter realized that she had finally found her calling in the form of nonfiction writing. As a part of the University of Memphis' MFA program, Wendy has been awarded the Concentration Award in Nonfiction, the Service Award, and has served as managing editor for The Pinch, the Program's literary journal. She has presented papers at The College English Association and The AWP convention. She lives in Memphis with her family of two red-headed humans and two silly dogs. E-mail her at wendysumnerwinter@yahoo.com.
	Pat Walters (Second Semester, Creative Nonfiction) writes nonfiction for newspapers and magazines, including The St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times Magazine. He also produces radio stories for NPR, and has done reporting for national magazines like Rolling Stone, AARP The Magazine, Fast Company, On Earth and CJR. Pat recently spent a year on a fellowship at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, writing, editing and planning a redesign for its website. This summer he will co-direct the institute's "boot camp" for recent college journalism graduates. You can read a few of his stories here. E-mail him at pwalters@memphis.edu.
	Jennifer Weber (Second Semester, Creative Nonfiction) received a B.A. in Art from Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Recently, she received a M.A. in Communication with a concentration in nonfiction film at the University of Memphis. Jennifer enjoys rhetoric and nonfiction storytelling using both written and visual mediums. She aspires to be a professor of English Composition and Creative Nonfiction upon graduation. E-mail her at jweber@memphis.edu.
	Karen Wells (Second Semester, Fiction) is actually a continuing grad student as she took graduate classes previously at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. She also holds a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She wrote for trade magazines in the building industry for more than 25 years. She and her husband have four grown daughters. E-mail her at wellskaren@bellsouth.net.
	Mary Willis (Second Semester, Fiction) is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
	J.D. Wilson (Fourth Semester, Fiction) works for the University as publications writer for the Division of Communications, Public Relations and Marketing. He writes for The University of Memphis Magazine as well as several other U of M publications. Originally from Nashville, Arkansas, Wilson holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Arkansas Tech University and a Master of Sports Science from the United States Sports Academy.

{alumni}
Jim Meacci is a photographer, musician and writer living abroad in Brescia, Italy, where he pretends to teach over 537 students to speak English at Nicolo Tartaglia Technical Institute for Geometry. Few of the students actually learn to speak English, but enjoy the entertainment Jim provides. After school Jim performs in local bars, drinks bitter cocktails with the locals, and enjoys learning the Brescian dialect whilst eating fatty pork products and salty mountain cheeses. Mark Yakich is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin 2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo 2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin 2008). He is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. His website is markyakich.com. Margaret Skinner has taught at the University of Memphis, served as writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and held several fellowships, and she also has worked with area high school groups. Alexandria LaFaye is currently on leave from California State University, San Bernadino for a year of writing and speaking. Her latest book, Worth, won the 2005 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Her next book Up River will be serialized in newspapers through Breakfast Serials, a serialized novel company. She is also the author of The Year of the Sawdust Man, Edith Shay, Strawberry Hill, and Nissa's Place. Michael Graber works as a professional editor/writer in his native Memphis, moonlights as a poetry reviewer for the Commercial Appeal, and as a vaudeville/old-time mandolin player and crooner. In a former life, Mr. Graber served as poetry editor of River City. Work was recently published in the Spoon River Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Habersham Review, and other print publications. Will Christopher Baer is the author of the novels Kiss Me, Judas, Penny Dreadful, and Hell's Half Acre. He attended college in New Orleans, LA (Tulane) but soon dropped out and finished his B.A. at Memphis State. He has lived in California since '96, primarily in Bay Area and L.A. working as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, WA) screenwriter and journalist. His short stories have been published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. Click here for his website. Scott and Ashley McWaters, who each received an MA in 2002, are currently instructors in the English Department at the University of Alabama. Scott's stories have appeared in Caketrain, Carolina Quarterly, Quarter After Eight, and The Florida Review. Ashley’s manuscript of poems, Whitework, was recently a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Four Way Books Prize. Poems from her collection have appeared in Northwest Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Pindelyboz. Laurel Jenkins-Crowe, MFA 2003, is currently working on a Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Her poems and stories have appeared in Tattoo Highway, edifice WRECKED, Scrivener Creative Review, and The Pinch. She also wrote several entries for an upcoming book from Midnight Marquee Press, tentatively titled You’re Next! You’re Next!: Loss of Identity in the Horror Film. Randy Rudder, MFA 2005, is an Associate Professor of English at Nashville State Community College. As an arts/entertainment freelance writer, he has had articles and essays published in The Washington Post, The Nashville Scene, The Nashville Business Journal, Bluegrass Unlimited, and The Writer. He has also had several pieces published in scholarly journals such as Southern Crossroads, Southern Cultures, and the University Press of Kentucky’s anthology Country Music Goes to War. In addition, Randy edits the annual Country Music Reader anthology series. CD Mitchell, MFA 2006, is currently an Instructor at the University of Alabama. He will be serving as the Director of the Summer Creative Writing Workshops at the Hemingway/Pfieffer Museum in Piggott, Arkansas, in the summer of 2007. His work has appeared in Big Muddy , The North Dakota Quarterly, The Arkansas Review, and The Julie Mango International Online Journal of Creative Expression He has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jerome Wilson was born and raised in Memphis and has lived here his whole life. Someday he may leave. For now, he is a part-time instructor at Lemoyne-Owen College and at Southwest Community College. He is the author of Paper Garden and Other Stories. J. Conrad Schulze, MFA 2007, is currently woking on his PhD at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. Mr. Schulze served as Creative Nonfiction Editor and Technical Editor on The Pinch. His most reccent work has appeared in Ellipsis and the on-line journal Fresh Yarn.

m.f.a. in memphis

the place

the life

{faculty}

{staff}

{visiting faculty}

{students}

{alumni}