Faculty

 

Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press.

He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

 

Maurice Broaddus

Maurice Broaddus is a community organizer, teacher, and writer. His work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, Magazine of F&SF, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk works, Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novels, The Usual Suspects and Unfadeable.

  • His project, Sorcerers, is being adapted as a television show for AMC. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine.

    His gaming work includes writing for the Marvel Super-Heroes, Leverage, and Firefly role-playing games as well as working as a consultant on Watch Dogs 2. Learn more about him at MauriceBroaddus.com.

 

Tommy Dean

Tommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks.

He is the Editor at Fractured Lit. He has been previously published in the BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review.

  • His story “You’ve Stopped” was chosen by Dan Chaon to be included in Best Microfiction 2019.

    It will also be included in Best Small Fiction 2019. His interviews have been previously published in New Flash Fiction Review, The Rumpus, CRAFT Literary, and The Town Crier (The Puritan). Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

 

Melissa Fraterrigo

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which was named one of “The Best Fiction Books of 2017” by the Chicago Review of Books as well as the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006). Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in more than forty literary journals and anthologies from storySouth and Shenandoah to Notre Dame Review, Sou’wester and The Millions. She is the founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, where she offers classes on the art and craft of writing. Melissafraterrigo.com

 

Michelle Herman

Michelle Herman’s newest book is Close-Up, a novel. The author of three previous novels – Missing, Dog, and Devotion – and the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, as well as three collections of personal essays – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life, Herman’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun, American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Story, and many other journals.

  • Her awards and honors include numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Copernicus Foundation, the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and multiple teaching awards from Ohio State, where she taught for 34 years and was a founder of the MFA program in creative writing.

    She also founded a graduate interdisciplinary program across the arts at OSU and is the executive and artistic director of an all-scholarship, in-residence summer writing program on the OSU campus for teenagers who are enrolled in urban public schools.

    A New Yorker by birth – and temperament – born in Brighton Beach and educated in New York City public schools and at Brooklyn College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has lived for many years in Columbus with her husband, the painter Glen Holland. Their daughter, Grace, used to live there too, but she is long grown, and her mother dispenses weekly parenting advice on Slate.

 

Christine Sneed

Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men (Bloomsbury USA & UK). Her fifth book, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, and a short fiction anthology she edited, Love in the Time of Time's Up, will both be published in October 2022.

 Her work has been included in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, ZYZZYVA, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and O Magazine.  

  • Her feature script The Female Gaze was one of 150 semifinalists, drawn from 7,831 entries, in AMPAS's 2020 Nicholl Fellowship competition. She has written a number other high-placing scripts in the Austin Film Festival, CineStory Feature and TV Pilot competitions, the PAGE Awards, Atlanta Film Festival, Filmmatic, New York International Screenplay Awards, and Screencraft Comedy Feature competitions.

    She has received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award twice, the Society of Midland Authors’ Award, an O. Henry Prize, and Ploughshares’ Zacharis Award.

    She has also been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Chicago Review Fiction Award. She lives in southern California with her partner Adam Tinkham and teaches for the graduate creative writing programs at Northwestern University and Regis University.

 

Laura Maylene WalteR

Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the debut novel Body of Stars (Dutton, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Literary Hub, The Masters Review, Horse Girls (Harper Perennial 2021), and many other publications. She has been a Tin House Scholar, a recipient of the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, and a writer-in-residence at Yaddo, the Chautauqua Institution, and Art Omi: Writers. Laura is editor in chief of Literary Cleveland’s Gordon Square Review and works for Cleveland Public Library.

 

Melissa Scholes young

Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels The Hive and Flood, and editor of Grace in Darkness and Furious Gravity, two anthologies of new writing by D.C. women writers. She is a contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Literary Hub and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation Residency Fellowship and the Center for Mark Twain Studies’ Quarry Farm Fellowship. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, she is currently an associate professor in Literature at American University.

 
 

Faculty

 

EB Bartels

E.B. Bartels is a writer, editor, and teacher from Massachusetts. She holds a BA in Russian from Wellesley College and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Her nonfiction has appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, The Believer Logger, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Toast, The Butter, Entropy, FullStop, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. She is a regular performer in Mortified, and her flash nonfiction piece “Vulnerable” was the winner of the 2018 Eldridge Tide & Pilot Book Story Contest. She also writes the monthly column Non-Fiction by Non-Men for Fiction Advocate, in which she interviews women and non-binary people who write nonfiction.

  • Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, E.B.’s narrative nonfiction book about the world of loving and losing animals, exploring the singular nature of our bonds with our companion animals, and how best to grieve for them once they’ve passed away, is forthcoming from Mariner Books on August 2, 2022.

    E.B. is an instructor at the creative writing center GrubStreet, the Wellesley Writes It editor for Wellesley Underground, and an on-again-off-again bookseller at Newtonville Books. In addition to writing, E.B. also works as a freelance editor, a manuscript consultant, a writing coach, a tutor, and a senior editorial writer in the communications and public affairs department at Wellesley College.

    She lives in outside Boston with her husband, Richie, and their pets: Seymour (dog), Terrence (tortoise), Bert (pigeon) and many fish and shrimp.

 

Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press.

  • He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles.

    His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

 

Melissa Fraterrigo

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which was named one of “The Best Fiction Books of 2017” by the Chicago Review of Books as well as the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006).

  • Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in more than forty literary journals and anthologies from storySouth and Shenandoah to Notre Dame Review, Sou’wester and The Millions. She is the founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, where she offers classes on the art and craft of writing. Melissafraterrigo.com

 

Michelle Herman

Michelle Herman’s newest book is Close-Up, a novel. The author of three previous novels – Missing, Dog, and Devotion – and the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, as well as three collections of personal essays – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life, Herman’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun, American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Story, and many other journals.

  • Her awards and honors include numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Copernicus Foundation, the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and multiple teaching awards from Ohio State, where she taught for 34 years and was a founder of the MFA program in creative writing. She also founded a graduate interdisciplinary program across the arts at OSU and is the executive and artistic director of an all-scholarship, in-residence summer writing program on the OSU campus for teenagers who are enrolled in urban public schools.

    A New Yorker by birth – and temperament – born in Brighton Beach and educated in New York City public schools and at Brooklyn College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has lived for many years in Columbus with her husband, the painter Glen Holland. Their daughter, Grace, used to live there too, but she is long grown, and her mother dispenses weekly parenting advice on Slate.

 

James Tate Hill

James Tate Hill is the author of a memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff, released August 3, 2021 from W. W. Norton. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel. His essays were Notable in the 2019 and 2020 editions of Best American Essays. He serves as fiction editor for Monkeybicycle and contributing editor for Literary Hub, where he writes a monthly audiobooks column. Born in Charleston, WV, he lives in North Carolina with his wife.

 

Sonya Huber

Sonya Huber is the author of six books, including the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System and the forthcoming Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.

 

Brenda Miller

Brenda Miller’s book, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing on Form, was published by University of Michigan Press in July 2021. Her book of collaborative essays with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, was published by Cleveland State University Press in Fall 2021.

  • She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her poetry chapbook, The Daughters of Elderly Women, received the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.

    She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Brenda’s work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and Associate Faculty with the Rainier Writing Workshop.

 

Randon Billings Nobel

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars, was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, and Creative Nonfiction. Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program and Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website, www.randonbillingsnoble.com.

 

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Andromeda Romano-Lax is an “accidental historical novelist” who has published award-winning novels set over two centuries, spanning three continents: The Spanish Bow set in Spain, Germany, and France from the 1890s to 1940s (translated into 11 languages and a NYT Editor’s Choice); The Detour, set in Munich and Italy in 1938; Behave (A Top 10 Amazon Editor’s Pick and Indie Next Pick) set in New York and Baltimore in the 1920s; Plum Rains (winner of Canada’s Sunburst Award) set in Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, in the 1930s and 2029; and Annie and the Wolves set in late 1800s and present-day (Top 10 Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, Booklist; One of the Best Books of the Year, Library Journal). Before writing fiction, she was a journalist. Before the pandemic, she was a frequent traveler—and hopes to dust off her backpack again soon! Visit her on Instagram at @romanolax.

 

Sue William Silverman

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning author of seven works of creative nonfiction and poetry. Her most recent book, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, was named “one of 9 essay collections feminists should read in 2020” by Bitch Media, and is a finalist in Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award. Other nonfiction books include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which was made into a Lifetime TV movie; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award; The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew; and Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a Contributing Editor to Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. www.SueWilliamSilverman.com

 

Ira Sukrungruang

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night.

  • He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry.

    His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. For more information about him, please visit: www.buddhistboy.com.

 

Julie Vick

Julie Vick is the author of the humorous advice book for new parents Babies Don’t Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?): The Introvert’s Guide to Surviving Parenthood (Countryman Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in New Yorker Daily Shouts, Real Simple, Parents, McSweeney’s, and The Washington Post. She is an English Instructor at the University of Colorado Denver. Learn more at julievick.com.

 
 

Faculty

 

Melissa Fraterrigo

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which was named one of “The Best Fiction Books of 2017” by the Chicago Review of Books as well as the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006).

  • Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in more than forty literary journals and anthologies from storySouth and Shenandoah to Notre Dame Review, Sou’wester and The Millions. She is the founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, where she offers classes on the art and craft of writing. Melissafraterrigo.com

 

Lauren Mallett

Lauren Mallett (she/her/hers) is a poet, teacher, birth doula, and fiber artist. She has lived and studied in Guanajuato and Xalapa, Mexico. Lauren taught dual-language immersion fifth grade in Richmond, California. She earned her MFA and was the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University.

 
 

Faculty

 

Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger’s newest poetry collection, Department of Elegy, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in early 2022. She is editor of the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press, and recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Cleveland Arts Prize.

  • Biddinger is the author of six previous poetry collections and a chapbook, and co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics. She serves as professor and assistant chair of English at the University of Akron, and teaches in the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

 

Paula J. Lambert

Paula J. Lambert is a literary and visual artist from Columbus, Ohio. Her full-length poetry collections include The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022); How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020), a finalist in the 2021 Ohioana Book Awards; and The Sudden Seduction of Gravity (Full/Crescent 2012). She has also authored several chapbooks.

  • The focus of much of her work has been the anatomy of birds: by digging deep into their bones, beaks, and feathers, she has found her way to issues both deeply personal and broadly political.

    Awarded the 2021 PEN America - L'Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert's work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. She has twice been in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

    Lambert owns Full/Crescent Press, a small publisher of poetry books and broadsides, through which she has founded and supported numerous public readings and festivals that support the intersection of poetry and science.

 

Lauren MalletT

Lauren Mallett (she/her/hers) is a poet, teacher, birth doula, and fiber artist. She has lived and studied in Guanajuato and Xalapa, Mexico. Lauren taught dual-language immersion fifth grade in Richmond, California. She earned her MFA and was the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University.

 

Shari Wagner

Shari Wagner is the author of three poetry books: The Farm Wife's Almanac (Cascadia, 2019), The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana (Bottom Dog Press, 2013), and Evening Chore (Cascadia, 2005). She earned an MFA from Indiana University. She was named Indiana State Poet Laureate for 2016-2017.