Faculty
Winter/Spring 2020
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016), which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. He's the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, POETRY, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Ari lives in the Bay Area where he also teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.
Dan Bellm is a poet and translator living in Berkeley, California. His translations of poetry and fiction from Spanish and French include Speaking in Song, by Mexican poet Pura López Colomé (Shearsman Books, 2017); two works by Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca, Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue (Unicorn Press, 2015) and Nostalghia (Mexico City: La Diéresis, 2015); several works by French poet Pierre Reverdy, including The Song of the Dead (Black Square Editions, 2016) and Sun on the Ceiling (American Poetry Review, 2009); The Legend of the Wandering King, a young adult novel by Laura Gallego García (Scholastic, 2005); and Angel’s Kite by Alberto Blanco (Children’s Book Press, 1994). He has published four books of poetry: Deep Well (Lavender Ink, 2017); Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of a 2009 California Book Award and named one of the top ten poetry books of 2008 by the Virginia Quarterly Review; Buried Treasure (1999), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize; and One Hand on the Wheel (Roundhouse Press, 1999). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, Best American Spiritual Writing, Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Writing, and The Ecopoetry Anthology. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Dorset Colony House, an Artist’s Fellowship in Literature from the California Arts Council, and a Literature Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. www.danbellm.com.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award. The collection was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and named a Stonewall Honor Book in Literature. Bloodaxe Books has published the UK edition. Chen’s work appears in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence.
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a novel of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. It was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Coster’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Catapult, Arts & Letters, Aster(ix), The Rumpus, Kweli, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. Her second novel, What’s Mine and Yours, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing.
Jim Daniels’ most recent books are The Perp Walk, his sixth collection of short fiction, and RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music, an anthology of poetry and lyrics coedited with M.L. Liebler, both published by Michigan State University Press in 2019. Recent poetry books include Rowing Inland (Wayne State University Press) and Street Calligraphy (Steel Toe Books). His fifth book of fiction, Eight Mile High, was a Michigan Notable Book and a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. His fourth independent film, The End of Blessings, appeared in numerous film festivals, including the Black Maria Film Festival, an international touring fest. He has also collaborated with photographer Charlee Brodsky on two books, including Street, which won the Tillie Olsen Prize. He edited Challenges to the Dream: The Best of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards, in 2017. His poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac," and “Prairie Home Companion,” in Billy Collins' Poetry 180 anthologies, and Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry series. His awards include three Michigan Notable Book selections, the Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award, two Gold Medals in poetry in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Brittingham Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. During his long career, he has warmed up for Lucinda Williams at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, had his poem "Factory Love" displayed on a racecar, and sent poetry to the moon with the Moon Arts Project. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he is the Thomas S. Baker University Professor of English, he has received the Ryan Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Teaching and Educational Service, the Mark Gelfand Service Award for Educational Outreach, and a Faculty Service Award from the Alumni Association.
Christine Hale is the author of a memoir, A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice (Apprentice House, 2016) as well as a novel, Basil’s Dream (Livingston Press, 2009), which received honorable mention in the 2010 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Dinty Moore says of the memoir, “A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice is an exquisite engagement with those tough human questions that must be asked even if they can never be answered.” Praising the novel, National Book Award finalist Joan Silber says, “Basil’s Dream…seems to prove fiction can go where other forms can’t.”
Ms. Hale’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Hippocampus, Arts & Letters, Prime Number, Shadowgraph, and The Sun, among other literary journals. A fellow of MacDowell, Ucross, Hedgebrook, Hambidge and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ms. Hale has been a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work in progress includes a collection of linked short stories set in a small town in western North Carolina as well as a set of essays on wisdom.
A native of the southern Appalachians, as were her parents, Ms. Hale lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and grew up in Bristol, Virginia. She received an MBA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She worked in investment banking in New York City in the early 80s, began teaching writing in 1996 at the University of Tampa, and in the intervening years worked as a freelance writer and editor in business communications in New York and Tampa. From 1989 to 1992, she lived in Bermuda. A former Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College, she now teaches in the Antioch University Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville.
Genevieve Hudson is the author of the forthcoming novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which was a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published in McSweeney’s, Catapult, Hobart, Tin House (online), Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Tin House Summer Workshops, and artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Portland, OR.
Brad Kessler is a critically acclaimed novelist whose work has been translated into French, Persian, and Hebrew. He won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction for his novel, Birds in Fall, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an educator and farmer and author of the literary non-fiction Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese. His other books include Lick Creek, a novel, The Woodcutter's Christmas, and the forthcoming novel, The Accidentals. His writing has earned him a Whiting Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. His work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, the Nation, Bomb, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He teaches creative writing at the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and has lectured at, among other places, Northwestern University, Smith College, The New School University and the Kenyon Writers Workshop. He lives in Vermont on the smallest licensed goat dairy in the state, alongside the photographer and activist, Dona Ann McAdams.
Aditi Khorana is the author of two Young Adult novels, Mirror in the Sky (Penguin/Razorbill 2016), named "one of the most powerful reads of the year" by Paste Magazine, and the critically acclaimed feminist historical fantasy, The Library of Fates (Penguin/Razorbill, 2017). Both her novels areJunior Library Guild selections. Her first book is the subject of a Tedx talk, Harnessing the Power of the Unknown. She is a member of the advisory board of the House of Beautiful Business, headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, where she gives talks and workshops on feminist myth and the need for more inclusive narratives. In a former life, Aditi was a producer at CNN, PBS and ABC News. She also worked as an entertainment marketing consultant for various Hollywood studios, including FOX, SONY and Paramount. Her work has been featured on NPR, and in Los Angeles Review of Books, NBC News, Buzzfeed, EW, Bustle, Seventeen, Huffington Post, and Paste Magazine. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in International Relations and Modern Culture and Media, and has an MA in Global Media and Communications from the Annenberg School for Communications. She volunteers with 826LA, The Library Foundation of LA, and The Hammer Museum, teaching writing workshops for teens and kids.
Jim Krusoe (fiction faculty) has published two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press. Since then he has had five novels published by Tin House Books: Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You, Parsifal, and The Sleep Garden (2016). His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Field, North American Review, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, and Santa Monica Review, which he began in 1988. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Manoa, Brief Encounters, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and in the Tin House Writers’ Notebook. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a reading fellowship from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems. He is currently working on a novel.
Tammy Lechner (pedagogy faculty) An award-winning photojournalist for more than thirty years, she was a staff member of four newspapers, including the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Los Angeles Times. During these decades her work in both writing and photography was widely published, including three long-term documentary projects that each received Pulitzer Prize entry nominations. With the Jackson (MI) Citizen Patriot she won best feature writing (all circ.) from Michigan UPI for a documentary project about displaced Goodyear workers (1984); with the Louisville Courier Journal she was the Kentucky Photographer of the Year (1985); and with the Los Angeles Times she shared Pulitzer Prize staff honors as an editor for coverage of the Los Angeles riots (1992) and the Northridge earthquake (1994). Also recognized as an accomplished chronicler of professional baseball, she has published the books Our Team-Our Dream: A Cubs Fan’s Journey into Baseball’s Greatest Romance and In The Cal: Pastime Goes Primetime In California’s Minor League. Since 1994 she has been a partner in a freelance media company, STILL Productions, Inc., producing photography, writing and editing for numerous editorial and corporate clients. Lechner earned an MFA in creative non-fiction and a Post-MFA pedagogy certificate from Antioch University–Los Angeles (2013), where her critical paper “Making Order of Memory” won the inaugural Library Research Award. She is an honors graduate of the University of Missouri majoring in both magazine writing and photojournalism (BJ: 1980). Currently she is an adjunct professor of English at Chapman University, an affiliate professor of creative writing pedagogy at Antioch University-LA, and teaches both creative writing and photo-documentary narrative in community workshops in Laguna Beach, CA where she has resided since 1991.
Kerry Madden-Lunsford (fiction and writing for young people faculty) is the author of the Maggie Valley Trilogy for children, which includes Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song and Jessie’s Mountain, published by Viking. Her first novel, Offsides (William Morrow), was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age and was released on Kindle by Foreverland Press. Her American Girl book Writing Smarts is full of story sparks for young writers. Up Close: Harper Lee was one of Booklist’s Ten Top Biographies of 2009 for Youth and a Kirkus Pick for 2009, and was re-released in 2015. Her first picture book, Nothing Fancy About Kathryn and Charlie, about the friendship between storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and folk artist Charlie Lucas, was illustrated by her daughter, Lucy and published by Mockingbird Publishers. Her picture book, Ernestine’s Milky Way, will be published by Schwartz & Wade, a division of Random House Children’s Books, in 2019. She will be reading from her memoir-in-progress, Carson, China, and a Marriage – Alphabetically this July in Rome as part of Carson McCullers in the World: A Centenary Conference at John Cabot University. She has published stories in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Five Points, Shenandoah, Salon, Redux, Voices, Flash Fiction Magazine, and the Washington Post. Her most recent three essays with the Los Angeles Times include stories of student loan debt, Harper Lee, and addiction. She appeared as a bag lady in Echo Park in her first indie film, Little Feet, directed by Alex Rockwell and which premiered at the IFC in New York in December 2014. Kerry directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The mother of three adult children, she divides her time between Birmingham and Los Angeles as she and her husband are tenured in two different states.
Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. She loves Sofia Coppola movies, Bollywood endings, and the Fast and Furious franchise. She’s the winner of the We Need Diverse Books short story contest, and her story “Be Cool, For Once” can be found in the anthology FRESH INK (Crown Books For Young Readers). She is the author of NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR (Feiwel and Friends), TELL ME HOW YOU REALLY FEEL (Feiwel and Friends), and the forthcoming THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT (Feiwel and Friends, June 2020). Originally raised in Texas, she now lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner, a cat bent on world domination, and another cat who’s just here for the snacks.
Angela Morales, a graduate of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program, is the author of The Girls in My Town, a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays 2013, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, The Southwest Review, and other journals. She is the winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, 2014, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. Her book is the 2017 winner of the River Teeth Book Prize and the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Victoria Patterson's latest story collection, The Secret Habit of Sorrow, was published in 2018. The critic Michael Schaub wrote: “There’s not a story in the book that’s less than great; it’s a stunningly beautiful collection by a writer working at the top of her game.” Her novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture,” was published in 2015. She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in South Pasadena, California with her family.
Sharman Apt Russell is the recipient of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing for Diary of a Citizen Scientist (Oregon State University Press, 2014), which also won the WILLA Award for Creative Nonfiction and was named by The Guardian as a top ten nature book. The Burroughs Medal was first given in 1926 and recipients include Aldo Leopold, Roger Tory Peterson, Rachel Carson, and contemporary writers like John McPhee and Barry Lopez. Recently Sharman finished Within Our Grasp: Feeding the World’s Children for a Better and Greener Future (Pantheon Books, 2021) which combines her longtime interest in the environment with her longtime interest in hunger. She is now working on the next nonfiction, People Who Live Inside Us, about conversations with her test-pilot father (who died in 1956), a project she loves and doubts in equal measure. Recent work in fiction includes Knocking on Heaven’s Door (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), an eco-sci-fi set in a Paleo-terrific future, winner of the Arizona Authors Association and New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Science Fiction, and her award-winning YA Teresa of the New World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), a story of plagues, were-jaguars, and the dreamscape of the sixteenth-century American Southwest. Sharman’s Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist was one of Booklist’s top ten books in religion. Her Hunger: An Unnatural History was written with the help of a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work has been translated into nine languages and her essays published in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. Sharman has also been awarded a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Henry Joseph Jackson Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has thrice judged the PEN Award in Children’s Literature. For more information, go to www.sharmanaptrussell.com.
Sarah Van Arsdale began writing fiction after earning her MFA in poetry at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The publication by Riverhead Books of her first novel, Toward Amnesia, in 1996, had her focused on writing fiction, although she has continued to write and publish poetry and non-fiction as well. Her second novel, Blue, won the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2003. Her third novel Grand Isle, was published by SUNY Press in 2012. Her most recently-published fiction, a collection of three novellas titled In Case of Emergency, Break Glass, was published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2016.
Sarah returned to poetry with her fifth book, a book-length narrative poem illustrated with her watercolors, titled The Catamount and published by Nomadic Press in 2017. Her poetry, essays, short fiction and book reviews have appeared in literary magazines including The AWP Writers’ Chronicle, The Writer, Guernica, Passages North, The Poetry Miscellany, The Widener Review, Episodic, New Millennium Writings, and The New Guard. Her work has been a finalist in the Galtelli International Writing Contest, The New Guard Poetry Contest, New Millennium Writing Contest, The American Library Association Fiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.
Her current novel, with a working title of Madrugada, is represented by her agent at Writers’ House, and she is now working on mosaic memoir illustrated with her watercolors.
Sarah lives in New York City and the Catskills, where she co-curates the Bloom reading series and co-administers the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction. In addition to teaching at Antioch, she teaches at NYU, with Writers’ Harbor/Maine Media Workshops, and elsewhere.
Terry Wolverton has authored eleven books, most recently Ruin Porn, a collection of poetry. Other collections include Black Slip, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Mystery Bruise; Embers: a novel in poems, finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Award and the Lambda Literary Award; and Shadow and Praise. Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building, a memoir, was named one of the “Best Books of 2002” by the Los Angeles Times, winner of the 2003 Publisher’s Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Another nonfiction collection is Wounded World: lyric essays about our spiritual disquiet. Her novel Bailey’s Beads was a finalist in the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Awards; her two other novels are The Labrys Reunion and Stealing Angel. A collection of her short fiction is called Breath and other stories. She has edited several successful compilations, most recently Bird Float, Tree Song, which features her 2015 collaborative poetry project, dis•articulations. She has produced numerous works of experimental theater and performance art in Los Angeles, Toronto and New York, and collaborated with Heidi Duckler Dance Theater on several site-specific performances. She has adapted Embers as a jazz opera with composer David Ornette Cherry. Terry has taught creative writing since 1977; in 1997, she founded Writers at Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, where she teaches. She spent thirteen years at the Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, eventually serving as its executive director. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards for her artistic and community contributions, including a California Arts Council Artist Fellowship for Poetry and a COLA Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She is also a certified instructor of Kundalini Yoga. Website: terrywolverton.net.