Faculty W/S 2021

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (2016), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. He’s the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, 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 poems have appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Hyperallergic, The New Republic, Poetry, and A Public Space. Ari lives in the Bay Area, where he also teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. His second book, A Symmetry, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2021.

Dan Bellm has published four books of poetry: Deep Well (Lavender Ink/Diálogos, 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 such journals and anthologies as Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, Best American Spiritual Writing, and 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

Francesca Lia Block has published over twenty-five works of fiction, nonfiction, short stories and poetry for adults and young adults including the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award-winning and best-selling Dangerous Angels, a Time Magazine, NPR and Booklist Best Book For Young Adults. She has also been the recipient of a Rainbow Award, a Spectrum Award, a Phoenix Award, an American Library Association Best Book Award and awards from Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. Her work has been translated into Italian, French, German Japanese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Portuguese. Francesca has also published stories, poems, essays and interviews in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Review of Books, Spin, Nylon, Black Clock, The Fairy Tale Review and Rattle, among others. She has taught at Antioch since 2013, at UCLA Extension, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, Writing Pad, Fine Arts Work Center, Idyllwild Arts Academy, and as a Writer-in-Residence at Pasadena City College. Recently she was nominated as Professor of the Year at University of Redlands where she taught undergraduate creative writing as a visiting professor. She has written a screenplay based on her novel Weetzie Bat for Fox Searchlight.

Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of the memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis (Beacon Press) and the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns (Black Lawrence Press). Other books include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne); the poetry collections The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press); and Dictionary Poems (Pudding House); the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction; Self Storage (Ballantine), a Target Breakout Book; Delta Girls (Ballantine); and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns, a statewide read in Wisconsin. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Longreads, The Rumpus, The Nation, and O, The Oprah Magazine) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Notable Essays in the Best American Essays 2016 and 2019. Gayle was named 2018 Multi Genre Maverick Writer by the Willamette Writers. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986, and in 2004, The Writer magazine named Gayle a Writer Who Makes a Difference. Gayle holds a BA in “Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing” from the University of Redlands and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from Antioch University. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012- 2014. Gayle currently lives in Incline Village, Nevada, and teaches at Sierra Nevada University. Her kids were born in 1990, 1993 and 2009.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/S&S. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the Program Chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

Naima Coster is the author of two novels. Her debut, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was recommended as a must-read by People, Essence, BitchMedia, The Root, Well-Read Black Girl, The Skimm, and the Brooklyn Public Library among others. Naima’s forthcoming novel, What’s Mine and Yours, is the story of the integration of a public high school in a small Southern city, and the resulting chain of events that bonds two families together in unexpected and complicated ways over the course of their lives. It will be published in March 2021.

Naima’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Rumpus, Aster(ix), Kweli, The Paris Review Daily, The Cut, The Sunday Times, and elsewhere. Naima tweets as @zafatista and writes the newsletter, Bloom How You Must. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Jim Daniels has published 17 books of poems. His recent collections include Rowing Inland, Wayne State University Press and Street Calligraphy, Steel Toe Books, both published in 2017, and The Middle Ages, Red Mountain Press (2018). His sixth book of short fiction, The Perp Walk, was published by Michigan State University Press in 2019, along with the anthology he edited with M.L. Liebler, RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He has also written and produced four short films, including “The End of Blessings,” which appeared in numerous film festivals. His poems accompanying the photographs of Charlee Brodsky have been displayed in a number of art galleries and collected in two books. His poem “Factory Love” is displayed on the roof of a racecar, and in 2021, he will be sending poetry to the moon as part of the Moon Arts Project. In addition to serving as Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Program at Antioch, he is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Brad Kessler is a critically acclaimed novelist whose work has been translated into several languages. He won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction for his novel, Birds in Fall, a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Whiting Writers Award. 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 the novel, Lick Creek, and The Woodcutter's Christmas, and the forthcoming novel, North (2021, The Overlook Press/Abrams). His work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, the Nation, Bomb, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. 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 on the smallest licensed goat dairy in the state of Vermont where he makes cheese 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 are Junior 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.

Tammy Lechner 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 nonfiction 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.

Lisa Locascio's debut novel, Open Me, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. A New York Times Editor's Choice, Open Me was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and was reviewed in The New York Times Review of Books, The New Yorker, and on NPR. Lisa is also the editor of an anthology, Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, published by Outpost19 Books.

Lisa's stories, essays, and poems have been published in n+1, The Believer, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Tin House and many other places. Her essay "Byzantium," was selected for inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and she was awarded the 2017 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction International Literary Award for her essay "Protest," which later appeared in The Southampton Review. Lisa is editor of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7x7LA and Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their cat, Sybil.

Prior to joining Antioch, Lisa held teaching positions at UCLA (where she was Lecturer of Scandinavian), Wesleyan University, the University of Southern California, Colorado College, and New York University, among other institutions.

Sarah Manguso's first novel, Very Cold People, is forthcoming in 2022. Her previous book, 300 Arguments (2017), a work of aphoristic nonfiction, was named a book of the year by more than 20 publications. Her other nonfiction books include Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015), an essay on self-documentation, motherhood, and time; The Guardians (2012), an essay on friendship and suicide; and The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), an essay on living with chronic illness. Manguso's story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007), was published by McSweeney's as part of 145 Stories in a Small Box and was preceded by two poetry collections, Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002), poems from which won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four volumes of the Best American Poetry series. Manguso is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. She has served as the Mary Routt Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College and a Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College, and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the Pratt Institute. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.

Alistair McCartney is the author of The Disintegrations: a Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). The story of a man obsessed with death, the novel blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, story and eulogy, poetry and obituary. The Disintegrations was named one of 2017’s best works of fiction by the Seattle Times and Entropy Magazine, and won the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His first novel, The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), took Rimbaud’s method of systematic derangement and applied it to the form of the encyclopedia. TEOTWB was a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award 2009 and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 2009, and was in Seattle Times Best Ten Books of 2008. McCartney's writing has also appeared in 3:AM, Hotel, The Nervous Breakdown, Fence, Animal Shelter (Semiotexte), Bloom, Lies/Isles, Gertrude, 1913, Scott Heim's The First Time I Heard series, Karen Finley's Aroused, and elsewhere. Born in Perth, Western Australia, he lives in Venice Beach, California. A graduate of Antioch University MFA's inaugural year class, he also oversees AULA’s undergraduate creative writing concentration, and has presented at institutions throughout the country, including CUNY Grad Center, PEN Center USA, Teacher's & Writers Collaborative New York, and UW Madison. You can learn more about his writing at www.alistairmccartney.com.

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.

Carol Potter is the 2015 winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press for her book, Some Slow Bees. Her fourth book of poems, Otherwise Obedient (Red Hen Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in GLBT poetry. Her book of poems Short History of Pets won the 1999 Cleveland State Poetry Center award and the Balcones Award. Previous books are Upside Down in the Dark, 1995, and Before We Were Born, 1990—both from Alice James Books. Potter’s poems have appeared in Field, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books and many other journals and anthologies. Potter was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 2002 for her poem Three Crows. Other honors include residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Fundación Valparaíso, Millay, Centrum, and Cummington Community of the Arts. Besides teaching for Antioch since 2002, Potter has taught at Indiana University, Redlands University, Los Angeles Community College, Santa Monica College, Holyoke Community College, Community College of Vermont, and the UCLA Writer’s Extension. After five years in California, including living part-time on a boat in Marina del Rey, Potter returned to New England. Most recent publications include poems in Green Mountains Review, Ekphrasis, and Sinister Wisdom. She has poems forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Kenyon Review, River Styx, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She was the winner of the 2015 Ekphrasis prize for poetry.

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 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. Her forthcoming Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, 2021) combines her longtime interest in the environment with her longtime interest in hunger. She is now working on a memoir project about test pilots and the Mojave Desert that she loves and doubts in equal measure. Recent work in fiction include Knocking on Heaven’s Door (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), an eco-sci-fi set in a Paleoterrific 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.

After earning her MFA in poetry at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Sarah Van Arsdale took a left turn and, to her own surprise, began writing fiction. After the publication by Riverhead Books of her first novel, Toward Amnesia, in 1996, she focused on writing fiction, although she has continued to write and publish poetry and nonfiction 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.

Marco Wilkinson is a visiting assistant professor in the English Dept. at James Madison University. His essays have appeared in the journals Kenyon Review, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, Bennington Review,Territory and elsewhere, as well as in the anthologies The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury) and Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence (Ohio University Press). His memoir, Madder, will be published by Coffee House Press in fall 2021. He is the nonfiction editor at The Los Angeles Review and lives in San Diego.

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.

Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books, including, most recently, SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019). Her other books include a memoir, MOTHERs, and a double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians. Her book Museum of Accidents was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker has taught poetry at New York University for the past decade. She has also taught at Columbia University, Yale, the 92nd Street Y and many non-degree-granting programs. As founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People) Zucker has recorded and aired in-depth conversations with over eighty contemporary poets and artists. Zucker is currently working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine). In 2016 Zucker wrote and delivered a series of lectures on the intersection of poetry, confession, ethics and disobedience as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. These lectures will be published by Wave Books as a collection of essays called The Poetics of Wrongness in 2021. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Zucker lives in New York and in Scarborough, Maine.