Faculty
Summer/Fall 2020
Chris Feliciano Arnold has written essays and journalism for The Atlantic, Harper's, Foreign Policy, Vice News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Folha de S. Paulo, and more. His fiction has been published in Playboy, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone and other magazines. His work has been noted in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a 2014 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he resides in northern California and is the Distinguished Visiting Writer in Nonfiction at Saint Mary’s College. His first book, The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty- First Century Amazon, is a work of narrative nonfiction published by Picador in 2018.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), is inspired by her family's immigration stories and her time volunteering with the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths. A dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com.
Most recently, Bermejo was chosen as the first “Poet in the Parks” resident at Gettysburg National Military Park in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and the National Parks Arts Foundation. Locating the Dead, a chapbook inspired by her time at Gettysburg was published by A-B Projects as part of the collaborative art exhibit, “The Stacks.”
A former Steinbeck fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund/Money for Women grantee, and Tucson Festival of Books 3rd place poetry winner, she was once selected by her mentor, Eloise Klein Healy as a Los Angeles Central Library ALOUD newer poet. She has received residencies with Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Miresa Collective.
Bermejo is cofounder and director of Women Who Submit, a literary organization fighting for gender parity by empowering women and non-binary writers to submit work for publication. She received a BA in Theatre Arts from California State University of Long Beach and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She teaches adult writing workshops with UCLA Extension and children’s poetry workshops through out LA County.
Francesca Lia Block has published over twenty-five works of fiction, nonfiction, short stories and poetry for adults, young adults and children 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, the L.A. Review of Books, Spin, Nylon, Black Clock and Rattle among others. She has taught at Antioch since 2013, at UCLA Extension, Writing Pad, Fine Arts Work Center, Idyllwild Arts Academy, Writing Workshops Los Angeles and as a Writer-in-Residence at Pasadena City College. She has written a screenplay based on her novel Weetzie Bat for Fox Searchlight.
Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet and essayist. His poetry collections include The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2012), Carrier Wave (2006), and the chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His first collection of essays Of Color is being released by McSweeney’s in June 2020. His poems and essays have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have been included in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry and The Norton Reader. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
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. She also serves on the National Book Critics Circle Board.
Piotr Florczyk is a poet, critic, and translator of Polish poetry. His most recent books are East & West, a volume of poems, and two volumes of translations, My People & Other Poems by Wojciech Bonowicz, and Building the Barricade by Anna Świrszczyńska, which won the 2017 Found in Translation Award and the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, The Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Notre Dame Review, New Orleans Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, West Branch, The Louisville Review, World Literature Today, The Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, America Magazine, Poetry International, The Yellow Nib, and other journals and magazines. He is a founding editor of Calypso Editions, a cooperative press dedicated to publishing poetry and prose in translation.
Piotr Florczyk has been a fellow at the Czesław Miłosz Institute and at the Polish Book Institute, and has taught poetry and literature undergraduate and graduate courses at Claremont McKenna College, SDSU, University of San Diego, Antioch University Los Angeles, University of Delaware, and at UC Riverside. He is a doctoral candidate at USC and lives in Mar Vista. His new book of poems, From the Annals of Kraków, which is based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, will be published in September 2020.
Antioch alumna, Reyna Grande, is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us (Atria 2012), where she writes about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home was released in 2018. Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains (Atrial 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (2009) which were published to critical acclaim. The Distance Between Us is also available as a young readers edition Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges and cities across the country. Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The young reader’s version of The Distance Between Us received an International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award in 2017. Writing about immigration, family separation, language trauma, the price of the American Dream, and her writing journey, Reyna’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, CNN, The Lily at The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, among others. Reyna is a proud member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros, where she has also served as faculty. She has also taught at several writers conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and VONA (Voices of Our Nation’s Arts). Currently. she is at work on a novel set during the Mexican-American War and a collection of personal essays.
Jim Krusoe 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 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 is the author of seven books. 300 Arguments (2017), a work of aphoristic autobiography and “a pocket-sized foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing,” was named a book of the year by more than twenty publications including NPR and Buzzfeed. 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, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize and longlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize. 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 2003 Pushcart Prize and appeared in four volumes of the Best American Poetry series. Her books have been named Indie Next picks and New York Times Editors’ Choice titles, and have appeared on numerous book-of-the-year lists including those of the Atlantic, the Irish Times, the London Independent, the National Post, and the Telegraph.
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 and Writer's Collaborative New York, and UW Madison. You can learn more about his writing at www.alistairmccartney.com.
Bernadette Murphy's newest book, Harley & Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life (Counterpoint Press, hardback May 2016, paperback May 2017) explores female risk-taking through the lens of her own experience learning to ride a motorcycle at age 48, and weaves together memoir with psychology and neuroscience. She has published three additional books of creative nonfiction: The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate (with LA novelist Michelle Huneven), following the lives of six women (herself included) as they put Tao principles to work navigating the red-hot real estate market (Bloomsbury USA, 2007); The Knitter’s Gift (2004), an anthology of creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction; and the bestselling Zen and the Art of Knitting (2002) in which she uses memoir and reportage to explore the connection between fiber arts, creativity, and spirituality. She is now completing a first novel The Artane Boys Band, an early version of which was a finalist for the Heekin Group Foundation’s James Jones Novel-in-Progress award. She has been a contributing book critic for the Los Angeles Times and has published hundreds of reviews there. Her personal narratives and essays on literature have appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Climbing Magazine, The Observer, Literary Hub, BOOK Magazine, Ms. Magazine, LA Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times Magazine and elsewhere. She has taught at the UCLA Extension Writers Program and National University’s MFA program, as well as in private writing workshops. A proud graduate of the Antioch Los Angeles MFA program, she was a member of the inaugural year’s class, graduating with the Orange cohort.
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, Fundacion Valapariso, 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. For more information: cwpotterverse.net.
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.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going (University of Washington Press, 2018) and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, community, and civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights, including Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, appeared in 2017. Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a three-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have recently appeared in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, Hotel Amerika and elsewhere, and her work-in progress about Chinese miners along the Columbia River in the late 1800s has received support from Washington Trust Grants for Artists Program. She currently serves as Assistant Editor at Brevity and on the editorial board of Wandering Aengus Press. After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, at Whitman College, and now at Antioch.
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.
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.