Visiting Writers and Poets

Since its inception, the program has invited distinguished writers to teach graduate and undergraduate courses. They have included Edwidge Danticat, Shelby Hearon, Maxine Kumin, Terese Svoboda, Nintochka Rosca, Juan Delgado, Arthur Sze and Sabina Murray. More recently, R. Zamora Linmark, Chris Abani and Adrian Castro have taught in our program. Other distinguished visitors have been Isaac Bashevis Singer and James A. Michener, whose generosity began and has sustained the M.F.A. program for years.

 

Cristina Garcia, Visiting Associate Professor in Fiction, Fall 2011.

Cristina Garcia (www.cristinagarcianovelist.com) is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel, recently published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her newest work, Dreams of Significant Girls, is a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s.

García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and teaches at Texas Tech University most spring semesters. This fall, Garcia will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14.

 

John Murillo, Visiting Assistant Professor in Poetry, 2011- 2012 

John Murillo (www.johnmurillo.com) is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010).  A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  His work has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry.  His choreo-play, Trigger, has been commissioned by Edgeworks Dance Theater and is scheduled for production in spring 2011.  A founding member of the poetry collective, The Symphony, he has taught at New York University, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Currently, he is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell University.

 

Peter Selgin, Distinguished Visiting Writer-in-Residence, February 13-18, 2012

View his Writer-in-Residence Events (Feb 13-17th)

Peter Selgin (www.peterselgin.com) is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction, and Life Goes to the Movies, a novel, as well as two books on writing craft, By Cunning & Craft and 179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers, just out from Writers Digest Books. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, a memoir in essays whose title essay was included in Best American Essays 2006 is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press/Sightline Books. Selgin is currently the Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rolliins College.

 

Patricia Engel, Guest Lecturer, Spring 2012

Patricia Engel's first book, Vida, was named a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Fiction Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award, a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and Editors' Choice, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Latina Magazine, and Barnes & Noble, longlisted for The Story Prize, and winner of a Florida Book Award. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, and Guernica, among other publications, and received awards including the Boston Review Fiction Prize, fellowships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Key West Literary Seminar, Norman Mailer's Writer's Colony, the Hedgebrook Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey, Patricia earned her undergraduate degree in French and Art History at New York University and her MFA at Florida International University.