Visiting Writers and Poets

Since its inception, the program has invited distinguished writers to teach graduate courses. They have included Edwidge Danticat, Shelby Hearon, Maxine Kumin, Terese Svoboda, Nintochka Rosca, Juan Delgado, Arthur Sze and Sabina Murray. 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.

The University of Miami Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce R. Zamora Linmark will be the Visiting Writer in Fiction during the Spring of 2010.

• 

  R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the novel Rolling The R’s (Kaya Press), which he's adapted for the stage, and two collections of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions and The Evolution of a Sigh, both from Hanging Loose Press. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including two from the Fulbright Foundation, a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, he has published in numerous journals and anthologies in both the U.S. and the Philippines. He has also taught Creative Writing in several institutions, the last of which was as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007. He currently divides his time between Manila and Honolulu, where he is at work on another novel for young adults, a poetry collection, and his latest play, But, Beautiful. His second novel, Leche, the sequel to Rolling The R's, is longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (Shortlist will be announced in mid-Oct).

Rita Wong (Fall, 08) and Debra Dean (Spring 09) are among our recent visiting writers.

• Debra Dean, M.F.A. (University of Oregon, 1992)
  Visiting Assistant Professor
  

  Debra Dean’s bestselling debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad (Morrow), was translated into more than a dozen languages and received wide critical acclaim, including being selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Borders Original Voice, a #1 Booksense Pick, and a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association. Her short fiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, Image, The Seattle Review, Calyx, Writers Forum, and The Bellingham Review and has won awards including the AWP Intro Journals Award and the Nelson Bentley Prize. A native of Seattle, Dean worked as an actor in the New York theatre for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer. A collection of short stories titled Confessions of a Falling Woman will be published by HarperCollins in January 2008, and she is currently working on a second novel.

  Debra Dean's Teaching Statement

• Rita Wong
  

  Rita Wong is the author of monkeypuzzle (Press Gang 1998) and forage (Nightwood 2007, awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008). She received the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award in 1997, and her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Ribsauce: a CD/Anthology of Words by Wome, The Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War, Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry, Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literatures in Engilsh, and more. She is an Assistant Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada, and is also a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Miami.