Master of Fine Arts

Visiting Writers

 

The UMSL MFA program has presented public readings by the distinguished writers listed below.

Poets: Carl Dennis, Ross Gay, Rodney Jones, Joy Katz, Randall Mann, Adrian Matejka, Eric Pankey, Arthur Sze

Fiction Writers: Ethan Canin, Tony D’Souza, John Dufresne, Margot Livesey, Erin McGraw, Eric Puchner, Kevin Wilson

Recent Visiting Faculty


The Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri - St. Louis invites accomplished and well-regarded poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction writers to teach writing at UMSL for one semester. Typically, the visiting faculty member teaches a MFA workshop class and 4000-level seminar class open to both graduate students and undergraduates.

Andrew Altschul http://www.andrewfosteraltschul.com/

Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels Deus Ex Machina and Lady Lazarus, and short fiction and essays that have appeared in many publications and anthologies including Best New American Voices and O. Henry Prize Stories. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University from 2002-2008 and taught previously in the graduate programs at the University of San Francisco, Mills College, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Since 2009 he has served as director of the Center for Literary Arts at SJSU.

Gary Geddes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Geddes

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 40 books and has received numerous literary awards, including the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and Chile’s Gabriela Mistral Prize. He is the author of bestselling travel memoirs, The Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things and Sailing Home and Drink the Bitter Root. He lives on Thetis Island, British Columbia.

David Haynes http://smu.edu/smunews/matilda/haynes.asp

David Haynes has been recognized by Granta magazine as one of America's best young novelists. The author of six critically acclaimed novels and five children's books, he is director of creative writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

The former sixth grade teacher's short stories have been heard on "Selected Shorts" on NPR, and his novels have been recognized by the American Library Association.

Joy Katz http://joykatz.com/

Joy Katz is the author of three poetry collections, The Garden Room (2006), Fabulae (2002), and a new, as-yet-untitled volume to appear from Four Way in 2013. She is also co-editor of the acclaimed anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (2007). Honors for her writing include a 2011 NEA fellowship, a Pushcart prize, a Stegner fellowship, and the Nadya Aisenberg fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Her poems are anthologized in The Best American Poetry, among other places, and appear in such journals as American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The Village Voice.

She has taught literature and poetry at The New School and NYU and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and in the low-residency and on-the-ground programs at Chatham University. She is an editor-at-large for Pleiades.

Jason Sommer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Sommer

Jason Sommer has published three poetry collections: Lifting the Stone, Other People's Troubles, and The Man Who Sleeps in My Office. Most recently, he translated, along with Hongling Zhang, three novellas by Wang Xiabobo (widely recognized as one of the most important figures of 20th-century Chinese letters) to be published by the State University of New York Press. He has also published verse in The New Republic, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and other magazines, and in several anthologies, including The New American Poets. His work has been honored with a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and, in 2001, with the coveted Whiting Foundation Writers' Award. Since 1985 he has served as Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Fontbonne University.

Stacy Tintocalis http://stacytintocalis.weebly.com/

Writer Stacy Tintocalis is author of the short-story collection The Tiki King (Ohio University Press). Her fiction has been awarded The Journal's annual fiction prize, Santa Clara Review's editor's choice prize, the Mahan Fiction Award, and the McKinney Fiction Prize. Her story "Honeymoon in Beirut" is anthologized in New California Writing 2012. She is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received a PhD in Fiction Writing and Literature from the University of Missouri.

Lex Williford http://www.lexwilliford.com/

Lex Williford holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and has taught in the writing programs at Southern Illinois University, the University of Alabama and the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His book, Macauley’s Thumb, was co-winner of the 1993 Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction.  His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Fiction, Glimmer Train Stories, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market 2002, Poets & Writers, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Sou’wester, StoryQuarterly, Tameme, Virginia Quarterly Review and Witness. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. He is coeditor, with Michael Martone, of the popular Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, now in a new second edition, and the new Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction.  The director of the new online MFA at the University of Texas at El Paso, he also teaches in UTEP’s on-campus bilingualwriting program.