Bios of Prize-Winning Students

C.B. Adams (MFA 2001) has short stories in River Styx (issues 53 and 54), Zoetrope All-Story Extra (October 1998), Missouri Arts Council Writers' Biennial 94, The Distillery: Artistic Spirits of the South, Blue Penny Quarterly, Feedback Magazine, Forest Park Review, and elsewhere. He works as a St. Louis-based writer and communications consultant and teaches part-time at UM-St. Louis. His articles have appeared in more than 50 local, regional and national publications. He can be reached via email at: handuker@swbell.net.

Back to C.B. Adams's "Coffin Fishing"

Janet Goddard has an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (2001), as well as a Bachelor's degree in English and a Creative Writing Certificate from Washington University.  As a writer, Janet co-authored The Teaching Assistant for English Composition while attending UM-St. Louis.  Recently, Janet has completed her first novel, Shake the Middle Tree.  As an instructor, she teaches students of all ages in a variety of venues.  She has taught at UM-St. Louis and currently teaches as an adjunct instructor at Washington University and Forest Park Community College. She also tutors elementary through high school aged students in writing, reading comprehension, and SAT/ACT test preparation and has particular experience in teaching students with learning disabilities.

Back to Janet Goddard's "Beare's Widow"
Back to Janet Goddard's "The Bee Weeks"

Melissa Gurley Bancks (MFA 2001) has written poetry that is published or forthcoming in Sou'wester, Boulevard, The Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi, USLR (U.S. Latino Review), and The Cape Rock, and in two anthologies, Key West: A Collection (White Fish Press), and Micro 2: Fictions for the New Millennium (ed. Ryan Van Cleave and Virgil Suarez, publisher t.b.a.).  Her essay "Fourth Time's a Charm" was published on-line at sprawlopolis.com.  She is Managing Editor of River Styx.

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Angela Hamilton has served as an assistant editor and managing editor of Natural Bridge.  She is an instructor at the College Writing Center at St. Louis Community College at Meramec, where she also teaches travel writing.  Her essays have been published in Opium Magazine (where there is also an interview) and in Passionfruit.

Back to Angela Hamilton's "Rusted Nails"

Jim Mense (BA Washington University, MA in Composition Theory UMSL) has taught writing full-time at UMSL and St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley for over twelve years; in fall 2002, he will teach the personal essay for the St. Louis Writers Workshop. Jim has helped to edit the literary journals Natural Bridge and River Styx, and his personal essay "Everything I Break I Touch" was a winner in the 2002 Thurber Treat Writing Contest. 

Back to Jim Mense's "Once More to the Picnic"

John Ryan teaches English, including creative writing, at Clayton High School.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Buzzard Review, U.S. Latino Review, and River Styx.  He has received Honorable Mention in the Missouri Writers Week Award for Poetry, and his poems were among fifteen finalists for the Madison Review Phyllis Smart Young Prize in Poetry in 2001.  He writes occasional book reviews for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  He is currently working on his first chapbook.

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Matthew W. Schmeer holds an MFA from UM­St. Louis, where he also received a BA in English and a Writing Certificate.  He edits the online journal Poetry Midwest.  He is the author of a chapbook, Twenty-one Cents (Pudding House Publications, 2002), and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in River Oak Review, Re)verb, The Curbside Review, Good Foot, The Quercus Review, The Rio Grande Review, The Connecticut River Review, California Quarterly, and other journals both in print and online.  Beginning in the fall of 2002, he will be an assistant professor of English at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina.

Back to Matthew W. Schmeer's "Vultures of Sleep"

Linda Wendling received her MFA degree from UM-St. Louis in 2000.  "Inappropriate Babies" was published by Algonquin Books in New Stories From The South: The Year's Best, 2001, and the story was singled out for comment in Entertainment Weekly and the Dallas Times. Another story was anthologized in W.W. Norton's Microfiction--An Anthology of Really Short Stories (1996). She is the winner of the Heartland Fiction Prize (New Letters) and was both an AWP Writers Award nominee and a finalist for Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops Anthology. She has been a recipient of the World's Greatest Short Short Story Award (Florida State University Press) and the Margery McKinney Short Story Award. She has also received honors in the Carson McCullers Fiction Prize (STORY Magazine), the Writer's Digest Literary Fiction Prize, and Alaska Quarterly's International Short Story Award. Her stories have been published in a number of literary magazines, including New Letters, Sundog, The Southeast Review, and River Styx, among others. She is currently a finalist for the Bellwether Prize, Literature for Social Change-a publishing prize for novels sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver and Harper/Collins. She is also a James Jones First Novelist Fellowship finalist.  She is a book editor and a private writers' coach and has taught writing for over ten years at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  She also teaches for the St. Louis Writers Workshop.

Back to "Inappropriate Babies"

 

 

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