Faculty and Panelists

With an MFA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount University, filmmaker J S Mayank lives the life of a Hollywood screenwriter, pitching his own ideas and reworking others’ work. He’s developed scripts with Hollywood bigwigs such as Derek Dauchy (XXX, Across the Universe), Bruce Cohen (American Beauty, Big Fish), Ted Field (Last Samurai, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) & Steve McEveety (Braveheart, Passion of the Christ) and worked with some of the best production companies and studios in town. His first sci-fi feature – Slate earned him a spot on the BLOODLIST, and he was invited by Robert DeNiro to the prestigious 2010 Tribeca All Access Program. For his directorial debut, Mayank was granted an opportunity by the band Radiohead to create a concept music video for their song "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi." Most recently, his script for EMIT won a Grand Prize, winning him a trip to Sundance (2012) where a table-read of it was performed. He resides in Los Angeles.

Jack Lucido is an Associate Professor of Communication at Western State College of Colorado. He teaches film studies, production, and screenwriting. His Master of Fine Art degree in Cinema is from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and his BA in Theatre & Film is from California State University Humboldt. He is currently working to complete his documentary, Across the Fence, which focuses on sustainability in ranching. His recent short film Chill Out won the National Wildlife Federation’s “Chill Out: Climate Action on Campus Video Award” in 2010. In 2006, Jackson Sandwich, his documentary about his son’s autism spectrum disorder, was awarded the prestigious Cine Golden Eagle and has been broadcast on Public Television in North Carolina and South Carolina. Lucido received an Emmy nomination in 2000 for directing and producing for prime time broadcast, a documentary on engineering wonders on Northern California’s Redwood Coast. At the time, he was a producer for KEET TV, a PBS member station.

Kim Bridgford is the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center and the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the largest all-poetry writing conference in the United States.  As the editor of Mezzo Cammin, she founded The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which was launched at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington in March 2010, and recently celebrated its third anniversary at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in affiliation with the exhibition The Female Gaze.   Her collaborative work with the visual artist Jo Yarrington has been honored with a Ucross fellowship. Bridgford is the author of seven books of poetry, including Bully Pulpit, a book of poems on bullying, and Epiphanies, a book of religious poems.  She has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Connecticut Post, on NPR and the website of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and in various headline news outlets.

Natalie Gerber is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Fredonia. Her articles on modern poetry and poetics have appeared in Paideuma, The William Carlos Williams Review, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, for which she serves as an associate editor.  She is obsessed with using insights from linguistics to clarify what we talk about when we talk about poetic measure, meter, and rhythm.

Simon Jarvis is the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Wordsworth's Philosophic Song and of many essays on poetry and prosody. His most recent collection of verse is Eighteen Poems (London: Eyewear, 2012); Night Office appears from Enitharmon this summer.

Marilyn L. Taylor, former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, has published eight collections of poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, American Scholar, and Measure. She taught poetry and poetics for fifteen years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and served for five years as Contributing Editor and regular poetry columnist for the Writer magazine.  She is currently a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

Matthew P. Dyer is a high school English teacher with an attitude—motorcycles, martial arts, surfing, snowboarding, and guitar are just a few of the experiences he weaves into his curriculum to connect with students and shatter the image of English class as a yawner.  An avid writer and storyteller, Dyer has a reputation for firing up an English class, especially before the lunch bell, and backs up his irreverent style with a BA in English (UNM) and an MA in Education (UCCS)—as well as being on a continuous quest for knowledge and experience. Winner for the Thriller genre in the American Icon fiction contest put on annually by Pikes Peak Writers, and ripping through the Rockies on his motorcycle every chance he gets.  Dyer draws on his past, teaching ESL in St. Petersburg, Russia, for a year as an honorary Professor at the St. Petersburg’s Institute of Hydro-Meteorological Studies, surfing up and down the Baja coast of Mexico, and being recognized in the New York Times as one of the first snowboarders permitted to tear up Aspen Mountain—all to unabashedly attract attention to his teaching, his writing, and himself in general.

Caleb J. Seeling is founder and publisher of Samizdat Creative, an independent house at the forefront of new models of publishing. Currently in negotiation to acquire the award-winning Conundrum Press, he has plans to create a major poetry series, to publish the best fiction and creative non-fiction, and to develop a “Buy a book / Give a book” model of corporate philanthropy. Prior to starting Samizdat Creative, Caleb was a senior acquisitions and developmental editor for NavPress, a literary agent with WordServe Literary, an organizer for International Arts Movement, an adjunct professor of sociology at Front Range Community College, a corporate communications leader and educator for Kaiser Permanente, and community manager of Northeast Denver Housing Center, a permanent housing program for chronically homeless people. A native of Colorado, his passion is to help establish the Rocky Mountain region as a national cultural hub. He lives in Littleton with his wife, four children, and six chickens.

Andrew Zack is president of The Zack Company, Inc., a literary agency, and Author Coach, LLC, an author coaching and editorial consultation service, as well as publisher of Endpapers Press.  A publishing veteran with nearly a quarter-century in the publishing business, Andy has worked in-house and freelance for many major publishers.  He began his literary agent career at Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency in New York, and started his own firm in 1996.  In 2006, he moved to San Diego, CA.  His areas of interest for both TZC and AC are wide and varied, covering nearly all areas of fiction and nonfiction.  A complete list of representation areas can be found at  www.zackcompany.com.  Those interested in author coaching services or managed self-publishing options should visit www.authorcoach.com.