Faculty and Panelists
Most of the faculty for next year's four concurrent workshop tracks -- genre fiction/nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, and publishing -- serve as members of Western's MFA in Creative writing faculty. And they are all active and successful authors, poets, screenwriters, or publishing professionals. For an update on presenters for summer 2012, please check back in January, 2012.
Workshop Faculty
Barbara Chepaitis |
Genre Fiction/Nonfiction Holding a doctorate in creative writing from SUNY, Albany, Barbara Chepaitis has six published novels, including A Lunatic Fear (Wildside Press, 2004), Something Unpredictable (Simon & Schuster, 2003), These Dreams (Simon & Schuster, 2002), and three other novels with Bantam and Ace. She was a finalist in the 2003 Sundance screenwriters contest and has written four other screenplays. She has numerous shorter works collected in a variety of anthologies, and she also has experience in radio drama, voice-over work, and editing. Barbara is also Western's MFA concentration director for Mainstream/Genre Fiction. |
Russell Davis |
Genre Fiction/Nonfiction Russell Davis has written and sold numerous novels and short stories in virtually every genre of fiction, under at least a half-dozen pseudonyms. Some of his more recent novels include work in both THE EXECUTIONER and ROOM 59 series from Gold Eagle, as well as a forthcoming project for StoryPortals.Com. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as IMAGINARY FRIENDS, LAW OF THE GUN, and UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS. In addition to his work as a writer, he has worked as an editor and book packager, and has created anthology titles ranging from westerns such as LOST TRAILS to fantasy such as IF I WERE AN EVIL OVERLORD. He is currently an acquisitions editor for Ravenous Romance. A past president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, Russell now writes and edits full time, as well as teaches for Western's MFA in Creative Writing. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife and children, and in his copious spare time, he tries to get some sleep. |
Mayank Gupta  |
Screenwriting Insider Mayank Gupta lives the life of a Hollywood screenwriter, pitching his own scripts, reworking others’ works, collaborating and networking with Studio City heavyweights like producers Bruce Cohen (American Beauty, Big Fish, Milk), Derek Dauchy (XXX, Across the Universe), and Steve McEveety (Passion of the Christ, Braveheart, What Women Want), as well as working for some of the best production companies in the business – Vertigo Entertainment (The Departed, The Grudge), Strike Entertainment (Children of Men), Participant Media (Charlie Wilson’s War, The Kite Runner, Good Night and Good Luck), The Mark Gordon Company (2012, Day After Tomorrow, Speed), and others. |
Karla Kuban  |
Genre Fiction/Nonfiction Karla Kuban is author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling novel, Marchlands, published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. She was a student at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Program, a James A. Michener Fellow, and winner of two Pushcart Prizes for short stories. She currently divides her time between California and Aspen, Colo. |
| Jack Lucido  |
Screenwriting A tenure-track member of Western's faculty, John Lucido teaches both film and filmography, including screenwriting, and he directs both the undergraduate Film Studies program and the college's MFA concentration in screenwriting. His work has won a CINE Golden Eagle Award, a Broadcast Educator's Association Festival of Media Arts Award of Excellence, and an Emmy nomination. His professional experience includes work on such films as June Bug (2005) and National Lampoon's Pucked (2006), as well as the PBS series Simple Living. Jack is also Western's MFA concentration director for Screenwriting. |
Michaela Roessner |
Genre Fiction/Nonfiction With an MFA in Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine, Michaela Roessner has had four novels published, as well as assorted short fiction and nonfiction in publications that include Asimov’s Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, OMNI Magazine, Canada’s Room Magazine and anthologies that include Full Spectrum 2 and Intersections. Her first novel, Walkabout Woman, won the Crawford and John W. Campbell awards. She has also had work short-listed for the Calvino Prize, the Tiptree Award, and the Millennium Publishing short fiction contest. Her current “front-burner” projects include a number of short fiction pieces, finishing up her fifth novel, The Waters of Babylon, and an experimental fiction chapbook, The Book of Clever Women -- A Hagiology. |
David J. Rothman  |
Poetry With a Ph.D. in Poetics from New York University, award-winning poet David J. Rothman has been an editor, reviewer, publisher, and judge in poetry circles for over two decades. His own work has a distinguished record in such literary journals as The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, The Lyric, Prism, The Gettysburg Review, and many others. He has three collections of published poetry (Beauty at Night, 2002; The Elephant's Chiropractor, 1999; Dominion of Shadow, 1996), and a fourth collection forthcoming from Red Hen Press. He is also owner/publisher of award-winning Conundrum Press. David is also Western's MFA concentration director for Poetry. |
Bob Shayne  |
Screenwriting Bob Shayne has been an active and successful screenwriter for years, both in New York and Los Angeles. He’s sold 18 prime-time pilots and written 16 of them for the major TV networks in all genres, six of which were shot, two of which went to series, and most of which he produced. He’s worked on staff of both sitcoms and one-hour dramas; been a show-runner on sitcom, drama, MOW and pilots; written something well over 100 episodes; written and produced TV movies; written two four-hour miniseries, written features both live-action and animated, and adapted four novels into screenplays (not counting his own). He’s won or been nominated for awards including Best TV Movie of the Year from the Writers Guild of America, Edgar for Best TV Movie of the Year from the Mystery Writers of America, Edgar for Best TV Episode of the Year from the Mystery Writers of America, two Emmys from the TV Academy (for Best Talk Show and Best Documentary), and a Grammy for Best Comedy Album. |
| David Yezzi  |
Poetry David Yezzi, acclaimed poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, is former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, where he also currently teaches poetry in the center’s writing program. Yezzi’s poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The New Republic, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He writes literary criticism regularly for The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Yale Review and many other publications. Yezzi has held editing positions at Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The New York Observer, and The New Criterion. In 1998, he was awarded Stanford University’s prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife. |
Poetry Symposium Presenters
Joining David J. Rothman and David Yezzi (featured above) with Marilyn Taylor(featured on the Keynote page) are the following poets and critics:
Jan Schreiber |
Symposium co-founder Jan Schreiber has published Digressions (Aliquando Press, Toronto), Wily Apparitions (Cummington Press, Omaha), Bell Buoys (Aliquando), and two books of translations: Sketch of a Serpent and A Stroke upon the Sea. He was one of the founding editors of Canto: Review of the Arts. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines -– including the Southern Review, Hudson Review, Christian Science Monitor, and The Formalist -– and in online journals such as Expansive Poetry and Music and Not Just Air. Seven of his poems were set to music by Paul Alan Levi in a song cycle for tenor and piano called Zeno’s Arrow, which has been performed in Massachusetts and New York. Also a prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, he writes for Contemporary Poetry Review and other national publications. |
Ernest Hilbert |
Ernest Hilbert’s debut collection is Sixty Sonnets. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review. He graduated from Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He was the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City (1998-2003) and, more recently, of the Contemporary Poetry Review (2005-2010), which has been described as “one of the most comprehensive online journals of literary criticism.” His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and two best-selling Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology. |
Joan Houlihan |
Joan Houlihan’s most recent book of poetry is The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009). She is also author of Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays and The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast and Pleiades, among others, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Her critical essays on contemporary poetry are archived online at Bostoncomment.com. She is contributing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. |
Marilyn Krysl |
Marilyn Krysl has published eight books of poetry and four of short stories. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction and Sudden Stories. Dinner with Osama won the Richard Sullivan Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Bronze Medal 2008. Swear the Burning Vow: Selected and New Poems was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2009. A former director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Colorado Boulder, she’s received two NEAs, taught ESL in the Peoples’ Republic of China, served as Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked as an unarmed bodyguard for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, volunteered at Mother Teresa’s Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta, and tutored Boulder’s Lost Boys of Sudan in American slang. She’s taught hundreds of students who’ve brilliantly surpassed her, and now in her dotage teaches workshops, hangs out in the Caribbean with manta rays, watching clouds and anticipating the day she’ll forget her Social Security number. |
James Matthew Wilson |
James Matthew Wilson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He has authored many articles on philosophical-theology and literature, as well as essays in literary criticism, politics, and culture. A poet and critic of contemporary poetry, his poems has appeared in The Dark Horse, Modern Age, First Things, Lucid Rhythms, Measure, and other journals. He is currently at work on two books, one on T.S. Eliot and Jacques Maritain (The Return to the Real), and the other, a philosophical defense of truth, beauty, and the integrity of the intellectual life (The Vision of the Soul). He is an editor of the web journal, Front Porch Republic, and author of a book of poems, Four Verse Letters (Franciscan University at Steubenville Press, 2010). |
Conference Organizers/Panel Moderators
Larry Meredith  |
Larry Meredith is the author of This Cursed Valley, an historical novel set in the area near Gunnison. He has been a newspaper man, a college PR director, a director of instructional technology, a salesman, an advertising and public relations writer for a Fortune 500 company, and has owned a video production firm. He is currently Assistant to the President and Director of Public Relations for Western State College. He is at work on a second novel and has written three screenplays, at least one of which appears at this point to have a chance of being produced. |
Mark Todd  |
With a doctorate in English from Texas Tech University, Mark Todd has served on the faculty at Western for over 20 years. He also coordinates the undergraduate Creative Writing Emphasis. His own works include two collections of poetry (Wire Song, 2001; Tamped, But Loose Enough to Breathe, 2008), and two novels -- both adventure comedies co-written with wife Kym (The Silverville Swindle, 2006; The Silverville Curse, spring 2011). He and his wife have also written a screenplay adaptation, Little Greed Men, which is currently under development, and are working on a second original screenplay. Mark is also the program director for Western's MFA in Creative Writing. |
Panelists, Agents, Editors
Jim Booth |
Jim Booth is consultant in writing pedagogy and an English professor
at the University of Maryland University College. He holds bachelor and
master's degrees from UNC Greensboro and a doctorate in writing and the teaching
of writing from the University at Albany (SUNY). He has founded and directed
writing centers and programs at community colleges, colleges and universities in
North Carolina and Maryland and has served as a writing center and writing
program development consultant for writing centers and writing programs in KY,
TN, NC, SC, and GA. He has published articles on writing center policy, advisor
supervision, writing center development, and writing process theory. Jim is a
fiction writer with over 25 published stories in journals ranging from
StorySouth to Dead Mule to Pig Iron Malt. and the author of The New Southern
Gentleman (Wexford College Press, 2002) and Morte D'Eden, or Tom
Sawyer Meets the Rolling Stones (Beach House Books, 2003). His latest
novel, Completeness of the Soul: The Life and Opinions of Jay Breeze, Rock
Star, is in publication discussions with Coral Books, New York. Jim is
fiction editor for Scholars and Rogues Literary Magazine, the literary arm of the
national blog Scholars and Rogues. A former touring rock musician, Jim
currently operates his own independent record label, Goat Boy Records, and his
sons Joshua and Trevor lead the rock group DOCO, currently on tour. Jim’s
companion Carol Lea Saunders is an artist and poet whose work shows regularly in
galleries in North Carolina and the Southeast.He will entertain submission
entreaties at the conference. Bring pitches and incense.
|
Matthew P. Dyer |
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. |
Robert McBrearty |
Robert Garner McBrearty, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize and widely published in many leading literary journals including: The North American Review, StoryQuarterly, Missouri Review, New England Review, Narrative Magazine, and Mississippi Review. He is the author of two short story collections, A Night at the Y, and Episode, which was a winner of the prestigious Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, whose director said, “We think McBrearty’s writing is especially noteworthy for its blend of humor and pathos.” His stories have been used for large staged readings by professional actors at Stories on Stage in Denver, and at the Arts and Letters Live Show at the Dallas Museum of Art. He also serves as a Contributing Editor to the Pushcart Prize. Currently, he lives with his wife and children in Louisville, CO, and teaches writing at the University of Colorado. |
| Maria Melendez  |
Maria Melendez publishes Pilgrimage in Pueblo, Colorado, a literary magazine serving a far-flung community of writers, artists, naturalists, contemplatives, activists, seekers, and other adventurers in and beyond the Greater Southwest. Univeristy of Arizona Press has published two of her collections of poetry: How Long She'll Last in This World (2006), and Flexible Bones (2010). She serves as contributing editor for Latino Poetry Review and acquiring editor for Momotombo Press, a chapbook publisher featuring prose and poetry by emerging Latino writers. |
Teresa Milbrodt  |
Teresa Milbrodt grew up in northwest Ohio. Her stories have appeared in Nimrod, North American Review, Crazyhorse, The Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, CutBank, and Sycamore Review, among other literary magazines. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and her MA in American Culture Studies, both from Bowling Green State University. Currently she is a professor of creative writing at Western State College of Colorado, where she will serve as managing editor for Western's new press. She'll be on hand to listen to pitches for the first anthology, due out next year. |
Leah Rogin-Roper |
In 2006, Leah Rogin-Roper co-founded FastForward Press, a press dedicated to
flash fiction and other compressed forms of writing. Since that time, she has
served as an editor, as well as the head of research and development in charge
of seeking new projects and directions. The press's 2010 anthology, The Mix Tape,
was recently named a finalist in the category of literary fiction for the
Colorado Book Award. Her own work has been published in Mountain Gazette, Powder Magazine, Monkey Puzzle,
Daily Love, and Not Enough Night,
as well as in other literary journals. She has also written three novels, most
recently A Grizzly Love Story. She has
an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and teaches writing at
Arapahoe Community College. She lives in the mountains west of Denver with her
dogs, daughter, and husband. |
Caleb
J. Seeling |
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. |
Sam Smith  |
Samuel Smith is a poet, blogger and marketing strategist who lives and works in
Denver. As a poet, his work has been published in journals like Poet
& Critic, Cream City Review, The New Virginia Review and
Dead Mule, which also published his chapbook, "The Miles Between Here and
Home." He's also
published short fiction in storySouth, Wilmington Blues and
Dead Mule. Sam is the executive editor of Scholars & Rogues Literary Journal http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/sr-litjournal/, and accompanying blog addressing culture, arts, literature, politics and music (among other
things) that Technorati currently ranks among the Top 1500 in the world (out of
more than 100 million). He founded Lullaby Pit, one of the first 2000 branded
Web sites in the world, in April 1994, and also operates his own business blog,
Black Dog Strategic. His collective blogging efforts have earned him a number of
honors, including multiple finalist recognitions by the Weblog Awards and
recognition in several categories by the Blogger's Choice Awards. S&R was
one of 120 blogs credentialed to cover the 2008 Democratic National
Convention. |
| John Steele  |
John Steele has been the Fiction Editor for the online literary journal BloodLotus (www.bloodlotus.org) for four years. He received his BA in English from Western State College in 2003 and earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in 2006. He writes fiction and screenplays and teaches at Western State College as a Lecturer in Communications and English. |
Terrie Wolf  |
Literary agent Terrie Wolf has traveled the world in search of good stories and great books. As a member of the international media, an award-winning journalist and promotions specialist, Terrie has learned what it takes to write well, get accepted and develop notoriety; not necessarily in that order! She is happiest when given the opportunity to pitch softly, edit gently and market fiercely. A partner at AKA Literary agency, Terrie mastered her skills in the literary world from inside the offices of several large companies, which include CBS, NBC, and Hobson's Press. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University, Creative Writing at NYU and Journalism at CU-Denver. Her specialities include all genres of Romance, Graphic Novel, Western, Young Adult, Children's (all levels) including young adult, Women's, Multi-Cultural, Empowerment (Things of Faith), and Inspirational. She also represents non-fiction: Cookbooks, Humor, Memoir, Religion, Music and Nature. |
