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River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

The Ashland Poetry Press

AU English Department

Faculty & Student News

Joanna Robinson, MFA student, has had her lyric essay, "Mars" selected for publication in an upcoming issue of The Southern Review .
Joy Gaines-Friedler's first book of poems, Like Vapor, has been published by Mayapple Press.
Valerie Due, MFA student, has had her essay "The Skinning Board" selected as the winner of the Writers at Work nonfiction fellowship competition, which includes prize money, publication in Quarterly West, a featured reading at the Writers at Work Conference, full tuition for the conference, free housing, and a manuscript consultation with a visiting writer or agent while at the conference. Abigail Thomas, the judge of the contest, had this to say about Due's piece: "I love the emotional restraint coupled with the ravishing prose of the piece. It serves so perfectly the young narrator whose initiation into the harsh realities of life--and death--on a farm is being presented here."
Peter Campion's essay on poetry and politics is now featured on Poetry Daily.  He won a Pushcart Prize for his poem, "Just Now."
Robert Root's The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction will be published in paperback edition in August 2008 by Rowman and Littlefield.

Stephen Haven's new book The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk has been published by The University of Syracuse Press.

Angie Estes has had three of her poems translated and published in the recent Russian anthology Contemporary Poetry in the United States: A Bilingual English-Cyrillic Edition. New poems also appear in the Spring 2008 issue of FIELD. Her lyric essay, "Want," was just published in the anthology Every Passing Breath: Contemporary Poets Respond to the Psalms.

Amy Campbell, Incoming MFA student, was a finalist for the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize for her piece, "A World Away."

Timothy West, Incoming MFA student, has had his poem "To My Daughter on a Workday" selected to be featured on an RTA bus card in Cleveland, Ohio for the annual Moving Minds: The Verse and Vision Project.

A Commitment to Teaching
Kathy Winograd's Workshop, Summer 2007

The Ashland MFA is especially characterized by its commitment to its students.  We hire as faculty only practicing, published writers who have proven records as exceptional teachers. 

All faculty, students and staff participate during summer residencies and during non-residential semesters as equal members in a community of writers that celebrates the pursuit of art in language and the integrity of all human beings. 

We value deeply the craft of good teaching--of passing the literary mantle on to other generations of writers. 

Ashland hired six new faculty mentors for the 2008-2009 school year.  They are: Peter Campion, Angie Estes, Jill Christman, Bob Cowser, Sonya Huber, and Bob Root.

Ashland MFA Current Faculty Members

Poetry

Peter Campion

Angie Estes

Stephen Haven

Ruth Schwartz

Kathryn Winograd

Creative Nonfiction

Jill Christman

Bob Cowser, Jr.

Steven Harvey

Sonya Huber

Joe Mackall

Bob Root

Peter Campion

Peter Campion -- MFA Faculty

Peter Campion, poetry, is the author of The Lions: Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Other People, (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Mitchell Johnson (Terrence Rogers Fine Art, 2004).  He has held a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lecturership at Stanford University. His poetry and prose have appeared recently in The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, Parnassus, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Tikkun, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His monograph on the painter Joseph McNamara was published by The Seven Bridges Foundation, and his catalog essay on the painter Terry St. John was published by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery. 

Campion is the editor of the journal, Literary Imagination.  He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Washington College where he teaches creative writing, modern and contemporary poetry, prosody, and poetry and the visual arts.

 

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 Jill Christman

Jill Christman -- MFA Faculty

Jill Christman, creative nonfiction, is the author of the memoir Darkroom: A Family Exposure, which won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002. Her nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and recent essays have appeared in Brevity, Barrelhouse, River Teeth, Mississippi Review, Harpur Palate, Literary Mama, Brain, Child and other journals. Her work has appeared on Indiana Public Radio and in the Writer’s Digest anthology Rules of Thumb, and she has essays forthcoming in Descant, Wondertime magazine, and Got (Breast) Milk (an anthology).

Jill Christman holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Ball State University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative nonfiction writing.

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Bob Cowser, Jr.

Bob Cowser -- MFA FacultyBob Cowser, Jr., creative nonfiction.  Cowser's first book, Dream Season (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004) was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and "Paperback Row" selection and was listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education's best-ever college sports books.  His second book, Scorekeeping, a collection of coming-of-age essays, was published in October 2006 by the University of South Carolina Press. He is currently at work on a third book about the 1979 murder of one of his grade school classmates and the execution of her killer in 2000, the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years.

Cowser's work has appeared widely in American literary magazines, including the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Brevity, Sonora Review and Creative Nonfiction. He has taught at Marquette, Nebraska, and Vermont College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program and is currently Associate Professor of English at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches courses in nonfiction writing and later American literature.

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 Angie Estes

Angie Estes -- MFA Faculty

Angie Estes, poetry, is the author of three books, most recently Chez Nous (Oberlin College Press, 2005).   Her second book, Voice-Over (Oberlin College Press, 2002), won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America.  Her first book, The Uses of Passion (1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and  Slate, and in the anthologies Gondola Signore Gondola: Venice in 20th Century American Poetry (Supernova Edizioni, Venezia, 2007), Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality (Bottom Dog Press, 2006), The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001), and The Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of Place (Heyday Press, 1999). Her essays have appeared in FIELD, Lyric Poetry Review, Children’s Literature, Christianity and Literature, Little Women: Norton Critical Edition, and in Every Passing Breath: Contemporary Poets Respond to the Psalms.

The recipient of many awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the California Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ohio Arts Council. Estes received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Oregon and was for several years Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Most recently she has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and at The Ohio State University. She is also a contributing editor for the literary magazine The Journal.

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Steven Harvey

Steve HarveySteven Harvey, creative nonfiction, is the author of Bound for Shady Grove (University of Georgia Press, 2000), a collection of personal essays about his experiences learning to sing and play the traditional music of the Appalachian mountains where he lives. The University of Georgia Press published the book in June 2000. He is also the author of two other collections of personal essays, A Geometry of Lilies (University of South Carolina Press) and Lost in Translation (University of Georgia Press), and the editor of In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age (University of Georgia Press).

Harvey is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of English at Young Harris College. He received his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Virginia.  He has published pieces in many magazines such as Harper's, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Fourth Genre, River Teeth and Creative Nonfiction, and has been anthologized in In Short, Life Studies, The Fourth Genre, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction and other collections. He is a former Governor's appointee to the board of the Georgia Humanities Council and a book reviewer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper.

Steve Harvey will be on-leave for the 2008-2009 school year.  He will return beginning with the 2009 Summer Residency.

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 Stephen Haven

Stephen HavenStephen Haven, poetry, is Director of the Ashland University MFA Program and Professor of English at Ashland University.  His first book of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, was published by West End Press in 2004. He is also the author of Dust and Bread, a collection of poems published by Turning Point in 2008.  His chapbook of collaborative translations from contemporary Chinese poetry, The Enemy in Defensive Positions, was published by Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks in 2008.  Haven’s memoir, The River Lock:  One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, is under contract with Syracuse University Press and is scheduled for a spring 2008 publication.  Haven is the editor of The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass:  Everything Human (University of Michigan Press), and co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary poetry.

Haven's poetry and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Image, Western Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and in many other journals.  He has an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom.  Haven has been a repeat fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, twice a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature (poetry) at universities in Beijing, and has won three individual artist fellowships, and one residency grant (at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center), from the Ohio Arts Council.

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Sonya Huber

Sonya Huber-Humes Sonya Huber, creative nonfiction, is Assistant Professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University.  She has been publishing since 1985. Her first book, Opa Nobody, was published in 2008 by University of Nebraska Press.

Her work has appeared in literary journals including Fourth Genre, Topic, Passages North, Main Street Rag, Literary Mama, Kaleidoscope, and forthcoming from Hotel Amerika, Sub-lit and others; in anthologies including Learning to Glow (University of Arizona Press), Young Wives' Tales (Seal Press), Bare Your Soul (Seal Press), Reading for the Maternally Inclined: The Best of Literary Mama (Seal Press), Mama Ph.D. (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press), and Campus, Inc. (Prometheus Books); in periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, Psychology Today, In These Times, Sojourner, and Earth Island Journal; and elsewhere.

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Joe Mackall

Joe MackallJoe Mackall, creative nonfiction, is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish (Beacon Press, June 2007) and of the memoir, The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). As Resident Faculty Mentor he is the lead faculty member in the Ashland University MFA Program.  He is also Associate Professor of English at Ashland University, and co-director of creative writing at Ashland University, where he recently won the university's Taylor Teaching Award. 

Mackall is the co-founder and co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.  In partnership with the University of Nebraska Press, he also co-edits the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction book series. His articles have been published in a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post. His essays have appeared in several anthologies, literary journals, and on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He has taught in Goucher College's low residency MFA in Nonfiction Program.

As Resident Faculty Mentor, Joe Mackall will teach alongside Stephen Haven in the post-thesis summer residency.

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Bob Root
Bob Root -- MFA Faculty

Robert Root, creative nonfiction, is the author of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) and After Isabella: Coming to Colorado (University of Oklahoma Press, forthcoming, 2009) as well as The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist (University of Iowa Press, 1998). He is the editor of Landscapes With Figures: The Nonfiction of Place (Nebraska, 2007), a book of essays of place and commentaries by authors, and the co-editor of the anthology The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (Longman), now in its fourth edition. He is also the author or editor of nine other books and is the Interview/Roundtable editor for the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

Root taught at Central Michigan University and teaches nonfiction at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. His article “Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment,” from The Fourth Genre, is often assigned in creative nonfiction courses across the country. An essay on writing and teaching, “A Double Life,” published in Writing on the Edge, won the 2007 Donald Murray Award for Best Essay on Writing and/or Teaching.

His creative nonfiction includes essays of place published in literary journals such as Brevity, North Dakota Quarterly, Rivendell, Colorado Review, The Concord Saunterer, and divide; “Knowing Where You’ve Been,” in Ascent, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2004; “The Pattern of Life Indelible,” in Ecotone, was listed in 2007. As an essayist he has been an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Isle Royale National Park. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado. His websites are www.rootwriting.com and www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root.

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Ruth L. Schwartz

Ruth SchwartzRuth L. Schwartz, poetry, is the author of Dear Good Naked Morning (Autumn House Press, 2005), which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the 2004 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her three other books of poems include Edgewater (HarperCollins 2002), which was chosen by Jane Hirshfield as a 2001 National Poetry Series winner; Singular Bodies (Anhinga Press, 2001), the recipient of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry; and Accordion Breathing and Dancing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), winner of the 1994 Associated Writing Programs Competition. Ruth is also the author of a memoir, Death in Reverse: A Love Story (Michigan State University Press, 2004), and her creative nonfiction has appeared in the Utne Reader, The Sun, and numerous anthologies.

Recipient of over a dozen national writing awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation, Ruth has taught creative writing at California State University-Fresno, Cleveland State University, Goddard College, Mills College, California College of the Arts, and elsewhere. She holds a B.A. in Women's Studies, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology. Ruth currently lives with her partner Michelle Murrain in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches and maintains a private practice in psychospiritual healing. Her websites are www.RuthSchwartz.com and www.HeartMindIntegration.com.

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Kathryn Winograd
Kathryn Winograd

Kathryn Winograd, poetry, is the author of Air into Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002), a 2003 Colorado Book Award Winner in Poetry. Winograd has been the recipient of a Colorado Artist Fellowship in Poetry , a Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute Associateship, and a co-winner of a Colorado Endowment for The Humanities Grant. Her poetry has appeared in such literary journals as TriQuarterly, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, and The New Yorker.

Winograd has also co-authored two books on online learning and teaching, You Can Learn Online and You Can Teach Online (McGraw Hill) and is author of Stepping Sideways Into Poetry, a classroom resource book for K12 teachers published by Scholastic, Inc. in the fall of 2005. She has published numerous articles and essays in publications such as Iris: A Journal About Women, Bloomsbury Review, Converge Magazine, The Herbal Companion and Mountain Living as well as children's stories and poems in Cricket magazine and Shoofly: An Audio Magazine for Children. Winograd received her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Denver, and a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.

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