Creative Writing
The English Department faculty includes a distinguished group of fiction writers and poets. Our permanent faculty is complemented by a number of visiting writers in a variety of genres, sponsored by the English Department and the Michener Center for Writers.
Fiction Faculty
Michael Adams is a short story writer and novelist, his latest stories appearing in Autrement and Texas Short Stories II. His novels include Blind Man's Bluff and Anniversaries in the Blood.
photo: Susan Somers-Willett
Oscar Casares is a Texas-born writer who earned wide acclaim with his first collection of short stories, Brownsville, which was published in 2003. He is currently working on a novel.
Laura Furman's latest book is Drinking with the Cook. She is the author of three collections of stories, two novels, a family memoir, and is co-edtor of an anthology about reading. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Yale Review, American Scholar, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. She is the Susan McDaniel Professor of Creative Writing, and since 2003 has been the series editor of The PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories.
Elizabeth Harris's recently published collection, The Ant Generator and Other Stories, was awarded the 1991 John Simmons Award for Short Fiction. She has published stories in Southern Review, Chicago Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Epoch, Kansas Quarterly, and Wind, and her work has been anthologized in New Short Stories from the South: The Year's Best.
photo: Susan Somers-Willett
Peter LaSalle is the author of three short story collections and a novel; his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, Paris Review, Antioch Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has had work included in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.
James Magnuson is the author of several novels and a dozen plays, which have had production at Playwright's Horizons, Hudson Guild, and St. Peter's Gate. He received the Hodder Fellowship of Princeton University for his plays, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an award from the Texas Institute of Letters for his fiction.
photo: Susan Somers-Willett
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of a story collection, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry; two novels, The Giant's House, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996, and Niagara Falls All Over Again; and a memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. A 1990 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been recipient of grants from the Michener/Copernicus Foundation, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the NEA and was named one of the twenty Best Young American Novelists by Granta.
Poetry Faculty
Kurt Heinzelman is the former Executive Curator at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center where he curated several nationally acclaimed exhibitions, Heinzelman co-founded the award-winning journal, The Poetry Miscellany; currently, he is Advisory Editor for the Bat City Review and editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. As a poet he has been a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and his work was selected for the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards Anthology. His two books of poetry, The Halfway Tree (2000) and Black Butterflies (2004) were both finalists for the Natalie Ornish Award as best poetry book of the year, and in 2005 he was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters. Heinzelman has also written widely on both British Romanticism and Cultural Economics and has translated a variety of poetry from French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Latin. He is the general editor of The Covarrubias Circle (2004) and Make it New: The Rise of Modernism (2003). His book The Economics of the Imagination (1980) was a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year."
photo: Eric Beggs
Judith Kroll, author of two collections of poetry, has also published poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Southern Review, and a critical book on Sylvia Plath. Her creative nonfiction has been published in journals including Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, and River City. She has also published a collaborative translation of a novel from the Kannada. Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry, Kroll has been awarded other grants for creative nonfiction and for translating South Indian mystical poems.
Thomas Whitbread's books include two collections of poetry; his poems also appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Massachusetts Review, and The New Yorker, and his short stories in The Paris Review, Shenandoah, and The Texas Observer.
Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, recently Elegy on Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Primitive Mentor. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, two from the National endowment for the Arts as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College and was on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop until becoming the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. A book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness will be published in 2009.