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 two collections of stories and two novels, and her stories and essays have appeared in such journals as Southwest Review, The New Yorker, Mirabella, and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and she currently edits The O. Henry Award Stories.
Zulfikar Ghose is Poet Emeritus, and the author of several novels, collections of poetry, an autobiography, and four books of criticism, the most recent being Shakespeare's Mortal Knowledge photo: Susan Somers-Willett
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
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith is the author of several novels, among them, Klail City, which received the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1976. He has also received the Quinto Sol Award for Estampos del Valle and the Best Writing in Humanities Award (1981) for Mi Querido Rafa by the Southwest Conference in Latin American Studies.
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
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."
A. Van Jordan born in Akron, Ohio, received his MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His first book, Rise, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club.
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.
David Wevill is Poet Emeritus and his work has been published in numerous anthologies in England, Canada, and the United States. He is the author of six books of poetry, a translation of Selected Poems of Ferencz Jubasz, and has received the E.C. Gregory Award, Arts Council of Great Britain awards, the Richard Hillary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent collection is entitled Solo with Grazing Deer (Exile Editions 2001).
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.