2013 Faculty

FICTION

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang’s second novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, was published in 2010. NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse calls it an unforgettable novel that “begins small, but blossoms into a full and resonant story of the pains and perils, falsehoods and truths of trying to be an American artist, in this case poet, against all odds, psychological and social.” Chang is also the author of Inheritance and Hunger: A Novella and Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its 20 “Best of Young British Novelists.” Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The Welsh Girl was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. Equal Love was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the U.S., where he is on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li’s stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from both the Lannan Foundation and the Whiting Foundation. She is the author of the collections Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), a finalist for the Story Prize, and her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2006), which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction.  Her novel, The Vagrants (2010), won the gold medal of the California Book Award for fiction. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. In 2010 the MacArthur Foundation named her a Fellow. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. She teaches at University of California, Davis.

Christopher Tilghman

Christopher Tilghman’s most recent novel, The Right-Hand Shore, was named a Notable Book of 2012 by The New York Times, which hailed it as “the dark, magisterial creation of a writer with an uncanny feel for the intersections of place and character in American history.” He is also the author of Roads of the Heart (2004) and Mason’s Retreat (1996) and two story collections: The Way People Run (1999) and In A Father’s Place (1990). His stories have appeared in  The New Yorker, Ploughshares and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines, and have been selected three times for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories.  His fellowships and awards have included a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.  He is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, and is currently director of the MFA program in Creative Writing.

POETRY

Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.  Dungy’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Sustainable Arts Foundation, and Cave Canem.  She has won an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, and a California Book Award silver medal.  After seven years teaching in San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing Department, this fall she will begin a position as Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

Linda Gregerson

Linda Gregerson’s books of poetry include The Selvage (2012); Magnetic North (2007); Waterborne (2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award; and Fire in the Conservatory (1982). She is also the author of literary criticism, including Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (2001). Her awards and honors include the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Isabel MacCaffrey Award from the Spenser Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Gregerson teaches American poetry and Renaissance literature at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the MFA program in creative writing.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Come, Thief (2011). Her other collections include After, which was shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize, and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In addition to her book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Hirshfield has edited and co-translated several books, including The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, and Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Poetry Medal. In 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets.

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Holding Company and Hoops were finalists for NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literature: Poetry. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.