M.F.A Faculty
Poetry
Corrinne Clegg Hales is the author of five poetry collections, most recently To Make it Right, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize for 2010 (Spring 2011, Autumn House Press). Her previous books are Separate Escapes, winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize (Ashland Poetry Press); Out of This Place (chapbook, March Street Press), Underground (Ahsahta Press); and January Fire (chapbook, Devil's Millhopper Press). Her poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and many other journals. Awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Devil's Millhopper Chapbook Prize and the River Styx Poetry Prize.
Tim Skeen earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska in 1993. His collection, Kentucky Swami, is the winner of the John Ciardi Prize and was published in 2001 by BkMk Press at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His poems have appeared in such journals as New Letters, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and the Antioch Review. He has received a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the 10th Annual Conference on College Teaching and Learning.
Fiction
Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Baja California, and raised in suburban Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from UC Irvine. His first novel, Still Water Saints (Random House 2007) appeared simultaneously in English and Spanish and was selected for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers. His nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Salon. He was a 2009 fellow in fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is also a frequent participant in Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Writers Workshop. He currently teaches English and creative writing at Fresno State and just completed his second novel, tentatively titled The Other Stranger (Random House, 2012), about a Mexican actor in Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Randa Jarrar is the author of the novel A Map of Home, which won the Hopwood Award, the Gosling Prize, and the Arab American Book Award. She was born in Chicago and raised in Kuwait, Egypt, and New York, and has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from UT Austin, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in the New York Time Magazine, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, the Oxford American Magazine, Utne Reader, and other journals.
Creative Nonfiction
John Hales is the author of Shooting Polaris: A Personal Survey in the American West (University of Missouri Press), and his essays have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Ascent, and On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors. His writing has been cited numerous times in Best American Essays and Best American Science and Nature Writing, and awards include a Pushcart Prize and The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize in Nonfiction.
Steven Church, Associate Professor of English, earned his MFA at Colorado State University and his BA in philosophy from the University of Kansas. He's the author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, and The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record. His essays and stories have been published in places such as Fourth Genre, Sonora Review, Colorado Review, New South, Brevity, The Pinch, The North American Review, Packingtown Review, River Teeth, Post Road, Quarter After Eight, Quarterly West, Powells.com, Freshyarn.com, and many others. He's been nominated 6 times for the Pushcart Prize and was awarded the Colorado Book Award for The Guinness Book of Me, which has also been optioned for TV by Lionsgate Studios and Fox Television. He's the founding editor of the MFA Program's nationally recognized literary magazine, The Normal School.