Clyde Edgerton Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing PhD, MAT, BA, UNC Chapel Hill

Guggenheim Fellowship Lyndhurst Prize Honorary Doctorates from UNC-Asheville and St. Andrews Presbyterian College Fellowship of Southern Writers the North Carolina Award for Literature five notable book awards from the New York Times

“Mr. Edgerton’s ability to shine a clear, warm light on the dark things of life without becoming sugary makes a vivid backdrop for his tolerant humor and his alertness to the human genius for nonsense.” —The New Yorker

Clyde Edgerton is the author of ten novels, a book of advice, a memoir, short stories, and essays. Three of his novels have been made into movies: Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and Killer Diller. Edgerton’s short stories and essays have been published in New York Times Magazine, Best American Short Stories, Southern Review, Oxford American, Garden & Gun and other publications. Rebecca Lee associate professor

MFA, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop BA, St. Olaf College

Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2012 National Magazine Award, for “Fialta,” 2001 Bunting Fellowship, Harvard University, 2001-2002 Michener Fellowship, Iowa Writers Workshop, 1997

Rebecca Lee is the author of Bobcat and The City Is a Rising Tide. Her stories have been published in the Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope, and she was the winner of the National Magazine Award for Fiction “Lee writes with an unflinching eye toward for “Fialta.” Her fiction has also been read on NPR’s the darkest and saddest aspects of life, often Selected Shorts. finding humor where least expected. This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed.” —Publisher’s Weekly Awards for Bobcat The Story Prize 2013 Finalist Barnes & Noble 2013 ‘Discover’ Award Finalist Oprah Book of the Week Amazon.com Best Book of the Month NPR Best Book of the Year Powell’s Best Book of the Century David Gessner UNCW Creative Writing Department Chair

BA, Harvard College MA, University of Colorado

2012 Reed Award, Best Book on the Southern Envi- ronment and the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, The Tarball Chronicles All the Wild That Remains Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, “The New York Times Bestseller Dreamer Does Not Exist” Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of 2015 Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and best books about Significant John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay 2006, Figures in the Arts and Humanities “Learning to Surf” The Christian Science Monitor’s Top Ten Nonfiction Book of the Year 2006 Pushcart Prize Southwest Book of the Year Boston Globe’s top ten books of the year 2001, Return Smithsonian Best History Book of the Osprey To the Best of Our Knowledge Top Ten Book

David Gessner has written nine books, including All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. His essays appear Outside magazine and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He recently hosted the TV show, Call of the Wild, on the National Geographic channel. Gessner taught Environmental Writing as a Briggs- Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is now the Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the award-winning literary journal of place, Ecotone. Malena Morling professor

MFA, University of Iowa, 1995 MA, New York University, 1992 BA, Hampshire College, 1988

Finnish Literature Exchange Fellowship, Helsinki, Finland The Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship The Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, Marfa, TX Research Associate, The School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM MacDowell Fellowship Visiting Research Associate, The School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Lotos Club Foundation Prize The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award New Issues Press Poetry Prize Iowa Arts Fellowship, University of Iowa Yaddo Fellowship Academy of American Poets Prize University Scholarship, New York University Breadloaf Fellowship Philip Gerard professor & Chautauqua co-editor

MFA, University of Arizona, 1981 BA, University of Delaware, 1977, Phi Beta Kappa

Philip Gerard has won the Faculty Scholarship Award, the College of Arts & Science Teaching Award, the Chancellor’s Medal for Excellence in Teaching, the Graduate Mentor Award, the Board of Trustees The Dark of the Island (2016), Down the Wild Cape Fear (2013), Teaching Award, and a Distinguished Teaching Hatteras Light (2013), The Patron Saint of Dreams (2012), Cre- Professorship. The Philip Gerard Fellowship, ative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (2004), Secret Soldiers (2002), Writing a Book That Makes a Dif- endowed by benefactor Charles F. Green III to honor ference (2000), Desert Kill (2000) Gerard’s work in establishing and directing the MFA program, is awarded annually to an MFA student on the basis of literary merit.

He has served on the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network and from 1995 until 1998 on the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs, for two of those years as President. He has been appointed to a second three-year term on the North Carolina Arts Council. He is the 2012 recipient of the Sam Talmadge Ragan Award for Contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina. Wendy Brenner associate professor

MFA, University of Florida BA, Oberlin College

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Flannery O’Connor Award North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship UNCW Graduate Mentor Award Henfield Transatlantic Review Award AWP Intro Award

Wendy Brenner is the author of two story collections, Phone Calls from the Dead (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2001) and Large Animals in Everyday Life (U. of Georgia Press, 2009; W. W. Norton, 1997), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award. Her stories have appeared in the Oxford American, Mississippi Review, Five Points, and Story, among others. She is currently completing a book of essays titled Misfits. May-lee Chai associate professor

B.A., Grinnell College, French and Chinese Studies M.A., Yale University, East Asian Studies M.A, University of Colorado-Boulder, English-Creative Writing M.F.A., San Francisco State University, Creative Writing

National Endowment for the Arts fellowship Kiriyama Prize 2008 Notable Book for Hapa Girl: A Memoir Honorable Mention, 2007 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Award, Hapa Girl: A Memoir Nomination for the National Book Award in nonfiction,The Girl from Purple Mountain Notable Essay of 2012 for “The Blue Boot” in Best American Essays 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed

May-lee Chai’s short stories and nonfiction prose have appeared in numerous publications, including the North American Review, ZYZZYVA, Missouri Review, Seventeen, Many Mountains Moving, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Jakarta Post Weekender, Southwest Magazine, the Bedford Introduction to Literature, and At Our Core: Women Writing on Power. She has taught at various universities, including San Francisco State University, the University of Wyoming, and Amherst College in Massachusetts. Mark Cox professor & program director

MFA, Vermont College BA, DePauw University

“Tender beyond belief, uncannily lyrical, morbid and funny and smart, Cox is a master poet of the mystery of presence.” —Tony Hoagland

Oklahoma Book Award, 1999 Society of Midwest Authors Book Award, 1999 Pushcart Prize, 1993 Whiting Writers Award, 1987

Mark Cox is the author of three collections of poetry. Natural Causes (2004), Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone (1998), and Smoulder: Poems (1990). His work has been published in many anthologies and literary magazines. Nina deGramont associate professor

MFA, University of North Carolina Wilmington BA, Colorado College

ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults Pushcart Prize Nomination and Special Mention “With an artist’s eye and a poet’s heart, Booksense Selection de Gramont realizes a world of love, mystery, Booksense 76 New England Bookseller’s and the shattering sorrow of mental illness, Association Discovery Award deceit, hope, and lives cut short. Impossible to put down.”—Library Journal Nina deGramont is the author of The Last September (Algonquin, 2015), The Boy I Love (Atheneum, 2014), Meet Me at the River (Atheneum, 2013), Every Little Thing in the World (Atheneum, 2010), Gossip of the Starlings (Algonquin Books, 2008), co-editor of Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood and Abortion, (MacAdam Cage, 2007), and Of Cats and Men (Random House, 2002). Michael White professor

PhD, University of Utah BA, University of Missouri

Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Prize, Persea Books Distinguished Writers Series, Univeristy of Missouri Florida Review Editor’s Prize Competition in poetry Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry Travels in Vermeer is North Carolina Arts Council Individual Artist’s Grants a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry 2015 National Book NEA Fellowship in Literature Awards Longlist in Nonfiction Michael White is the author of four award-winning collections of poetry. His poetry and prose has been published in The Paris Review, The New Repub- lic, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poet- ry, among many other magazines and anthologies. My teaching awards at UNCW include the Chancel- lor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the UNCW Graduate Mentor Award. Robert Anthony Siegel associate professor

MFA, University of Iowa, 1992 BA, Harvard University, 1983

2014 O. Henry Prize 2013-2014 Fulbright Fellowship, Taiwan 2012 Pushcart Prize 2009-10 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellowship “Siegel’s … portraits (loving 1992-93 Writing Fellowship, Fine Arts Workcenter at and otherwise) of the Glassers, Provincetown New York prosecutors, and 1992 Michener-Engle Fellowship, University of Iowa various lowlifes are right on the 1983-85 Mombusho Fellowship, Japanese Ministry of money.”—The New Yorker Education, Tokyo, Japan

Robert Anthony Siegel is an American writer fascinated by East Asia and the experience of cross-cultural encounter in all its beauty and confusion. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, and Tin House, among other venues. He has also written two novels, All the Money in the World and All Will Be Revealed. A collection of essays, Criminals, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. Phil Furia professor

PhD, University of Iowa, 1970 MFA, Iowa Writers Workshop, 1970 MA, University of Chicago, 1966 BA, Oberlin College, 1965

Faculty Scholarship Award, UNCW, 2006 Presented with the Key to the City of Savannah by Mayor Floyd Adams for Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer, the first biography of the Savan nah-born songwriter Scholar of the College, University of Minnesota Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Minne- sota, College of Continuing Education & Exten sion Fulbright Professorship, University of Graz (Austria) Emily Louise Smith senior lecturer, director of The Publishing Laboratory MFA, UNCW, 2006 BA, Davidson College, 1999

Writer-in-Residence, Rivendell Writers’ Colony Truro Center for the Arts residency The Studios of Key West residency UNCW Lecturer of the Year Emily Louise Smith is director of the Publishing Laboratory Woman of Achievement in the Arts and co-founder and publisher of Lookout Books and its Hambidge / NEA New Artist Initiative residency sister magazine, Ecotone. With a background in advertising Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and development, Emily began her publishing career as Best New Poets an assistant to former CEO of HarperCollins Canada and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency Publishing Laboratory founder, Stanley Colbert. After Writer-in-Residence, Hub City Writers Project designing the inaugural issues of Ecotone and earning her Byington Fellow, UNCW MFA in poetry, she went on to work as an editor, designer, and publicist for Hub City Press, and returned to UNCW in 2007 to direct the department’s teaching press. She negotiated its distribution agreement, implemented the first overhaul and expansion of its textbook, Show & Tell: Writers on Writing, and in 2009 co-founded its award-winning literary imprint, Lookout Books. Anna Lena Phillips Bell lecturer and editor

MFA, Emerson College BA, Guilford College

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is editor of Ecotone and Lookout Books. She teaches the Ecotone practicum as well as special-topics courses in publishing, including developmental editing, copyediting, and book arts. She formerly served as senior editor and book-review editor for American Scientist and was a founding editor of Fringe. Ornament, winner of the 2016 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, judged by Geoffrey Brock, is forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press in spring 2017. Her projects include A Pocket Book of Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Forms, a fine-press guide to poetic forms, andForces Virginia Center for Creative Arts residency- of Attention, a series of printed objects designed to Penland School of Crafts winter letterpress help people mediate their interactions with screened residency devices. Anna Lena’s work appears or is forthcoming Southern Women Writers Conference 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Emerging Writers Award in poetry the Hopkins Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition International, the Southern Review, the Southern Poetry Weymouth Center for the Arts and Human Anthology Vol. VII: North Carolina, the Raintown Review, ities residency Durham County Arts Council Emerging Southern Poetry Review, the Anthology of Appalachian Artist grant Writers, Really System, Canary, and 111O, among Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, 2009 other places. She calls Appalachian square dances in Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, 2008 Piedmont, North Carolina and beyond. Beth Staples lecturer and assistant director, The Publishing Laboratory

MFA, Arizona State University BA, LaSalle University

Beth Staples is the assistant director of the Publishing Laboratory and teaches Books & Publishing, Publishing Practicum, and Special Topics in Publishing. She joined the UNCW faculty from The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University where she managed the literary journal Hayden’s Ferry Review and the Center’s other publications from 2007 to 2012. She also served as an adjunct faculty member in the creative writing department at ASU, teaching intermediate fiction writing, advanced fiction writing, and forms of fiction. Her writing has appeared in Phoebe, the Portland Review, and on 300Reviews.com.