THE RAINIER WRITING WORKSHOP MFA @ PLU Faculty Biographies

THE RAINIER WRITING WORKSHOP MFA @ PLU Faculty Biographies Rick Barot has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012. His third collection, Chord, will be published by Sarabande in 2015. He lives in Tacoma, WA and is an associate professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University. For many years he was on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is now the director of the Rainier Writing Workshop. Suzanne Berne is the author of three novels: The Ghost at the Table (2006), which was chosen as one the Best Books of 2006 by the Boston Globe; A Perfect Arrangement (2001), a New York Times Notable Book; and A Crime in the Neighborhood (1998), winner of Great Britain’s Orange Prize. Her first book of nonfiction is Missing Lucile: Memories of a Grandmother I Never Knew (2010). She has written frequently for the New York Times and her short stories and essays have been published in such places as The Threepenny Review, Agni, Vogue, Ploughshares, The Boston Globe, and The London Sunday Times. She is also the fiction editor for the Harvard Review. Her new novel The Dogs of Littlefield was published by Penguin in the UK and nominated for the Bailey Prize (formerly the Orange Prize). Simon & Schuster will soon publish the novel in the US. She lives outside of Boston and teaches creative writing at Boston College. Linda Bierds’ ninth book of poetry, Roget’s Illusion, was published in 2014 by Putnam’s. Her prizes include the PEN/West Poetry Award, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1998 she was named a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Bierds’s poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Smithsonian, and Poetry. She teaches at the University of Washington and lives on Bainbridge Island. David Biespiel is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Charming Gardeners. Previous collections include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, and The Book of Men and Women, which was named among the Best Poetry of the year by the Poetry Foundation and was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Oregon Book Award. His anthology, Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, received the William Stafford Memorial Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. His book on writing and creativity, Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, is based on his 2009 lecture at RWW and has sold out several editions. In the fall of 2014, Everyman’s Library will publish his edition of Poems of the American South. In addition, he writes the Poetry Wire column for The Rumpus, has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, was editor of Poetry Northwest from 2005-2010, is a frequent political contributor to Politico, has contributed to the New York Times Book Review, Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Sewanee Review, Poetry International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere, and has lectured at many colleges and universities, including Stanford University, University of Maryland, Wake Forest University, and Oregon State University, where he has taught creative writing and literature since 1999. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he is the president of the Attic Institute in Portland. Mary Clearman Blew’s most recent book is This Is Not the Ivy League: a Memoir. Her fiction collection, Runaway, won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, as did her memoir All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family. A novel, Jackalope Dreams, won the 2008 Western Heritage Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press/American Lives Series), winner of a Lambda Literary Award in Memoir and an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) Gold Medal in Essay/Creative Nonfiction. Her previous book, My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), won the ALA Stonewall Book Award. Her work has been cited in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading and she’s currently working on a book-length essay about repurposed industrial landscapes, urban joy, and riding her bicycle on the mean streets of Chicago. Borich was the first creative nonfiction editor of Hamline University’s Water~Stone Review and is currently a member of the creative writing faculty of the English Department/MA in Writing & Publishing Program at Chicago’s DePaul University, where she’s developing Slag Glass City, a creative nonfiction and new media journal focused on sustainability, identity and the arts in urban environments. Borich earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and lives now with her spouse Linnea, a few blocks from Lake Michigan, in the Boystown neighborhood of Chicago, which was recently voted the most “incomparable” gayborhood in the world. Fleda Brown’s eighth collection of poems, No Need of Sympathy, was published by BOA Editions, LTD in 2013. Her collection of essays, with Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, also came out in 2013 from Autumn House Books. Her memoir is Driving With Dvorak (University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Fleda’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and anthologies, and they have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She has won the New Letters and the Ohio State Univ/ The Journal awards for creative nonfiction. She has written on teaching poetry and on the craft of writing, and she is co- editor of Critical Essays on D.H. Lawrence (G.K. Hall). She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She and her husband now live in Traverse City, Michigan. David Allan Cates is the author of five novels, including Hunger in America, a New York Times Notable Book, X Out of Wonderland, and Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books, and Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home, a Gold Medalist in the Independent Book Publishers Book Awards. His fifth novel, Tom Connor’s Gift, is due out in the fall of 2014. The winner of the 2010 Montana Arts Council’s Artist Innovation Award in 2010, his stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and his travel articles in Outside Magazine and the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler. Cates is the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, which leads groups of medical professionals to provide public health and surgery services in Honduras. In Missoula he has worked with the Missoula Writing Collaborative, teaching classes on short story writing in high schools, and the 406 writing workshop. For many years he worked as a fishing guide on the Smith River and raised cattle on his family farm in Wisconsin. Kevin Clark’s book, Self-Portrait with Expletives, won the 2009 Pleiades Press book contest and is distributed by LSU Press. His first full-length collection of poetry, In the Evening of No Warning, was published by New Issues Press. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and collections, including The Antioch Review, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, and The Iowa Review. He also won the Angoff Award from The Literary Review for best contribution in a volume year. Kevin’s textbook, The Mind's Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry, is published by Pearson Longman. Having recently co-written a play with his son, he’s presently working on a verse novel. Kevin has published essays about numerous contemporary American poets. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in many journals and collections, among them The Iowa Review, Papers on Language and Literature, The Southern Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, The Georgia Review, and Poetry International. He was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, where he teaches poetry writing and modern and contemporary American literature. Still attempting slow pitch softball and fast pitch baseball, he lives in San Luis Obispo with his family. Stephen Corey is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, the latest being There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003), and six chapbooks. His poems, essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies, among them The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Yellow Silk, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The ‘Poetry’ Anthology, 1912-2002.

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