2012 Faculty

Craft Workshops | Prosody Workshops

One Day Workshops | Poetry Consultants

Click on the workshop title for a description.

Craft Workshops

Sonnet and Sonnet-Inspired Forms |
Kim Addonizio 

Kim Addonizio is the author of five collections of poetry including Tell Me, a 2000 National Book Award Finalist. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award, and other honors. She has published two instructional books: Ordinary Genius, A Guide for the Poet Within and The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (with Dorianne Laux).

Practical Prosody: Understanding the Principles of Rhythm | Tom Cable

Tom Cable is the author of books and essays on English prosody from Caedmon to the present, including The Meter and Melody of Beowulf and The English Alliterative Tradition, and co-author of A History of the English Language.  He has been Director o f the Creative Writing program in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and for many years has taught a seminar in prosody to poets at the Michener Center for Writers.

Master Class | Rafael Campo

Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University's Creative Writing MFA Program. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards: a National Poetry Series award; his third collection of poetry, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and his most recent, The Enemy, won the Sheila Motton Book Award.

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 Hip Hop Poetics and Pedagogy | Michael Cirelli

Michael Cirelli's newest collection, Everyone Loves The Situation (Penmanship Books, 2011), deconstructs MTV's hit reality show, Jersey Shore, flipping the cultural zeitgeist on its (gelled and sprayed) head. He is also the author of Vacations on the Black Star Line (Hanging Loose Press, 2010), which was named in About.com's Poetry Picks "Best Books of 2010," and Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), which was a NY Times bestseller from an independent press and was featured in the "Debut Poets" issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Hanging Loose, Texas Review, World Literature Today and King Magazine, among others. He is the Executive Director of one of the nation's largest youth literary arts organization, Urban Word NYC, and has authored two poetry curricula, Poetry Jam (Recorded Books, 2010) and Hip-Hop Poetry & the Classics (Milk Mug, 2004). He teaches courses on Hip Hop & the Teaching of English at New York University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bank Street College of Education. He has also appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and Brave New Voices.

Rhyme | Dick Davis

Dick Davis is Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. He lived for eight years in Iran, as well as for periods in Greece and Italy. His twenty-one books include academic works, translations from Italian (prose) and Persian (prose and verse), and books of poetry. His most recent collection of poems is At Home and far From Home: Poems on Iran and Persian Culture (Mage Publishers, 2009).

The Poetic Line | Dana Gioia

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Dana Gioia is the author of three full-length books of poetry including Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (2001), winner of the American Book Award. His critical collection, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992/2002) was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the "Best Books of 1992." He is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003-2008). 

Verse Forms Invented by Women | Allison Joseph

Born in London, England, raised in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx, NY, Allison Joseph currently directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review and director of the Young Writers Workshop. Her books include Soul Train, Imitation of Life, Worldly Pleasures (winner of the Word Press Poetry Prize) and Voice: Poems. Her most recent poetry collection, My Father's Kites, was published in 2010 by Steel Toe Books. 

The Villanelle | Julie Kane

Julie Kane is the author of Rhythm & Booze (2003), which was a National Poetry Series winner and finalist for the Poets' Prize, and Jazz Funeral (2009), which won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. Her doctoral dissertation on the villanelle won the Lewis P. Simpson Dissertation Award at Louisiana State University. She also co-authored the "Villanelle" entry in the forthcoming revised edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and wrote the preface to the Pocket Books anthology Villanelles, edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali.  She is a Professor of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana and the current Louisiana Poet Laureate.

Master Class | Tim Liardet
(with Molly Peacock)

Born in London, Tim Liardet is a poet, critic and Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University. Educated at the University of York to post-graduate level, he has written eight collections of poetry. His third collection Competing with the Piano Tuner was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998 and his fourth—To the God of Rain— was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2002. He has reviewed poetry for such journals as The Independent, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, Poetry Review and PN Review and ha s recently been the Poet-in-Residence at The Guardian. The Blood Choir, his fifth collection, won an Arts Council England Writer's Award as a collection-in-progress in 2003, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006 and shortlisted for the 2006 TS Eliot Prize.

Dramatic Monologue | David Mason

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David Mason's books of poems include The Buried Houses, The Country I Remember, and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow (2007) was named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also  featured on the PBS News Hour. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, his memoir, News from the Village, appeared in 2010. A new collection of essays, Two Minds of a Western Poet, appeared in 2011. He serves as Poet Laureate of Colorado.

Master Class | Molly Peacock
(with Tim Liardet)

Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush (2008). She is a member of the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her one-woman show in poems, "The Shimmering Verge," has toured in the United States and Canada. Former President of the Poetry Society of America, she is co-creator of Poetry in Motion on the nation's subways and buses.

Master Class | A.E. Stallings

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A.E. Stallings has published two volumes of poetry, Archaic Smile, which received the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award, and Hapax, which received the 2008 Poets' Prize. She has also received the 2008 Benjamin H. Danks award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry series and is widely anthologized. She translated Lucretius, The Nature of Things, for the Penguin Classics series. She is a recent winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a USA Fellowship. Stallings has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999.

Stichs and Stanzas | Timothy Steele

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Timothy Steele's most recent poetry collection is Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). He is the author of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and The Revolt Against Meter and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles where he teaches at California State University.

Experimental Forms| Terri Witek

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Terri Witek is the author of Exit Island, The Shipwreck Dress, Carnal World, Fools and Crows, Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Prize), and a book about Robert Lowell's revisions for Life Studies. Her collaborations with Brazilian new media arts Cyriaco Lpes have been show in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and include on-site installations, gallery shows, and video. She holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University.

The Lyric | David Yezzi

David Yezzi's latest book of poems is Azores, a Slate magazine best book of the year. Two operas for which he has written libretti will be performed this fall—David Conte's Firebird Motel in Delaware and, as a workshop, Cyril Deaconoff's The Last Tycoon in Palo Alto, California. A visiting professor in the low-residency MFA program at Western State College of Colorado, he is editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and executive editor of The New Criterion.

Prosody Workshops

Practical Prosody: Understanding the Principles of Rhythm | Tom Cable

Tom Cable is the author of books and essays on English prosody from Caedmon to the present, including The Meter and Melody of Beowulf and The English Alliterative Tradition, and co-author of A History of the English Language.  He has been Director of the Creative Writing program in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and for many years has taught a seminar in prosody to poets at the Michener Center for Writers.

Stichs and Stanzas | Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele's most recent poetry collection is Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). He is the author of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and The Revolt Against Meter and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles where he teaches at California State University.

One Day Workshops

Publishing | Jill Bialosky

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2011 she published her memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life to great critical acclaim. Her collections of poems are Intruder (2008); Subterranean (2001); and The End of Desire (1997). Bialosky is also the author of the novel House Under Snow (2002) and The Life Room (2007), and co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998). Bialosky has received a number of awards including the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review among other publications.

Bialosky studied for her undergraduate degree at Ohio University and received a Master of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently Executive Editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City.

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The Metrical Compass | Annie Finch

Annie Finch is author of six volumes of poetry including Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press).  Her books of poetics include The Body of Poetry, The Ghost of Meter, and the textbooks A Poet's Ear and A Poet's Craft, as well as several influential anthologies emphasizing poetic form.  She is Director of the Stonecoast MFA program in Creative Writing.  Poems, essays, and the free downloadable study guide to her book Calendars may be found at anniefinch.com.

Performance | David Yezzi

David Yezzi's latest book of poems is Azores, a Slate magazine best book of the year. Two operas for which he has written libretti will be performed this fall—David Conte's Firebird Motel in Delaware and, as a workshop, Cyril Deaconoff's The Last Tycoon in Palo Alto, California. A visiting professor in the low-residency MFA program at Western State College of Colorado, he is editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and executive editor of The New Criterion.

Poetry Consultants

Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess is the author of Leadbelly, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He has also won the Whiting Award, a Lannan Foundation Residency Award, a Fine Arts Work Center Winter Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and he is an alumnus of Cave Canem and New York University. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Joshua Mehigan
Joshua Mehigan's first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Hollis Summers Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry, and in Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. His poems have also been featured on Poetry Daily and Writer's Almanac and awarded Dogwood and Pushcart prizes. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is a teaching fellow at Brooklyn College.

Jennifer Reeser
Jennifer Reeser studied English in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and at McNeese State University in southern Louisiana. She has published two poetry collections, An Alabaster Flask, recipient of the Word Press First Book Prize, and Winterproof, and is the author of the Shakespearean series Sonnets from the Dark Lady. She is a regular contributor to The National Review. Her translations of the French poet Charles Baudelaire appear in multiple journals and anthologies. She resides in the bayous of Louisiana.

Catherine Tufariello
Catherine Tufariello's first book of poems, Keeping My Name, won the 2006 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  Her poems have appeared in The Dark Horse, Poetry, Mezzo Cammin, Able Muse, Western Wind, The Seagull Reader, and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and they have been featured or are forthcoming in The Writer's Almanac, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry.  She directs a program supporting humanities-based reflective reading and discussion for healthcare professionals at the Project on Civic Reflection at Valparaiso University, where she enjoys seeing poetry at work in the world outside the classroom.