2013 Faculty

19th Annual WCU Poetry Conference June 5-8, 2013

Craft Workshops | Prosody Workshops

One-Day Workshops | Poetry Consultants

Saturday Workshops for Teachers

Click on the workshop title for a description.

Craft 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 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 | 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).

Deep Form | Annie Finch

Annie Finch is the 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.

Teaching the Undergraduate Forms of Poetry Class--Strategies and Connections | Allison Joseph

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she co-directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University.  She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review. Her books include What Keeps Us Here (winner of the Ampersand Press Women Poets Series Prize and the John C. Zacharis Prize), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon), In Every Seam (Pittsburgh), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon), Worldly Pleasures (winner of the Word Press Poetry Prize) and Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press).  Her most recent poetry collection, My Father's Kites, was published in 2010 by Steel Toe Books. She received the 2012 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Sonnet | Julie Kane

Julie Kane won first prize in the 2007 Open Poetry international sonnet competition, and her all-sonnet collection Jazz Funeral won the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her previous book, Rhythm & Booze (2003), was a National Poetry Series winner and finalist for the Poets' Prize. She is the 2011-2013 Louisiana Poet Laureate, a Professor at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, and a former Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing/American Studies (Poetry).

Book Reviewing | William Logan

It is not necessary to submit six poems for this workshop. Please review the workshop description for submission instructions.

William Logan is the author of ten volumes of poetry: Sad-faced Men (1982), Difficulty (1985), Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988), Vain Empires (1998), Night Battle (1999), Macbeth in Venice (2003), The Whispering Gallery (2005), Strange Flesh (2008), Deception Island: Selected Earlier Poems (2011), and Madame X (2012).  He has published five books of essays and reviews: All the Rage (1998), Reputations of the Tongue (1999),  Desperate Measures (2002), The Undiscovered Country (2005), and Our Savage Art (2009).  Among the books he has edited are an expanded edition of Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age (2001); Donald Justice’s Collected Poems (2004), nominated for the National Book Award; and an edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s Guy Vernon (2012). 

Logan has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism, which was awarded to The Undiscovered Country.  Among his other honors are the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 1988 Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, and the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism.  He teaches at the University of Florida, where he is Alumni/ae Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching-Scholar.

Narrative | David Mason

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, and was featured on the PBS News Hour. He is also the co-editor of several anthologies and textbooks. Author of two collections of essays, a memoir and several opera libretti, he serves as Poet Laureate of Colorado.

Stanzas: Rooms and Corridors | 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.

Poetic Genres | 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.

Experimental Forms| Terri Witek

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 Contest) and  Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self . Her collaborations with Brazilian new media artist Cyriaco Lopes have been featured in galleries or site-specific projects in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere. A professor of English at Stetson University, her summer faculty positions have included the Prague Summer Literary Program and the DisQuiet program in Lisbon. Visit her website for more information http://terriwitek.com/

The Lyric | David Yezzi

David Yezzi's latest books of poems are Birds of the Air (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 2013) and Azores (Swallow Press, 2008), a Slate magazine best book of the year.  A visiting professor in the low-residency MFA program at Western State Colorado University, 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.

One-Day Workshops

A Metaphysical Poetry Studio and Seminar: George Herbert and John Donne and the New 21^st-Century Metaphysical Poem | Molly Peacock

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.

Performance Part 1 and Performance Part 2 | David Yezzi

David Yezzi's latest books of poems are Birds of the Air (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 2013) and Azores (Swallow Press, 2008), a Slate magazine best book of the year.  A visiting professor in the low-residency MFA program at Western State Colorado University, he is editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and executive editor of The New Criterion.

Poetry Consultants

Joshua Mehigan
Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP, 2004), was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and other periodicals. They have also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in numerous anthologies. Mehigan was awarded Poetry magazine’s 2011 Editor’s Prize for Feature Article, and was the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Leslie Monsour
A native of Los Angeles, California, and raised in Mexico City, Leslie Monsour is the author of The Alarming Beauty of the Sky (Red Hen Press 2005) and The House Sitter (winner of the 2010 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition), as well as the recipient of a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Dark Horse, Measure, The Able Muse Review, The Contemporary Poetry Review, Iambs and Trochees, The Raintown Review, and (forthcoming) The American Arts Quarterly, as well as the anthologies, California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present, Poetry Daily Essentials, Rhyming Poems, and The Able Muse Anthology.  Monsour has been an instructor at UCLA Extension, served as a mentor for PEN Center U.S.A.’s Emerging Voices Program, and lectured at colleges and universities in Southern California on the properties of verse and the ingredients of successful poetry.

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.

Saturday Workshops for Teachers

Michael Cirelli

Michael Cirelli's newest collection, Everyone Loves the Situation (2011), deconstructs MTV's hit reality show, Jersey Shore. He is the author of Vacations on the Black Star Line (2010) and Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard (2008), a NY Times bestseller from an independent press. He is the Executive Director of Urban World NYC, and has authored two poetry curricula, Poetry Jam (2010) and Hip-Hop Poetry & the Classics (2004). He teaches at New York University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bank Street College of Education. He was recently featured on CNN.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic and has lived in the United States since 1939. She writes poetry and prose both in English and her native Spanish. She has published eleven collections of her work, most recently El olor de la memoria / The Scent of Memory (2007), a bilingual collection of poems and essays, and a poetry collection, Her Place in These Designs (2008). She has received numerous awards including the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation.

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.