UNO MFA Faculty

Below are current UNO MFA faculty and a sampling of guest faculty. Past faculty and guests include John Gery, Rodger Kamenetz, Ann Beattie, Philip Levine, Miroslav Mandic, Ann Marie Macari, Cynthia Hogue, Kay Murphy, Mary Morris, Stuart Dybek, Moira Crone, Alison Deming, Donald Hall, Patricia Hampl, Ivan Klíma, Arnost Lustig, and dozens of other writers and scholars of national and international renown.



Fredrick Barton is an award-winning fiction writer and critic. He holds a B.A. from Valparaiso University and did graduate work under a Danforth Fellowship, taking degrees from UCLA and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Mr. Barton is author of the novels, The El Cholo Feeling Passes, Courting Pandemonium, With Extreme Prejudice, and A House Divided, which was awarded the William Faulkner Prize in fiction. In addition to his acclaim as a fiction writer, Mr. Barton has achieved success in other media as well with his jazz opera Ash Wednesday with composer Jay Weigel, and his short film, Early Warning. His film commentary appears weekly on WYES-TV, New Orleans.

Amanda Boyden’s work has been published in journals such as Mid-American Review, Sonora Review, and Gallery magazine. Amanda’s novel, The Art of Hanging, draws on her circus arts experience. In another life, she trained at the Main Space School of Circus Arts in Toronto, Canada, with whose troupe she toured as a solo trapeze artist and contortionist. She has performed with Circus Von Amberg and in many other venues.

Joseph Boyden is a Canadian citizen currently living in New Orleans. He is the author of Born With A Tooth, shortlisted for the Upper Canada Award in 2001, and to be released in France by Albin-Michel next year. He has published stories in Cimarron Review, Black Warrior Review, Panhandler, Blue Penny Quarterly, and Potpourri, among others. He was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant to work on his current book, a novel concerning the Great War. He is also at work on the biography of a remote Cree Indian family in Ontario's Far North. He teaches writing and literature at University of New Orleans.

Ales Debeljak is a poet, essayist and translator. One of the leading Central European poets, he has published eight books of essays and five books of poems in his native Slovenian, including the much-lauded collection Minute strahu, which later appeared in English translation as Anxious Moments (White Pine Press,1994). His book of personal and analytical meditation, Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia appeared in translation in more than twelve languages. His recent publications in the United States include a scholarly book, Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) and a comprehensive anthology, The Imagination of Terra Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine Press, 1997) which he edited. His books have appeared in Japanese, German, Croatian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Italian translation.

Among the books of Rachel Blau DuPlessis are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001), part of her long poem project, and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge, 2001). She is also the author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990), a book of experimental essays. Her work is anthologized in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998). She recently received Temple University’s Creative Achievement award (1999) and the Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize (2002). In 2002 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship for Artists.

John Hazlet, Academic Director of the Madrid Summer Seminars, has spent some of the most rewarding years of his life living and traveling in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. He was a Fulbright Junior Fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid from 1985 to 1987 and a Visiting Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca in 1991-92. In 1997-98, he was Visiting Professor at the Instituto TecnolÛgico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in CÛrdoba, Mexico. He is currently Professor of American Literature at the University of New Orleans, with publications in the fields of non-fiction prose and autobiography. He is currently working on a book treating nineteenth-century Mexican travel narratives set in the United States.

Bill Lavender is the coordinator of the low residency MFA program at the University of New Orleans and UNO’s study-abroad programs in writing, including the Madrid Summer Seminars, the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in the Brunnenburg, Italy, and the writing workshops in Montpellier, France. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, both electronic and print, including Exquisite Corpse, Fell Swoop, New Orleans Review, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today, and many others. His most recent book of poems, look the universe is dreaming, was published by Potes and Poets in 2002. A new book, While Sleeping, is forthcoming from Chax Press.

Kay Murphy teaches poetry in the UNO Creative Writing Workshop, and is the author of two books, The Autopsy (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1985) and Belief Blues (Portals Press, 1999). In his introduction to Belief Blues, poet W.D. Snodgrass writes, "Maybe you don't really want to read these poems. Are you sure you want to know about the lives of those at the low end of the scale -- those that World War Two gave the free time to grow dissatisfied and hate-filled, left without a real body of beliefs to enfold them in a stable, protected society?" Murphy's latest project is a book of formal poems. Her poetry has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Spoon River Poetry Quarterly, College English, New Orleans Review, and has been anthologized in From a Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets. Murphy is also a poetry critic; her work appears regularly in Chelsea and other literary journals.

John Gery is a poet and a critic of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as collaborative translator of poetry. He has taught at the University of Iowa and since 1990 he has served as the founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg, Italy. John's poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared in literary and academic journals throughout the country, as well as in Europe, including Contemporary Literature, Dark Horse, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Paris Review, Southwest Review, and Verse. For his work, he has received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991-92), an Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts (2002), two Deep South Writers Poetry Awards (1983, 1987), and a European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague (2000), among other awards. His collection of poems, The Enemies of Leisure, received a Critic's Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books.

For over 25 years, poet and literary critic Hank Lazer has published poetry in many of America’s leading literary magazines and journals. Among his many books are Doublespace (Segue, 1992), a collection of poems written in several deliberately conflicting styles, and INTER(IR)RUPTIONS (Generator Press, 1992), a series of ten collage-poems which incorporates a wide range of layouts and materials, from baseball batting averages to critical theory, from fashion and interior design columns to research in neurophysiology. His most recent book is Days, (Lavender Ink, 2001). David Ignatow called his collection, Doublespace, “a noble attempt to bridge the chasm between Language poetry and the traditional anecdotal and meditative poetry of the ‘free form’ mode.” Susan Howe claims that the book “returns to unsettle American cultural inheritance.”

Dinty W. Moore is the author of three books, including The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still American Style (Algonquin, 1997) and The Emperor's Virtual Clothes (Algonquin, 1995). He has written literary nonfiction for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Utne Reader, Crazyhorse, and Salon, and fiction for The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and The Iowa Review, among others. Moore is a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Fiction Writing, and edits the creative nonfiction journal, BREVITY.

Michael Winter comes from St. John’s Newfoundland, and is the author of two volumes of short stories, One Last Good Look and Creaking In Their Skins, which follow the youthful and observant Gabriel English as he comes of age in Newfoundland, leaves home, and establishes himself in the world. These are stories of first rites, hunting accidents, sibling rivalry, infatuation, romantic breakups, friendship, and the yearning for love and understanding.


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