TIMOTHY LIU
Associate Professor, Director of Creative Writing
M.A., University of Houston
Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.
Translated into a dozen languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
Heinz Insu Fenkl is a writer, translator, folklorist, and editor. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing and literature for the English department with courses cross-listed in Asian Studies, Philosophy, and Religion. He is known internationally for his collection of Korean folktales and his translations of contemporary Korean fiction, classical Buddhist texts, and North Korean comics. His translation of the 17th-century Koran Buddhist classic, The Nine Cloud Dream, by Kim Man-jung, was published by Penguin Classics in 2019. He is also the author of the novelMemories of My Ghost Brother (Dutton, 1996), a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. “Five Arrows,” an excerpt from his most recent novel, Skull Water (Spiegel & Grau, 2023) was first published in The New Yorker. His most recent translation is a collection of short stories and novellas by the South Korean director, Lee Chang-dong, who is best known for the film Burning.
KRISTOPHER JANSMA
Associate Professor
M.F.A, Columbia
Kristopher Jansma is the author of Our Narrow Hiding Places (Ecco), as well as the nonfiction book, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers (Quirk). His previous novels are Les Idealistes (Cherche Midi), Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (Viking/Penguin).
Kristopher is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016 has been published in The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His nonfiction, noted in The Best American Essays 2014, has been published in the New York Times, The Sun, America Magazine, The Center for Fiction, The Millions, The Rumpus, Lithub, Salon, Real Simple, The Believer, and Electric Literature.
KATHLEEN BLACKBURN
Assistant Professor
M.F.A, Ohio State University; Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago
Kathleen was born in a military hospital on Guam in 1984. She was raised in Lubbock, Texas. She is the author of the memoir Loose of Earth, out with the University of Texas Press (April 2024).
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Observer, Belt, Guernica, Gulf Coast, River Teeth, and elsewhere. For five years, she’s taught creative nonfiction workshops at the University of Chicago.
CAROL GOODMAN
Adjunct FacultyClaire Hero is the author of four books of poetry, including Sing, Mongrel and Dollyland. Her recent short fiction and poetry have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Potomoc Review, Prairie Fire, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.
KIM WOZENCRAFT
Neglect (Arcade/Simon and Schuster) is Kim Wozencraft’s latest novel. Wozencraft has authored six, including the internationally bestselling Rush, which was adapted into a film starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, the Los Angeles Times, and Texas Monthly, as well as in various literary journals and anthologies.