The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Malik Toms was born and raised in Harlem, New York, and is a 20+ year veteran of the pen and keyboard. He did his undergraduate work in Sociology at Iowa State University, working as a drug rehabilitation counselor before returning to college to pursue a graduate degree in Creative Writing. He published his first short story at the age 18 after two years of "No thanks." Since then he has worked as a freelance author, which is a bit like being a freelance mercenary minus all the bullets and moral ambiguity. His work has appeared in over thirty publications including multiple anthologies and a stand-alone novella. A graduate of Iowa State’s Creative Writing MFA program, Toms polished his writing skills crafting cyberpunk and steampunk fantasies on the way to multiple Origin and Ennie award nominations including six Ennie wins. Toms also was part of the Shadowrun Returns video game team which won Diehard gameFan’s PC Game of the year in 2013. He is presently hard at work writing his first fantasy thriller. Toms currently lives in Arizona where he is regularly super-smashed by at least one of his three video game obsessed boys. When he isn’t writing, he’s teaching writing and sociology at community colleges throughout the Arizona desert, and maybe watching a lot of TV.

Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning novelist, game designer, computer game designer, graphic novelist, screenwriter and podcaster. He's had over fifty novels published, including the New York Times Bestselling I, Jedi and Rogue Squadron.

Justin Petropoulos is the author of two collections of poetry, Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press 2011), selected by Anne Waldman for the 2010 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and <legend> </legend> (Jaded Ibis Press 2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist, Carla Gannis. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Columbia Poetry Review, Mandorla, among others, and have been included in the anthologies Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet (Jaded Ibis Press 2015) and The &NOW Awards 3 (Lake Forest College Press 2015). He is currently the program manager for Arizona State University’s Creative Writing Program.

Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water's Edge. He is Diné from the Navajo Nation. A graduate of the Low-Rez IAIA MFA program, he currently resides in the Navajo Nation and works at Diné College. He is one of the winners of the 2018 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His debut poetry collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, was selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner for the 2018 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Milkweed in September 2019.

Mary Sojourner's latest short story collection, The Talker, was published by Torrey House Press 2017. She's published three novels: Sisters of the Dream, Going Through Ghosts and 29; the short story collection, Delicate, essay collection, Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest, Bonelight: rituals of loss and desire; two memoirs, She Bets Her Life and Solace. She was chosen as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in 2007 by the Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She teaches at writing conferences throughout the Southwest, including the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference; and has taken part in residencies throughout America. Find more about Sojourner at http://www.breakthroughwriting.net.

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of both rinky dink press and The Revolution (Relaunch), a creative revisioning of the weekly women’s rights newspaper founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1868. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies (2014), The Philosophy of Unclean Things (2017), and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. She’s the recipient of a 2017 Arts Hero Award, the Carrie McCray Award in Nonfiction (2017), a fellowship from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, five Pushcart nominations, and a Whiting Fellowship nomination (2019). Her poem, “Atypical” was named a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets Whitman Bicentennial Poetry Contest.