The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Beth Staples is an assistant professor of English and editor of the literary magazine Shenandoah at Washington & Lee University. She has worked as an editor and publishing professional in a variety of jobs: as the assistant director of The Publishing Laboratory at UNC Wilmington, as editor of Lookout Books, as senior editor of Ecotone, and as the managing editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. (In her early professional life, she also dipped her toe into medical publishing at Elsevier and the print-on-demand publishing world at Xlibris.) In addition to teaching creative writing classes at W&L, she has taught classes in fiction writing, editing, and publishing at UNCW, Mesa Community College, and Arizona State University, where she earned her MFA in fiction writing.

Todd Mitchell is the author of several award-winning books for young readers and teens including The Last Panther (2018 Colorado Book Award Winner and Green Earth Honor Book Award winner), The Traitor King, The Secret to Lying (Colorado Book Award Winner), and Backwards (CAL Award Winner). He created the graphic series Broken Saviors (available on Comixology), and co-wrote the graphic novel A Flight of Angels (Vertigo, a YALSA "Top 10 Great Graphic Novels for Teens"). Currently, he serves as Director of the Beginning Creative Writing Teaching Program at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife, dog, and two wise daughters. You can visit him (and learn about his squirrel obsession) at www.ToddMitchellBooks.com.

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is the author most recently of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship (poetry, 2016) and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (biography, 2018), and Great American Desert (stories, 2019). She's won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the O. Henry award for the short story, the Bobst prize for the novel, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall. She's taught at Williams, Columbia School of the Arts, William and Mary, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, New School, Davidson, the Universities of Tampa, Miami and Hawaii, as well as in Tbilisi, Nairobi and St. Petersburg for the Summer Literary Seminars.