Meet the 2025 Conference Faculty

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Jan Beatty is the author of Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) and The Body Wars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), among other titles. Her awards and honors include the Paterson Prize and the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir American Bastard (Red Hen Press, 2021). She is a professor emerita at Carlow University, where she directed the university's creative writing program. She lives in Pittsburgh.

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Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University (ASU).

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Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate is of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Ancient Light: Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2024); Copper Yearning (Holy Cow! Press, 2019), winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers; and Trailing You (Greenfield Review Press, 1994), winner of the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. In 2020, Blaeser founded the literary organization In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets.

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Karen Brennan is the author of nine books, which include poetry, fiction and nonfiction. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and an AWP Award, she is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Her stories, poems and essays have been widely published and have appeared in anthologies from Norton, Graywolf, Penguin, Michigan, Georgia, among others, as well as Best Small Fictions 2017 and Women’s Xxperimental Fiction. Since 1991, she has served as core faculty for The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her most recent books are Television, a memoir (Four Way, 2022) and Rabbit in the Moon: The Mexico Stories (Schaffner Press, 2024).

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KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. Their writing is featured in Poets.org, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Poetry Society of America, Oxford American, and elsewhere. KB’s poetry chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their poetry collection Freedom House, described as “urgent and timely” by Vogue, won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry.

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Sarah Browning is the author of two collections of poems, Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, and many other journals and anthologies. She is co-founder and was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness for 10 years. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. She lives in Philadelphia, PA where she hosts the reading series Wild Indigo.

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Elena Karina Byrne is a screenwriter, essayist, reviewer, multi-media artist, editor, and author of five collections of poetry. Elena works as a freelance lecturer and national arts programs curator. Elena is The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Programming Consultant & Poetry Stage Manager and Literary Programs Director for the historic The Ruskin Art Club. She is currently writing a screenplay while completing her collection of hybrid essays entitled Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, & Desire.

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Carmen Calatayud (she/her) is the author of two poetry collections, This Tangled Body (FlowerSong Press/Letras Latinas, 2024) and In the Company of Spirits (Press 53, 2012), which was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Banyan Review, Cutthroat, Poet Lore, POETRY Magazine, Rogue Agent, Tahoma Literary Journal, and Verse Daily. She is a Larry Neal Award Winner and a Best of La Bloga winner. She is a Virginia Center for the Arts fellow and a fellow of Macondo Writers Workshop.

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Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2022, she was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Jonathan Danielson is an educator and writer. His debut collection, The Lowest Basin: Arizona Stories, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press in 2025. He is a Writer-at-Large for The Feathertale Review, and his stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, HAD, Juked, Superstition Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. He is a Tin House alumnus, and a member of the Western Writers of America. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Arizona State University (where he taught composition, creative writing, and literature for ten years) and an MFA from the University of San Francisco. His scholarly work focuses on Creative Writing, the Western, and Arizona Literary Regionalism.  

J. Bruce Fuller is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently teaches at Sam Houston State University, where he is Director of Texas Review Press.

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Cynthia Hogue is the author of ten poetry collections, including instead, it is dark (2023); Contain (2022); In June the Labyrinth (2017); and Revenance (2014). Revenance was listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets. Her translations (both with Sylvain Gallais) include Nicole Brossard’s Lointaines and Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy, which won the Landon Translation Award in 2013. Her honors include two NEA Fellowships, a MacDowell Colony residency, a Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship, and the H.D. Fellowship at Yale University. Before assuming the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Poetry in 2003 at Arizona State University (ASU) where is an emerita professor, she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. 

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Jodie Hollander was raised in a family of classical musicians. She studied poetry in England, and her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse, The New Criterion, The Rialto, and Verse Daily. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa, a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in Italy, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and attended MacDowell in 2015.  Her debut full-length collection, My Dark Horses, was published with Liverpool University Press (Pavilion Poetry) in 2017. Her second collection, Nocturne, was published with Liverpool & Oxford University Press in the spring of 2023 and was longlisted for the Laurel Prize in nature writing.

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Jenny Irish's fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing appear widely in journals including Blackbird, Conduit, Hobart, The Colorado Review, and Ploughshares. She facilitates a free community workshop every summer. She is the author of the collections Common Ancestor, I Am Faithful, Tooth Box, and Lupine. Her latest work Hatch is a hybrid feminist collection of speculative prose poems that trace the consciousness of a mechanical womb. She is an assistant professor in the MFA program at ASU. Jenny Molberg writes “Jenny Irish has an unflinching eye…wielding a mirror against cruel and patriarchal abuses of power.”

Tara Ison is the author of three novels: The List, A Child out of Alcatraz (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Rockaway, featured as one of the "Best Books of Summer" in O, The Oprah Magazine. Her most recent novel, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, a novel of life in WWII collaborationist France (Ig Publishing) has been selected a New York Times Editor’s Choice.  Robert Olen Butler calls At the Hour Between Dog & Wolf “a thrilling novel, not just as a splendid read but as a deeply resonant work of art.”

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Oscar Mancinas is a Rarámuri-Chicano poet, fiction writer, teacher, and scholar from Mesa, Arizona's Washington-Escobedo neighborhood. His published works include TO LIVE AND DIE IN EL VALLE (Arte Público Press, 2020) and DES___: PAPELES, PALABRAS, & POEMS FROM THE DESERT (Tolsun Books, 2022). Contact him and find more of his work at: https://oscarmancinas.wordpress.com/

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Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press) won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, Diagram, and elsewhere. She is currently the Senior Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. Publisher’s Weekly writes: “Nguyen's poetry reveals a remarkable embrace of complexity while accounting for the difficulties of complicity, witness, and forgiveness.”

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Erica Soon Olsen was born in Hollywood, California, in 1966. She is the author of Recapture & Other Stories (Torrey House Press, 2012), a collection of short fiction about the once and future West. Her story “Grand Canyon II,” won the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose from Gulf Coast magazine. Shei is also the author of Girlmine, a micro-chapbook of flash fiction. Her short stories and other literary magazines and in the anthologies Dirt: A Love Story (University Press of New England) and California Prose Directory (Outpost 19). She is currently working on a nonfiction manuscript about the sense of home and about the dwellings of her Korean, Norwegian, and Swedish forebears.

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Justin Petropoulos is the author of two collections of poetry, Eminent Domain (2011), selected by Anne Waldman for the 2010 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and <Legend> </Legend> (2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist, Carla Gannis. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Gulf Coast, Mandorla, and Portland Review. He is currently the Program Manager for the Creative Writing Program at ASU. Campell McGrath calls Petropoulos’s work, “. Rigorous, smart and seductive….when he says, ‘close your eyes and I’ll let you in,’ he really means it.”

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Gionni Ponce is a Macondista prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona where is program manager of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. She was a 2021 Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing NEA Big Read Grant Partner and a 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference Fellow. Her work is published in Kenyon Review Online, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, and The Workshop. She is currently working on a short story collection centered on bilingualism and multi-generational conflict in Mexican American families.

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Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was shortlisted for the National Book Award.  He was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio. His forthcoming book Las Horas Imposibles won the 2024 Ambroggio Prize and is forthcoming from University of Arizona Press.  His poetry, fiction, and translations have appeared in journals such as The Southampton Review, Salamander Review, Rhino, The Texas Observer, and Alaska Quarterly Review.  Octavio is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera and founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing in the MA and MFA Program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

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Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo and was a participant of the Callaloo Writers Workshop. Gabriel has performed on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre, and other venues. Gabriel has been featured in Huffington Post, VIBE Magazine, Blavity, Upworthy, The Flama, and Remezcla, and his work has appeared in publications like The Volta, Split This Rock, Winter Tangerine, VINYL, and in Bettering American Poetry Anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the author of a chapbook If Pit Bulls Had a God, It’d be a Pit Bull (The Head and Hand Press) and a children’s book We’re Community.

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Cecilia Savala is a Shrek-obsessed Latinx poet, teacher, and mom who writes about fatphobia, body image, and gender 1200 miles from home. She is a morning person, a cat person, and is the Piper Center Fellow in Residence where she directs Thousand Languages Project. She has been anthologized in Curating Home and Lift Every Voice: An Anthology of Poetry, and her work can be found in Red Ogre Review, the Boiler, and Poetry South, among others. 

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ire’ne lara silva (she/they) is the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections the eaters of flowers (Saddle Road Press, 2024), FirstPoems: ani’mal, INDíGENA, and furia (FlowerSong Press, 2021), Cuicacalli//House of Song (Saddle Road Press, 2019), Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), and furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010). They are also the author of the chapbooks Hibiscus Tacos (Alabrava Press, 2021) and Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), and the short story collection flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), winner of the Premio Aztlán. She is currently a writer-at-large for Texas Highways magazine.

Laura Strachan is the founder and principal agent of the Strachan Literary Agency, established in 1998 and based out of Annapolis, MD. The agency allows Laura to combine her lifelong love of reading and books with her career as a lawyer. She focuses on representing literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. She was recently cited by Poets & Writers Magazine as “one of 21 agents you should know.”

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Natalia Treviño is the author of the chapbook VirginX (Finishing Line Press) and the poetry collection Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press). Treviño is the recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Menada Literary Award from Macedonia, and the San Antonio Artist Foundation Literary Prize. She is also the winner, with Octavio Quintanilla, of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize for co-translating his book Las Horas Imposibles | The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press, 2025). Her first novel is forthcoming from Arte Publico Press. Treviño is a professor of English at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas.

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Brian Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently: The Wild Delight of Wild Things (2023), The Goodbye World Poem (2023), and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (2023), all with Alice James Books. His other works include Here Bullet and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.

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Joni Wallace’s fourth poetry collection is Landscape with Missing River (Barrow Street Press) winner of the 2024 Willa Prize.  Her other honors include Four Way Books’ Levis Prize for her second collection, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, and Fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Baltic Writing Residency. Work from her documentary poetry collection, Kingdom Come Radio Show, is anthologized in Privacy Policy, The Poetry of Surveillance, and has been featured by the Scottish Poetry Library and the Poetry Society of America.

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Amanda Eyre Ward is The New York Times bestselling author of Sleep Toward Heaven, How to Be Lost, Love Stories in This Town, Forgive Me, Close Your Eyes, The Same Sky, The Nearness of You, The Jetsetters, The Lifeguards and Lovers and Liars. Her bestselling novels have been featured in People Magazine, The New York Times, and more. Amanda publishes nonfiction in Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and more, and publishes original work on Audible.com. Amanda’s work has been optioned for film and television and translated into fifteen languages. She lives in Austin, TX.

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Joshua Wheeler is from Alamogordo, New Mexico. He's the author of Acid West: Essays (FSG Originals). Acid West was a finalist for the Western Writers Spur Award and the New Mexico Book Award. Los Angeles Review of Books describes Acid West as “fluorescent…

brilliant…worth reading more than once” Joshua’s essays and features have appeared in The Iowa Review, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Harper's, BuzzFeed, The New York Times and others. His first novel, The High Heaven, is newly released from Graywolf Press.