Faculty in Creative Nonfiction

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Joan Connor is a full professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. She has published hundreds of stories and essays in an array of journals. Her first two collections of short stories, Here on Old Route 7, and We Who Live Apart, were published by the University of Missouri Press. Her third collection of short stories, History Lessons, (University of Massachusetts Press) won the AWP award for short fiction. Her collection of essays, The World Before Mirrors, (University of Nebraska Press) won the River Teeth award. She is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council fellowship, the John Gilgun award, the Ohio Writer award in fiction and nonfiction, a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Colony.

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Richard Hoffman's memoir Half the House was awarded the Boston Athenaeum Readers' Prize in 1996 and was recently reissued by New Rivers Press. He is author of two collections of poems, Without Paradise (2002), and Gold Star Road (2007), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize.  Hoffman’s prose and verse have appeared in journals including Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Louisville Review, River Teeth, Shenandoah, Marlboro Review, and Poetry, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has twice been a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow in fiction and in 2004 was awarded the Charles Angoff Prize from The Literary Review for his essay Pictures of Boyhood. He is currently Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

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Barbara Hurd is the author of three books of creative nonfiction: Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming 2008), Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark (Houghton Mifflin Company), Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Beacon). She has also published a collection of poetry, The Singer’s Temple (Bright Hill Press).  Barbara’s essays and poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Best American Essays 2001, Best American Essays 1999, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Audubon, and others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, four Maryland Individual Artist Awards for Poetry, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, and finalist for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and the PEN/Jerard Award.  She teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Maryland.

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Debra Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment.  Her books include two poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a road musician in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Debra continues to perform with her jazz-poetry, rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, with whom she released two CDs:  Orange Parade and A Regular Dervish.  Her latest book, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, A Memoir, was published by Counterpoint Books in 2006 and was awarded the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She is currently at work on a novel set in Greece, titled The Olive Harvest.  more about Debra

Suzanne Strempek Shea is the author of five novels: Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, and Becoming Finola, published by Washington Square Press.  She has also written two memoirs, Songs From a Lead-lined Room: Notes - High and Low - From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and Radiation, and Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures From a Year in a Bookstore, published by Beacon Press. Her third memoir, Sundays in America, for which she spent a year attending services at Protestant churches nationwide, will be published by Beacon in March of 2008.  Winner of the 2000 New England Book Award, which recognizes a literary body of works’ contribution to the region, Suzanne began writing while working as reporter for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Newspapers and the Providence Journal (Rhode Island). Her freelance work has appeared in Yankee magazine, The Bark Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Organic Style, and ESPN the Magazine.

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Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry: The White Words (Houghton Mifflin), Good Trembling (Houghton Mifflin), Atoms, Soul Music and Other Poems (Paris Review Editions),When (Sarabande Books), Mulroney and Others (Sarabande Books), Subject Matter (Sarabande Books), and Carthage (The Illuminated Sea Press). He is also the co-author of two books about teaching poetry: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (Heinemann). Baron’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Paris Review, The New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Baron is director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and the Frost Place Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Maine.

more about Baron

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