Alumni Highlights and News
Alumni Highlights
Johnson has worked as a newspaper reporter, a janitor, and a whole-animal butcher, among other jobs. He has been awarded a Jentel Writing Residency, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Currently, he lives with his wife, Irina, and their dog, Hugo, in Valle Crucis, NC, where he teaches at Appalachian State University while working on his next novel.
Adrian Shirk (2014) is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint Press, 2017), a hybrid-memoir exploring American women prophets and spiritual celebrities. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She’s a columnist at Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, among others. Currently, she teaches in Pratt Institute’s BFA Creative Writing Program, and lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband, Sweeney, and Quentin the cat.
Callan Wink (2012) was born in Michigan in 1984. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. He is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories.
Ginger Ko (2014) is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and the chapbooks Comorbid (Lark Books) and Biography of My Automaton (Bloof Books). Ginger is a PhD student at the University of Georgia's creative writing program, where she teaches writing and Women's Studies. She is a contributing editor for The Wanderer and an editor at smoking glue gun.
Lori Howe (2010) is the author of Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains (Satrugi Press, 2015), Voices at Twilight: A Poet's Guide to Wyoming Ghost Towns (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and Stories from Earth: Millennials, Literature, and Teaching Writing that Matters. Her poems, short fiction, and non-fiction appear in numerous journals, anthologies, and books such as The Meadow, Pilgrimage, Northern Lights, Red Hook, Open Window Review, Frontiers Magazine, and the Owen Wister Review. Author Lori Howe holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and Spanish, as well as an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Wyoming. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Literacy Studies at the University of Wyoming, where she teaches in the College of Education, serves on the leadership team of the Wyoming Writing Project, and teaches creative writing/literacy workshops with underserved writers around the state. Her research on creative writing workshop pedagogy appears in journals such as the Journal of Lifelong Learning and Qualitative Inquiry. She is the editor in chief of Clerestory: Poems of the Mountain West (clerestorypoets.org), and has appeared as a guest poet on Wyoming Public Radio. Her current writing project is the novel, Heaven of Olives, set in Wyoming, New York City, and Andalusia, Spain.
Randy Koch’s (2009) interests are creative writing, particularly poetry and nonfiction, and composition theory and pedagogy. His poems and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, most recently J Journal, Measure, The Caribbean Writer, Open Window, and Making Connections: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cultural Diversity. His books include the composition text Serving Sentences (Kendall Hunt, 2014) and two collections of poems: This Splintered Horse (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Composing Ourselves (Fithian Press, 2002). From 2002-2014, he wrote a monthly column about writing, writers, and the writer’s life called “Serving Sentences” for LareDOS: A Journal of the Borderlands, and his academic essays focusing on composition curriculum and pedagogy have appeared in I>The NWP Quarterly and College Composition and Communication.
Alumni News
2020
Kali Fajardo-Anstine has won an American Book Award, and a Reading the West Award. Since releasing Sabrina & Corina in spring 2019, she has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, The Story Prize, and The Saroyan International Prize. She is the 2019 recipient of the Denver Mayor’s Award for Global Impact in the Arts. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O, the Oprah Magazine, The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Tin House, and Hedgebrook. Her work has been translated into multiple languages.
2019
Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird: Essays and two prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. She is a 2019 Oregon Literary fellow in nonfiction and former Olive B O’Connor fellow. Her essays have been collected in Best American Science and Nature Writing, Waveform: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women, How We Speak to One Another: an Essay Daily Reader, and others.
Caleb Johnson’s novel Treeborne received an honorable mention for the Southern Book Prize, and was longlisted for The Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Johnson’s writing can be found in The Bitter Southerner, The Carolina Quarterly, The Paris Review Daily, Southern Living, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Jentel Writing Residency. Currently, Johnson teaches writing at Appalachian State University.
2018
Maria Anderson's (2015) story, "Cougar," was chosen for the 2018 Best American Short Stories by Roxanne Gay. It was originally published in the Iowa Review. Also this year her story, "Chiroptera," was accepted by the Mississippi Review. Work on both stories began in workshops in the UW MFA program.
Kevin Kelley has an essay published by Entropy: https://entropymag.org/rosemary-sage-and-fear/.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine will have April 2019 publication of her collection, Sabrina & Corina. She has received summer fellowship to the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Women’s History Fall Fellowship at the Byers-Evans House Museum.
Nat Wisehart's essay "Vestiges" has been accepted for publication by december.
Meaghan Elliot Dittrich has accepted the position as Director of the Connors Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire.
Caleb Johnson’s first novel, Treeborne, will be published by Picador in summer, 2018.
Maria Anderson’s story, “Couger,” will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2018.
