Department of English and Literary Arts
Department of English and Literary Arts
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Featured Placement
2023 GraduatesWendy ChenAssistant ProfessorDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Nevada, Las VegasWendy Chen is the author of Unearthings (Tavern Books). Chen is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Most Promising Young Poet Prize, and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her debut novel, Their Divine Fires, is forthcoming from Algonquin in 2024. Her translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are forthcoming from FSG in 2025.2022 GraduatesJustin WymerAssistant ProfessorDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Tennessee at ChattanoogaJustin Wymer is a writer and educator from West Virginia. He is the author of the poetry collection DEED (Elixir Press), winner of the Antivenom Poetry Award. He has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Harvard Office for the Arts, the Radcliffe Foundation, the University of Iowa, and the University of Denver. He is an assistant professor of English (poetry) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Gretchen SchrafftScience Communications SpecialistCarney Institute for Brain ScienceBrown UniversityGretchen Schrafft (she/her) is a writer and scholar whose interests include speculative and historiographic fiction, early American literature, and narrative journalism. Her work has most recently been supported by Lighthouse Works and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently leverages her journalism and academic background to tell science and medical stories for the Carney Institute for Brain Science, a neuroscience research institute at Brown University.
2021 GraduatesElijah NullFaculty MemberValor Christian High School
Elijah Null's dissertation (in process) is titled "The Wealth and Wisdom of the Past or Self-Invention and Possibility? Postwar Picaros and The Discourses of American Identity and Fundamental Anthropology (1950-1965)." His project analyzes how Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Kennedy Toole adapted the picaresque genre in order to think through what it meant to be human and, moreover, American after WWII and in the midst of the Cold War. He teaches English and Humanities at Valor Christian High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.Kelly KrumrieVisiting Writer in EnglishDepartment of Communication Arts, Languages, & LiteratureWestern Colorado University
Kelly Krumrie's creative and critical writing explores the intersections of art and literature with mathematics and science. Her work can be found in Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, DIAGRAM, La Vague, Black Warrior Review, Full Stop, The Explicator, and others. https://kellykrumrie.net/Alison Turner2022-24 American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge FellowshipOperation Shoestring, Jackson, Mississippi
Alison Turner grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where she learned to endure large amounts of time in inclement weather waiting for buses. Her research interests include community literacy, oral history, and connections among archives, literature, and history. She has been facilitating social-justice-oriented memoir writing workshops with the Herstory Writing Network since completing a Herstory/Coalition for Community Writing fellowship in 2021, and she is on the editorial collective for Coda, the creative writing section in Community Literacy Journal. Her critical work appears or is forthcoming in Western American Literature, Archivaria, Reflections, American Archivist, and Community Literacy Journal, and her first collection of short stories, Defensible Spaces, is forthcoming with Torrey House Press. As a 2022-2024 ACLS Leading Edge Fellow, she is the Research and Data Coordinator for an oral history project that records the narratives of people living in underserved and marginalized neighborhoods in Jackson, Mississippi.Olivia TracyTeaching Assistant ProfessorUniversity Writing ProgramUniversity of Denver
Olivia's research and teaching explores rhetoric and gender in technical writing, especially recipes, cookbooks, and botanical and medical texts. She advocates for access in writing centers and writing classrooms, particularly by investigating and enacting embodied and spatial practices. Her work has appeared in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal and The Journal of Haitian Studies.Ashley ColleyPostdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Literary ArtsWashington University in St. LouisAshley Colley's poems have appeared in Orion, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Southern Indiana Review, Prelude, The Spectacle, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook, In the Garden (dancing girl press 2022). The recipient of a Fulbright creative writing research grant, she has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver.
Website: ashley-colley.com
2020 GraduatesVincent JamesAssistant Professor of Creative WritingDepartment of EnglishViterbo University
Vincent James (he/him) is the author of Acacia, a Book of Wonders (Texas Review Press, 2023), the chapbook Rady, or Squirrelhunter (Ravenna Press, 2021), and the collaborative novel, Swerve (Astrophil Press, 2021). Other work has appeared in Juked, Tarpaulin Sky, Heavy Feather Review, Texas Review, Prick of the Spindle, Essay Daily, and others. While at DU, James served as the Associate Editor and Managing Editor of Denver Quarterly. Currently, he is a Contributing Editor to FivesQuarterly.com and the web designer for Ilora Press, a digital journal in partnership with the Emengini Institute for Comparative Global Studies.Brian LaidlawCo-founder and Teaching WriterBrian Laidlaw is a poet-songwriter whose releases include The Stuntman (Milkweed Editions, 2015), The Mirrormaker (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and the musical translation-adaptation album This Aster (Fonograf Editions, 2021). Brian is a co-founder of Unrestricted Interest, an organization offering poetry and songwriting mentorship for kids and adults on the Autism Spectrum, and he also teaches in the Masters' in Professional Creative Writing program at University College in Denver. Now based in Moab, Utah, Brian continues to tour nationally with his band The Family Trade, and moonlights - often literally - as a rock climber. www.brianlaidlaw.com.Mark MayerAssistant ProfessorDepartment of EnglishUniversity of MemphisMark Mayer's first book, Aerialists (Bloomsbury 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His stories have been published in American Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review, Guernica, the Iowa Review, and Best American Mystery Stories. His academic essays have been published in LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the University of Memphis MFA.Dennis SweeneyLecturerDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Massachusetts--AmherstDennis James Sweeney is the author of In the Antarctic Circle, winner of the 2020 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, as well as four chapbooks of poetry and prose. His writing has appeared in FivePoints, Ninth Letter, The New York Times, and The Southern Review, among others. A Small Press Editor of Entropy and former Fulbright Fellow in Malta, he has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.2019 GraduatesThirii M. MyintAssistant Professor of EnglishDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Massachusetts—AmherstThirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018), which won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the family history, Names for Light (Graywolf Press, 2021), which was the winner of the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Black Warrior Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. https://www.thiriimyokyawmyint.com/Diana Khoi NguyenAssistant Professor in African American PoetryDepartment of English and Writing Program MFA ProgramUniversity of PittsburghA poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA. www.dianakhoinguyen.comAditi MachadoAssistant ProfessorDepartment of English and Creative Writing MFA ProgramUniversity of CincinnatiAditi Machado is the author of two books of poetry, Emporium and Some Beheadings (both from Nightboat Books), which received, respectively, the James Laughlin Award and The Believer Poetry Award, and the translator of Farid Tali’s novel Prosopopoeia (Action Books). She has published widely in journals such as The Chicago Review, Jacket2, Lana Turner, The Rumpus, Volt, and Western Humanities Review. Her most recent chapbook is an essay titled The End (Ugly Duckling Presse).
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2018 Graduates
Mairead CaseAssistant Teaching ProfessorColorado School of MinesSince graduating from DU in 2018, Mairead published her second book, Tiny, which was also her dissertation. She taught ELA in full-inclusion classrooms in Denver Public Schools; writing in the Denver Women's Jail and at Cañon Correctional Facility; and literature, contemplative practices, poetry, fiction, and critical analysis to graduates and undergraduates at the Colorado School of Mines, Naropa University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and DU. Mairead is a mentor in PEN-America's Prison Writing Program and has been a Legal Observer for almost two decades. She is widely published in places including POETRY, JSTOR Daily, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she collaborates on a variety of editing and publishing projects including MDW Atlas and Maggot Brain magazine. Currently, Mairead is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
Serena ChopraAssistant ProfessorCreative WritingSeattle UniversitySerena Chopra is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana/Chapti (Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper's Bazaar (India) as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.comAngela BuckAssistant ProfessorCapital UniversityAngela Buck is the author of Horses Dream of Money (FC2), which was a finalist for the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. She is Assistant Professor of English at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.Christopher RosalesAssistant ProfessorChicanx & Latinx Studies - Literature and Creative WritingCalifornia State University, Long BeachChristopher David Rosales is a writer and editor from the city of Paramount, Los Angeles, CA. He is the author of three novels including Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper (2015, Mixer Publishing) which won the McNamara Creative Arts Grant, Gods On the Lam (2017, Perpetual Motion Machine), and Word is Bone (2019, Broken River Books) winner of the International Latino Book Award. His award-winning short stories have appeared in Both Sides: An Anthology of Border Noir (2020, Polis/Agora Books), among other anthologies, journals, and magazines in the U.S. and abroad.Khadijah QueenAssistant ProfessorDepartment of EnglishVirginia TechKhadijah Queen is the author of six books, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), which won the William Carlos Williams Award, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017). Essays and editorials appear in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times and widely elsewhere. Her verse play Non-Sequitur won the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech.Mona AwadAssistant ProfessorEnglish DepartmentSyracuse University
MONA AWAD is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and The New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and for a Goodreads Choice Award. Her first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her writing has appeared in New York Times Magazine, Vogue, TIME, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. Her latest novel, All’s Well, is out with Simon & Schuster in August 2021.
2017 GraduatesTeresa CarmodyDirector of MFA of the AmericasAssistant Professor of EngishStetson University
Teresa Carmody's writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include Maison Femme: a fiction (2015) and The Reconception of Marie (2020), which was a finalist for the Big Other Fiction Award and Readers' Choice Award. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, LitHub, WHR, Two Serious Ladies, Diagram, St. Petersburg Review, Faultline, and was selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing and by Entropy for its Best Online Articles and Essays list of 2019. Carmody is co-founding editor of Les Figues Press, an imprint of LARB Books in Los Angeles, and director of the MFA of the Americas at Stetson University, where she holds the Nell Ray Carlton Endowed Chair of English.Jacob PrideTeacherEngish LiteratureHoly Family High School
Jacob Pride has taught for over ten years. He lives in Thornton, CO, where he teaches English Lit. at Holy Family High School. His wife, Caitlin, and two boys, William and Charles, and first girl, Elsie Grace, moved from Manhattan, KS back to the Denver area in June 2020. Their fourth child, a girl, is due in October! He graduated from Ave Maria University with a concentration in English and philosophy in 2008 and received the St. Thomas Aquinas Award for Balance and Eutropalia. After studying theology for a year at Mount St. Mary’s seminary, he served as a FOCUS missionary for two years and met Caitlin, who dated him while he earned a master’s in English at Georgia Southern University. Caitlin and he were married in 2013, and he received his PhD in English at the University of Denver in 2017. His dissertation concerns Catholic literary theory and the Southern Gothic Literature of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. He taught English literature and composition at Kansas State University, Manhattan Christian College, and Arapahoe Community College and 7th-12th Grade theology at St. Francis Xavier High School in Kansas. He is glad to be back to Colorado and teaching at Holy Family High School, where he can teach and explore the unity between his dual-loves of literature and theology.2016 Graduates
Lindsay DragerAssistant ProfessorEnglish DepartmentUniversity of UtahLindsey Drager's novels have won a Shirley Jackson Award, been finalists for two Lambda Literary Awards, and are currently being translated into Spanish and Italian. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Prose, she is currently an assistant professor at the University of UtahMildred Kiconco BaryaAssistant Professor of EnglishDepartment of EnglishUniversity of North Carolina—AshevilleMildred K Barya is a writer from Uganda and Assistant professor at UNC-Asheville, where she teaches creative writing and world literature. Her publications include three poetry books as well as prose, poems or hybrids forthcoming or published in Shenandoah, Tin House, Obsidian, poets.org, Poetry Quarterly, Asymptote Journal, Matters of Feminist Practice Anthology, Prairie Schooner, New Daughters of Africa International Anthology, Per Contra, and Northeast Review. She’s at work on a collection of nonfiction, and one of the essays—Being Here in This Body—won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award, and is forthcoming in the North Carolina Literary Review, 2021. She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver, MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and B.A. in Literature, Makerere University. She is a board member of the African Writers Trust, and coordinates the Poetrio Reading Events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café in Asheville. Visit her blog: http://mildredbarya.com/Robert GilmorTeaching Associate ProfessorUniversity Writing ProgramUniversity of DenverRob has worked in the Writing Program at DU since 2014. He partners frequently with library faculty and staff to encourage students to research DU history and student life in Special Collections and Archives. He researchers scholarly rhetorics, rhetorics of institutional identity, and teaching writing and research with archives. He regularly presents his work at conferences in writing studies, rhetoric, and history of rhetoric.Nicholas GuligAssociate ProfessorCreative WritingUniversity of Wisconsin - WhitewaterSince receiving his PhD at the University of Denver, a revision of Nicholas Gulig's dissertation, ORIENT, received the CSU Poetry Center book award and was published in 2018. After teaching at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, he received a fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he has remained. Currently, Gulig is an associate professor who he teaches creative writing and runs the campus reading series as well as the journal of student art and literature.2015 Graduates
David BuchannanDirector of OperationsUnited States Air ForceDave is a pilot and Colonel in the United States Air Force. Before returning to an operational assignment in the Air Force, he was an Associate Professor of English and Fine Arts at the USAF Academy in Colorado Springs. His scholarly research and academic interests include war literature, native American literature, and the literature of the American west. His published work focuses on Tim O’Brien, post-9/11 war literature, Stephen Graham Jones, and Percival Everett. His first book, Going Scapegoat: Post-9/11 War Literature, Language, and Culture, appeared in 2016.Christina FirebaughAssistant Dean of Academics and Communication, College of Arts, Humanities and Social SciencesUniversity of DenverKristy Firebaugh completed her PhD in English Literary Studies in 2015. Her dissertation examines the concept of authenticity in early twentieth-century travel writing. Kristy has held a variety of teaching and administrative positions at the University of Denver, and is currently the Associate Dean for Academic Planning and Communications. In this role, she helps lead the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in areas including enrollment management, academic program planning, marketing and communications, and graduate recruitment and admissions.