2021
Faculty, Readers & Speakers
Faculty
Christopher Citro
Generative Poetry
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Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His awards include a 2019 fellowship from Ragdale Foundation, a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and first place in the 2015 Poetry Competition at Columbia Journal. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative, Blackbird, Pleiades, and in such anthologies as Best New Poets, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, and They Said: An Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Boulevard, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, Passages North, Colorado Review and elsewhere. Christopher serves as the poetry editor for decomP magazinE. He currently teaches creative writing at SUNY Oswego and lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.
Brian Hall
Full-Length Prose Manuscript (Fiction/Non-Fiction)
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Brian Hall bicycled in western and eastern Europe for two years after attending Harvard University, and wrote his first book about those experiences: Stealing from a Deep Place. His most recently published novel, Fall of Frost, concerns Robert Frost, mainly in the last year of his life, when he went to Russia to speak with Khrushchev, hoping to save the world from nuclear war. Other major works, The Impossible Country, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company, Madelaine’s World and Saskiad delve into subjects ranging from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Madelaine's World was recently named by Slate as one of the best 50 nonfiction books of the last 25 years. Brian Hall has published in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. His fifth novel, about lonely people and the ultimate fate of the universe, will be completed sometime this year.
Michael Seidlinger
Full-Length Prose Manuscript (Genre Fiction)
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Michael J Seidlinger is a Filipino American author of a number of books including My Pet Serial Killer, Dreams of Being, and The Fun We’ve Had. He serves as print and digital producer for The New Modality and is a member of The Accomplices. In 2012, he founded Civil Coping Mechanisms, an independent press specializing in poetry, hybrid-form fiction and nonfiction. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Buzzfeed, Forbes, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, PANK, Hypable, GEN, and elsewhere. He has taught classes for Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon Writers Workshop, and Catapult. A graduate of George Washington University’s Masters of Business in Publishing program, he lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he never sleeps and is forever searching for the next best cup of coffee. You can find him online on Facebook, Twitter (@mjseidlinger), and Instagram (@michaelseidlinger).
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Kem Joy Ukwu
Short Prose
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Kem Joy Ukwu's fiction has appeared in a number of publications, some of which include Carve Magazine, PANK, Jabberwock Review and Auburn Avenue. Her short story collection manuscript Locked Gray / Linked Blue was selected as a finalist for the 2016 New American Fiction Prize and was published by the Kindred Books Imprint of Brain Mill Press. Locked Gray / Linked Blue was also selected as a 2018 Foreword INDIES Winner (Bronze Award in Literary). Kem led a workshop each as an Institute Scholar at the 2016 and 2018 Writing from the Margins Institute at Bloomfield College. She earned her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University and her master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University. Born and raised in the Bronx, she lives in New Jersey with her husband.
Sandra Lim
Poetry
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Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014) and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her poems and essays have been published in anthologies including The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Knopf, 2016) and The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleaides Press, 2017). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Jentel Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Readers
Jules Gibbs
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Jules Gibbs is the author of the full-length poetry collections Snakes & Babies (forthcoming, 2020) and Bliss Crisis (2012), both published by the Sheep Meadow Press, as well as chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, The Bulk of the Mailable Universe (2011) and Songuary (forthcoming, 2020). Her writing has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including the The Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, the Best New Poets anthology, Gulf Coast, Salt Hill Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Verse Daily, among others. She serves as the poetry editor for the national political magazine, The Progressive, as well as for Corresponding Voices, a bilingual magazine of cross-cultural and intersectional poetics based at Syracuse University, where she also curates the Cruel April reading series.
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Gibbs has won awards from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence Program. She has been a visiting professor at Hamilton College, taught at the Downtown Writing Center in Syracuse, and has been a poet-in-residence in Syracuse and Houston city schools. She has taught literature and creative writing at Syracuse University since 2010.
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Brock Clarke
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Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the short story collection The Price of the Haircut, and has won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, and a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His eighth book—the novel I Am Calvin Bledsoe—will be published in September 2019. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.
Kevin Canty
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Kevin Canty is the award-winning author of the novels Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero, and Winslow in Love, as well as the short story collections Honeymoon and Other Stories, A Stranger in This World, and Where the Money Went. His most recent book is The Underworld: A Novel, published in 2017. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Details, Story, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. He currently teaches fiction writing at the University of Montana.
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Speakers
Emma Caruso
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