UAA Low Residency MFA Program - Associate Faculty

Associate Faculty

Judith Barrington Nonfiction
	Judith Barrington is the author of Lifesaving: A Memoir, which won the 2000 Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is used in writing programs and by writers' groups across the USA and in Britain and Australia. She has also published three volumes of poetry, most recently, Horses and the Human Soul, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and a chapbook, Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea. Her work has been published in many literary journals and been featured by Garrison Keillor on his National Public Radio program, The Writer's Almanac. Judith has taught workshops in memoir at Split Rock (University of Minnesota), The Hassayampa Writers' Conference in Prescott, Arizona, The Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and many others. She also teaches memoir classes for The Poetry School in Spain and England and for The Arvon Foundation in the U.K. She is a web mentor for the University of Minnesota. For more information, go to http://www.judithbarrington.com

Derick Burleson Poetry
	Derick Burleson is the author of Never Night (Marick Press 2008). His first collection of poems, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94, won the 2000 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and many other journals. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches creative writing and literature at the University of AlaskaFairbanks, and lives with his partner and daughter in Two Rivers.

Rich Chiappone Fiction
	Richard Chiappone is the author of Water of an Undetermined Depth, a collection of short fiction published by Stackpole Books (2003). The story “Raccoon” from this collection was made into a short film and featured at international film festivals. His stories and essays have appeared in national magazines, including Alaska Magazine, Playboy, and Gray’s Sporting Journal, and in literary journals including Crescent Review, Missouri Review, and ZYZZYVA. He has taught at the University of Alaska Anchorage and served as a senior associate editor at Alaska Quarterly Review. He now teaches at the Kachemak Bay Campus of Kenai Peninsula College and lives with his wife on the Anchor River.

Ernestine Hayes Nonfiction
	Ernestine Hayes is a member of the Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan Clan of the Lingit. Her book, Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, won a 2007 American book Award, was a HAIL (Honoring Alaska Indigenous Literature) recipient, and was a finalist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize and the 2007 PEN Creative Non-Fiction Award. She is the author of other published work in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Grandmother of four, she currently teaches at the University of Alaska Southeast Juneau campus

Nancy Lord Fiction

Alan J Parks

Nancy Lord, a long-time resident of Homer, Alaska, holds a liberal arts degree from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. from Vermont College. In addition to being an independent writer, she fished commercially for many years and has, more recently, worked as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships. She is the author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who Swam with Beavers) and three books of literary nonfiction (most recently Beluga Days.) Her work also regularly appears in journals, magazines, and anthologies. She teaches part-time at the Kachemak Bay Branch of Kenai Peninsula College, University of Alaska Anchorage, and has also taught in the M.F.A. programs at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She has won numerous honors and fellowships, including grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize. She is an active conservationist and enjoys beach combing, berry picking, and bird and wildlife watching. www.nancylord.alaskawriters.com

Valerie Miner Fiction

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books. Her new novel, After Eden, is published in the "Literature of the American West Series" by the University of Oklahoma Press. Other novels include Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Since and Trespassing. Her nonfiction books are The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir and Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Conditions, The T.L.S., The Women's Review of Books, The Nation and other journals. Her stories and essays are published in more than 60 anthologies. Collaborative work includes books, museum exhibits and theatre. Her stories have been widely dramatized on BBC Radio 4. She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has held Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia and India. Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she is a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures and workshops. She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California. See www.valerieminer.com.

Zack Rogow Poetry

Zack Rogow has thirteen published books, including five collections of poetry, three anthologies, four volumes of translation, and a children’s book. His books of poetry include Greatest Hits: 1979–2001 from Pudding House Publications. His sixth book of poems, The Number before Infinity, is forthcoming from Scarlet Tanager Books in September 2008. Twice he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. He is the author of two plays, including La Vie en Noir: The Art and Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor, which was read in the Lit&Lunch reading series in San Francisco in collaboration with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. He is the editor of a recent anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press; and editor of two volumes of TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation, distributed by University of Washington Press. His translations of George Sand, Colette, and André Breton have won numerous awards, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award and the Northern California Book Award in Translation. His children’s book, Oranges, was a Junior Library Guild Book-of-the-Month. He currently also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has taught in the writing programs at the University of San Francisco and at San Francisco State University.

Eva Saulitis Nonfiction

Eva Saulitis has taught English and creative writing at the Kachemak Bay branch of Kenai Peninsula College, in Homer, Alaska, since 1999 and is also on the faculty of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Trained initially as a marine biologist, she received her M.S. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1993. Since 1986, she has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Kenai Fjords and the Aleutian Islands and is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications. Dissatisfied with the objective language and rigid methodology of science, she turned to creative writing—poetry and the essay—to develop another language with which to address the natural world, receiving her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996. Her essay collection, Leaving Resurrection, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize, and was published by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press in 2008. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Carnet de Route, Seattle Review, Ice-Floe, Connotations and Kalliope. They have also appeared in several anthologies, including Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez; she has read essays she contributed to that volume on the PBS radio series Living on Earth. She’s been a recipient of fellowships from the Island Institute, the Alaska State Council on the Arts (Connie Boochever Fellowship), and the Rasmuson Foundation. In 2007, with the help of grants from Rasmuson Foundation and Ventspils House, an international center for writers and translators, she spent a month in Latvia, her parents’ birthplace, where she began a new book of lyric essays and completed a poetry collection entitled Many Ways to Say It.

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