Faculty

Lynda Barry (Writing the Unthinkable)

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison.

Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook’s Comeek , featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons! , Tea! Greatest! of! Marlys! , Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel , Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! , and The Good Times are Killing Me , which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor’s Award.

She has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and RR Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and  Making Comics, which received two Eisner Awards and appeared on numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Barry was born in Wisconsin in 1956.

Find out more about Lynda Barry on her Instagram

Safia Elhillo (Poetry Workshop)

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her latest novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit (Make Me a World/Random House, 2024), was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).

Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Find out more about Safia Elhillo on her website

Elisa Gabbert (Creative Nonfiction Workshop)

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG, 2024); Normal Distance (Soft Skull, 2022); The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020); The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). Any Person Is the Only Self, The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were each named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Believer, the New York Review of Books, A Public Space, The Yale Review, and many other venues.

Find out more about Elisa Gabbert on her website

Stephen Amidon (Fiction Workshop)

Stephen Amidon was born in Chicago and grew up on the East Coast of America.  He lived in London for twelve years before returning to the United States in 1999.  He now lives in Massachusetts and Torino, Italy.

His books have been published in seventeen countries and include two works of non fiction, a collection of short stories, and eight novels, including Human Capital and Security.

Amidon’s novels have appeared on many books of the year lists, and Human Capital was selected by Jonathan Yardley, chief critic of The Washington Post as one of the five best novels of 2004.

Paolo Virzì’s Italian film version of Human Capital, Il Capitale Umano, staring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Gifuni, Valeria Golino, and Fabrizio Bentivoglio, won best film at the 2014 David Di Donatello, Nastri d’Argento, and Globi D’Oro Awards and was selected to represent Italy as best foreign language film at the 2015 Oscars. 

An American film adaptation of Human Capital, starring Liev Schreiber, Marisa Tomei, Peter Sarsgaard, Alex Wolff, and Maya Hawke and directed by Marc Meyers, premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.

Amidon co-wrote the script (with Paolo Virzì, Francesca Archibugi, and Francesco Piccolo) for Virzì’s film The Leisure Seeker, starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. The film premiered in competition at the 2017 Venice Film Festival and the screenplay was nominated for Italian Golden Globe and David di Donatello awards.

In February 2015, Amidon’s serial play 6Bianca, directed by Serena Sinigaglia, premiered at Teatro Stabile di Torino .

A film adaptation of the novel Security, directed by Peter Chelsom and with a cast including Marco D’Amore, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Silvio Muccino, Valeria Bilello, and Ludovica Martino, was released in Italy in May 2021 and worldwide by Netflix in June 2021.

Stephen Amidon’s new novel Locust Lane was released in January 2023 in the US by Celadon.

Find out more about Stephen Amidon through his website

Janan Alexandra (Poetry Class)

Janan Alexandra is the author of the poetry collection COME FROM (BOA Editions). Her poem On Form & Matter won the 2023 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, judged by Marie Howe, and her poem Open Letter To A Politician was recently featured in Lit Hub’s 50 Contemporary Poets on the Best Poems they Read in 2024.  

As the daughter of a Lebanese mother and Beirut-born American father, Janan’s life has been peripatetic, with roots scattered in Cyprus, Lebanon, Pakistan, England, France, and many corners of North America. She was awarded a 2021-2022 Creative Research Fulbright Fellowship and has also received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts. 

Since 2015, Janan has taught poetry and creative writing in schools, libraries, youth arts centers, zoom rooms, and carceral spaces. Along with language work, Janan has facilitated restorative movement classes; nannied; welded ice cream scoops; tied oyster nets; tended land and animals; built picnic tables; baked bread; painted houses; and busked to make a living. She currently teaches at Indiana University, edits poetry at The Rumpus, and plays fiddle in the Sweet May Dews. With Essence London she curates Mondays Are Free, a Substack collaboration by BFF poets Ross Gay and Pat Rosal. 

Find out more about Janan Alexandra through her website 

Marguerite Sheffer (Fiction Class)

Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer is the author of The Man in the Banana Trees, which won the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named a “Best Debut Book of 2024 by Debutiful and a “Most Exciting Debut Story Collection” by Electric Literature. Her stories appear in The Cincinnati Review, BOMB, LitHub, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Smokelong Quarterly, among other magazines. Her story “Tiger on My Roof” was a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize, which awards short fiction with “daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.” At Tulane University she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. She is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a New Orleans writing collective.

Find out more about Marguerite Sheffer through her website

John Cotter (Nonfiction Class)

John Cotter is the author of Losing Music: A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation (Milkweed, 2023), winner of the Colorado Book Award in 2024. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Guernica, Epoch, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and Joyland; his book-length fiction Under the Small Lights is available from Miami University Press, as winner of their 2010 novella competition. He’s been a resident artist at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, and SPACE gallery in Portland, Maine. He lives in New England.

Find out more about John Cotter through his website