Faculty

Ashley C. Ford (Special Guest)

Ashley C. Ford is the author of the New York Times Bestselling memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, published by Flatiron Books on June 1, 2021. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, seasons one & three of MasterCard’s Fortune Favors The Bold, as well as the video interview series PROFILE by BuzzFeed News, and Brooklyn-based news & culture TV show, 112BK. She currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy.

Ford has written or guest-edited for The Guardian, ELLE Magazine, BuzzFeed, OUT Magazine, Mailchimp Presents, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Allure, Marie Claire, The New York Times, Netflix Queue, Domino, Cup of Jo, and various other web and print publications. She’s taught creative nonfiction writing at The New School and Catapult.Co, and had her work listed among Longform & Longread’s Best of 2017.

While working as an executive for Matter Studios, Ford focused on developing web series and documentaries. She was also the host of the first season of Audible’s literary interview series, Authorized. She has been named among Forbes Magazine‘s 30 Under 30 in Media (2017), Brooklyn Magazine‘s Brooklyn 100 (2016), Time Out New York’s New Yorkers of The Year (2017), and Variety’s New Power of New York (2019).

Michael Martone (Special Guest)

Michael Martone’s recent books include “The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” “Four for a Quarter, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover,” and “Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins.”

He is also the author of “The Blue Guide to Indiana” and five other books of short fiction including “Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List,” “Safety Patrol,” and “Alive and Dead in Indiana.” His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, and other magazines.

Martone has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Shruti Swamy (Fiction Workshop)

The winner of two O. Henry Awards, Shruti Swamy’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, the Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. In 2012, she was Vassar College’s 50th W.K. Rose Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook.

She is a Kundiman fiction fellow, a 2017 – 2018 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a recipient of a 2018 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her book A House Is a Body was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and her novel The Archer was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel prize.

Melissa Febos (Memoir Workshop)

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, WHIP SMART (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, ABANDON ME (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a Best Book of 2017. Her second essay collection, GIRLHOOD, a national bestseller, was published by Bloomsbury on March 30. A craft book, BODY WORK, will be published by Catapult on March 15, 2022.

The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, her work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and The Center for Women Writers at Salem College. She is a four-time MacDowell fellow and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute at The Camargo Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which named her the 2018 recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award.

She co-curated the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan for ten years and served on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts for five. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

José Vadi (Nonfiction Class)

José Vadi is an award-winning essayist, poet, playwright and film producer. He is the author of Inter State: Essays from California. José received the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award for his debut play “a eulogy for three” produced by Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Word Project. He is the author of SoMa Lurk, a collection of photos and poems published by Project Kalahati / Pro Arts Oakland. His work has been featured by the Paris Review, The Atlantic, Catapult, Stranger’s Guide, the PBS NewsHour, the San Francisco Chronicle, Free Skate Magazine, Quartersnacks, and Pop-Up Magazine.

Nicky Beer (Poetry Workshop)

​​Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015) and The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a MacDowell Fellowship, a fellowship and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Campbell Corner Prize. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel. Her third book of poems, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2022.

Peter Kispert (Fiction Class)

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, February 2020), an Elle Magazine Best Book of the Year and O, The Oprah Magazine Best LGBT Book of the Year. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in OUT magazine, GQ, Esquire, them, Playboy, Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading, The Carolina Quarterly, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from Indiana University, where he was a fiction fellow, taught undergraduate fiction writing workshops, and served as editor-in-chief of Indiana Review. Peter currently serves as an assistant editor at American Short Fiction. He lives in New York.

Ross Gay (Poetry Class)

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

Amelia Martens (Poetry Class)

AMELIA MARTENS is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (2016), a book of prose poems, selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. She received both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education from Indiana University and currently serves as the Associate Literary Editor for Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her work has been supported by a 2021 Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship to Rivendell Writer’s Colony in 2017, an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women in 2016, and an Emerging Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council in 2011. She is a recent Pushcart nominee and the author of four poetry chapbooks:  Ursa Minor (winner of the 2017 Prose Poetry Prize from elsewhere magazine, 2018), A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and Purgatory (winner of the Spring 2010 Black River Chapbook competition; Black Lawrence Press, 2012). Her new poems appear, or are forthcoming in: Cream City Review, Still: The Journal, Southern Indiana Review, and Sweet: A Literary Confection. She is married to the poet Britton Shurley; they have two smart/beautiful/brave daughters and a ridiculous dog.

L. Renée (Poetry Class)

L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, has been published in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Indiana University Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Alumni Award, Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and second place for PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review’s Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize. She has received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc., Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Lafayette Flats’ New River Gorge Creative Residency, Prairie Ronde Artist Residency, the dots between, The Watering Hole, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she was Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. She believes in Black joy, her ancestors, wondering, and wandering. IG: @lreneepoems

Joy Priest (Poetry Class)

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and The Atlantic, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Priest received her MFA in poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and has taught creative writing, comedy, gender & sexuality, and African American Arts & Culture at the university level. Joy is an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellow and a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets for Sarabande Books.