Contact Information

About

Program Director Gregory Spatz is the author of the novels Inukshuk, Fiddler’s Dream and No One But Us, and of the story collections Half as Happy and Wonderful Tricks. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Glimmer Train Stories, Shenandoah, Epoch, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Zyzzyva. He has written for Poets and Writers, as well as The Oxford American. He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Washington State Book Award, and a 2012 NEA Fellowship in literature. Spatz also plays the fiddle in the twice Juno-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds.

When not on the road with the Jaybirds or busy at work teaching and writing, he enjoys playing music with his wife, Caridwen, also a fiddler, and being a step-dad to her two sons Tal and Angus.

Visit Greg’s website at gregoryspatz.com.

Read Greg’s article in Poets & Writers: “The Teachable Talent: Why Creative Writing Can Be Taught”. Check out Greg’s interview with Kenyon Review.

Listen to Greg talk about MFA programs and the application process on Jared McCormack’s podcast: MFA Applications: Faculty Edition.

About

Polly Buckingham is the author of one book of poetry, The River People (Lost Horse Press 2020), two books of fiction, The Expense of a View (Katherine Anne Porter Award, UNT Press 2016) and A Year of Silence (Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award, Florida Review Press 2015), and of the forthcoming book The Stolen Child and Other Stories (Betty Books). She is the recipient of a 2014 Washington Artists Trust Fellowship. Polly is the editor of Willow Springs magazine and the series editor for The Katherine Anne Porter Award. Her work appears in The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sugar House, The Poetry Review, North American Review, Conduit, Spillway, The Moth and elsewhere.

About

Jonathan Johnson’s poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry, published in recent issues of Ploughshares, Southern Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review and Gettysburg Review, and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. His books include the poetry collections Mastodon, 80% Complete (Carnegie Mellon, 2001), In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (Carnegie Mellon 2010), and May Is an Island (Carnegie Mellon 2018); and the memoirs, Hannah and the Mountain (Nebraska, 2005) and The Desk on the Sea (Wayne State, 2019). Ode, his play about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, was produced as part of the GetLit! Literary Festival, and his fiction has appeared recently in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, and Missouri Review. Johnson migrates between the Northwest; his hometown of Marquette, Michigan; and his ancestral village of Glenelg in the Scottish Highland where his cousins are still crofters.

In addition to his regular course load, Jonathan teaches a unique summer writing class from Yellowstone National Park. All students in previous sections of this course have watched wolves. Other observations have included wild trout, grizzly bears, falcons, mountain goats, and bison (lots and lots of bison). The course is designed to be a peak life experience that inspires writers to observe their world closely, to conduct field research, and to write from their own experiences for years to come.

About

Natalie Kusz is the author of the memoir Road Song, and has published essays and reviews in Harper’s, Threepenny Review, McCall’s, Real Simple, The New York Times Book Review, and other periodicals. Her work has earned, among other honors, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bush Foundation, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

A former faculty member of Bethel College and of Harvard University, she now teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

About

Samuel Ligon is the author of two novels—Among the Dead and Dreaming and Safe in Heaven Dead—and two collections of stories, Wonderland, illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and Drift and Swerve. He’s co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. His short fiction has appeared in Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Quarterly, and elsewhere. Ligon serves as the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

About

Rachel Toor is the author of five books of creative nonfiction: Write Your Way In (Chicago, 2016); Misunderstood(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Personal Record (Nebraska, 2008); The Pig and I (Penguin, 2005; Nebraska, 2009) and Admissions Confidential (St. Martin’s, 2001). Her first novel, On the Road to Find Out, was published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She writes a monthly column on issues in writing and publishing for The Chronicle of Higher Education and “Everything is Copy,” which appears monthly in the Spokesman-Review. She was a longtime contributor to Running Times and in 2012 she was given an award for journalistic excellence by the Road Runners of America. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, SB Nation, Glamour, Inside Higher Ed, Reader‘s Digest, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The LA Times, and other various and diverse publications. Three times she has had essays listed as Notable in Best American Sports Writing, and once in Best American Essays, and in 2017 she received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize. She’s been sponsored by Athleta and SkirtSports.

After graduating from Yale, Rachel spent a dozen years as an acquisitions editor at Oxford and Duke University Presses. She has an MFA from the University of Montana.