Faculty Bios

Julie Hensley’s stories and poems have appeared in many journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Phoebe, Quarterly West, Redivider, and Ruminate. Her work is regularly anthologized and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first manuscript, Landfall, was selected as the winner of the 2007 Everett Southwest Literature Award. The recipient of the Berry College Award for Emerging Voices in Southern Fiction, Hensley holds an MFA from Arizona State University. Before joining the faculty at Eastern Kentucky, she directed the creative writing program at Cameron University and served as the visiting writer at Prescott College.

 

 

R Dean Johnson’s essays and stories have appeared in several national literary journals, including Ascent, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, Santa Clara Review, and The Southern Review. His fiction has previously been nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology and excerpts from his novel manuscript, Californium, have been anthologized in Tribute to Orpheus (Kearney Street Books) and Paradigm, Volume One (Rain Farm Press). Editor of the anthology Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education (University Press of America), he holds an MA in English from Kansas State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. Previously, he has taught at Prescott College, Cameron University, and Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

 

 

Derek Nikitas is the author of the novel Pyres (St. Martin’s Minotaur), nominated for an Edgar Award in 2008. His short stories have been published in such journals as The Ontario Review, Chelsea, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, New South and The Pedestal Magazine. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has received a Pushcart nomination and a 2007 fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

 

 

 

 

Young Smith is the author of In A City You Will Never Visit, a collection of poems published by Black Zinnias Press of San Francisco in 2008. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, American Literary Review, Arts & Letters, The Midwest Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, on the Poetry Daily web site, and in other publications. He is an associate professor of English and coordinator of the brief-residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University.

Visiting Writers for EKU's January, 2009 MFA Residency
 
Julianna Baggott is the author of four novels -- including national bestseller Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, The Madam, and Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Steve Almond, as well as three books of poems, including This Country of Mothers, Lizzie Borden in Love, and Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees. Her fifth novel, My Husband's Sweethearts, will be published this August by Random House's Bantam Dell imprint, under the pen name Bridget Asher. She also writes novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode -- The Anybodies trilogy, The Slippery Map (fall 2007), the prequel to Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (2007), a movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Jason Bateman; and a Red Sox novel The Prince of Fenway Park (January 2009). Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the Best American Poetry series, Glamour, Ms., Poetry, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and read on NPR's Here and Now and Talk of the Nation. She lives in Florida with her husband writer David G.W. Scott and their four kids, and teaches at Florida State University's Creative Writing Program.
 
Rick Hilles received his MFA from Columbia University. His first poetry collection, Brother Salvage, won the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine.  In 2008, Rick received the prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award. He was the 2002-03 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar and has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and was awarded the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from The Missouri Review. His work has appeared in Harper's, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Salmagundi, Field and Witness. He is an associate professor of English in the creative writing program at Vanderbilt University.
 
Joanie Mackowski’s book of poems The Zoo (Pitt Poetry Series 2002), winner of the 2000 Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, also was awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize in 2003, which recognizes an exceptional first book of poems published in a given year. Recently Mackowski's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2007, edited by Heather McHugh and David Lehman, The Yale Review, Poetry, New England Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, on MSN's Slate online magazine (http://slate.com), The Kenyon Review, and in other journals. A Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1998-2000, Mackowski is now an associate professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati. In addition to teaching, she has worked as a journalist, a French translator, and a juggler. She’s originally from Connecticut.

Nancy Reisman, author of House Fires and The First Desire, received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts , Amherst . Her short story collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her novel The First Desire won the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize for Jewish Fiction.  She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown , and has won an O. Henry Award and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award.  Her stories have been included in numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Award Stories, and Jewish in America. She is an associate professor of English in the creative writing program at Vanderbilt University.
 
Jim Tomlinson was born and raised in a small northern Illinois town. He lives now in rural Kentucky with his wife, fiber artist Gin Petty. His fiction and poetry have been published in The Pinch, Five Points, Bellevue Literary Review, Potomac Review, and Shenandoah. Jim was awarded a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a 2005 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, a teaching fellowship at the 2006 Wesleyan Writers Conference, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the 2006 Sewanee Writers Conference. Jim recently completed work on a second short story collection. He is hard at work now on a novel.