Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Program Director
	Gregory Wolfe, director, and writer-in-residence at SPU, will teach the introductory Art and Faith course that MFA students will take in their first residency. Wolfe is Publisher and Editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, one of the premier literary quarterlies in America. Wolfe is the author of intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery (2003), Sacred Passion: The Art of William Schickel (1998) and Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography (1997), and editor of The New Religious Humanists: A Reader (1997). His work has appeared in Commonweal, First Things, Modern Age, National Review, New Oxford Review, and many other periodicals.

Program Coordinator
	Dyana Herron is a 2008 graduate of the MFA program at SPU and now serves as its Program Coordinator. She is also the Development Associate for Image, as well as Managing Editor of Image Update, the journal's biweekly e-newsletter.

Current Faculty
The creative writing faculty work closely with students both at the residencies and throughotu the correspondence quarter. We are honored that some of America's leading writers have chosen to teach in our program.
	Robert Clark (Creative Nonfiction) is the author of four books of nonfiction and four novels, most recently the nonfiction book Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpiecesand the novel Lives of the Artists. His other novels include Love Among the Ruins, Mr. White's Confession (which won the Edgar Award), and In the Deep Midwinter. A memoir, My Grandfather's House: A Geneology of Doubt and Faith, was published in 1999. He was recently a Guggenheim Fellow working on a collection of essays on art and belief.

	Leslie Leyland Fields (Creative Nonfiction) is the author of nonfiction books Surviving the Island of Grace, Out on the Deep Blue, Surprise Child, and The Entangling Net: Alaska's Commerical Fishing Women Tell Their Lives, among others. She teaches at Kodiak College and fishes commercially with her family. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, Image and The Christian Science Monitor.

	Jeanine Hathaway (Poetry) teaches writing and literature at Wichita State University. Her books include the autobiographical novel, Motherhouse (Hyperion, 1992) and a collection of poems, The Self as Constellation (UNT Press, 2002), which won the 2001 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Double Take, The Georgia Review, and The Best Spiritual Writing. She received the Wichita State University Regents' Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1992, as well as the Seaton Award for Poetry in both 1985 and 1990.

	Bret Lott (Fiction) is the author of twelve books, most recently the novel Ancient Highway, the story collection The Difference Between Women and Men, the nonfiction book Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life, and the novel A song I Knew by Heart. He is also the author of the bestselling novel Jewel, which was selected for Oprah's book club in 1999. Lott has taught in the MFA programs at Gennington and Vermont College, and is the ofrmer editor of The Southern Review.

	Gina Ochsner (Fiction)is the acclaimed author of two short story collections, most recently People I Wanted to Be. Her fiction has received numerous awards and has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her first collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, was selected for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short FIction. It also won the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the PNBA award for short stories and was an Austin Chronicle Top Ten Pick.

	Jeanne Murray Walker's (Poetry) poetry appears in periodicals such as Image, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Georgia Review, and The Christian Century. Her poetry collections include Nailing Up the Home Sweet Home, Coming into History and A Deed to the Light. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Colladay Award, and the Prairie Schooner/Strousse Award, and was named a Pew Fellow in Poetry in 1998. Her first play won the Washington National Theater Competition. Subsequently her plays have been performed in Boston, Chicago and London.

Recent Faculty
	Deborah Joy Corey (Fiction) has published stories in many quarterlies, including Ploughshares, Story, New Letters, The Crescent Review, and Image. Her first novel, Losing Eddie (Algonquin), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and was voted one of the best 100 novels of the nineties. Her second novel, The Skating Pond (Putnam) was published in 2003.

	B.H. Fairchild's (Poetry) most recent book of poems, The Art of the Lathe (Alice James), was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Award and received the Kingsley Tufts Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN Center West Peotry Award. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowships. His latest book, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Norton), won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

	Paul Mariani (Poetry) is one of America's leading literary biographers and poets. His books include the poetry collections Salvage Operations and The Great Wheel, as well as biographies of William Carlos Williams (nominated for a National Book Award), John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and most recently Hart Crane. Three of his biographies were New York Timesnotable books. His most recent books are Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercise of St. Ignatius, winner of the Catholic Book Award, and God & the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, & the Ineffable.

	Sandra Scofield (Fiction) is the author of Occasions of Sin (Norton, 2004), Gringa (winner of the New American Writing Award), Beyond Deserving (a 1991 finalist for a National Book Award), and A Chance to See Egypt (winner of a Best Fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1997). She received an NEA fellowship in 1991 and has participated in outreach programs for Oregon Literary Arts and the National Book Foundation. Her newest book for writers, The Scene Book was published by Penguin Books in 2007. She is currently at work on a second memoir.

Recent visitors include Lauren Winner, Valerie Sayers, Marilyn Nelson and more. Click here for more information on visiting writers, artists and musicians.

Last Modified: 8/21/2009