Core Faculty
Doug Van Gundy Program Director |
Doug Van Gundy’s poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Oxford American, The Guardian, Ecotone, Poems & Plays and The Louisville Review. His first book of poems, A Life Above Water, is published by Red Hen Press. He is the co-editor of Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary Writing from West Virginia, published by Vandalia Press. A graduate of the Goddard College MFA program, Doug has been a visiting poet at Middle Tennessee State University, Lynchburg College, Randolph Macon College, Barton College, Coastal Carolina University and Davis & Elkins College, and was an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. In addition to writing and teaching, Doug is an award-winning old-time musician whose music has been featured on three CDs, several films, and National Public Radio’s Mountain Stage. He plays fiddle, guitar and mandolin in the duo, Born Old. Active Faculty Summer-Fall 2021
“Serengeti” in Birmingham Arts Journal (new window) “The Return of the Almighty” in Waccamaw (new window) “Engineers” in Waccamaw (new window) |
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Devon McNamara has poetry, essays, reviews and interviews in The Christian Science Monitor, The Hiram Poetry Review, Laurel Review, Trellis, Dark Horse, Wild Sweet Notes: 50 Years of West Virginia Poetry, and most recently Dogs Singing, from Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare, Ireland. She directs cultural tours of Ireland for undergraduates and for writers in the MFA program. Before joining the Wesleyan English faculty she taught in poets-in-the-schools projects in West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Missouri, conducted writing workshops in reform facilities, and pioneered the West Virginia Public Radio college course, Women and Literature, featuring interviews with Appalachian musician Jean Ritchie, poets Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Irene McKinney, and former West Virginia Poet Laureate Louise McNeill. She was also co-manager of The Morgantown School of Ballet, a character dancer in the regional company, and has worked collaboratively with dancers from The Dayton Ballet and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. Her Ph.D. is from New York University and she is the recipient of a YADDO fellowship. Active Faculty Summer-Fall 2021 |
![]() Robert Stevens |
As a Navy brat, Robert Stevens moved 11 times by the time he turned 18. After graduating from Pitt, he lived in Pittsburgh for the next 15 years. In the summer of 2012, he worked as a stand-in for George Takei and has appeared as an extra in commercials and movies such as Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Fathers and Daughters. Writing as Robert Yune, his fiction has been published in Green Mountains Review, The Kenyon Review, and Pleiades, among others. In 2009, he received a writing fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2015, his debut novel Eighty Days of Sunlight was nominated for the International DUBLIN Literary Award. Other nominees that year included Lauren Groff, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. His debut story collection Impossible Children won the 2017 Mary McCarthy Prize and was published in October 2019 by Sarabande Books. Stevens was the 2018-2019 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. He is currently an Assistant Professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Active Faculty Summer-Fall 2021 |