WVWC Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing

recent Guest Faculty

Read the teaching statements of current faculty.

Remica Bingham-Risher	Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award, What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.

Mary Carroll-Hackett	Mary Carroll-Hackett earned the BA and MA from East Carolina University and an MFA from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Superstition Review, Drunken Boat and The Prose-Poem Project, among others. She is the author of six titles: The Real Politics of Lipstick (Slipstream Press 2010), Animal Soul (Kattywompus Press 2013), If We Could Know Our Bones (A-Minor Press 2014), The Night I Heard Everything (Future Cycle Press 2015), Trailer Park Oracle (Kelsey Books 2016), and most recently, A Little Blood, A Little Rain (Future Cycle Press 2016). Another collection, Death for Beginners, is forthcoming from Kelsey Books in September 2017. She teaches Creative Writing at Longwood University in Virginia. She is currently working on both a memoir and a novel.

Jonathan Corcoran	Jonathan Corcoran is the author of the story collection, The Rope Swing, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and long-listed for The Story Prize. He received a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Rutgers University-Newark, where he teaches writing. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Katie Fallon	Katie Fallon is the author of Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird (Univ. Press of New England, March 2017), Cerulean Blues (Ruka Press, 2011), and a book for children, Look, See The Bird!(Hatherleigh Press, June 2017). Her nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and she has taught writing at Virginia Tech and West Virginia University. Her first word was “bird.”

Matthew Ferrence	Matthew Ferrence is the author of Appalachia North: a memoir, and All-American Redneck: variations on an icon, from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dixie Chicks. He teaches creative writing at Allegheny College, in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Diane Gilliam	Diane Gilliam is the author of four poetry collections—Dreadful Wind & Rain (Red Hen, 2017), Kettle Bottom, One of Everything, and Recipe for Blackberry Cake. She has won the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, a Pushcart Prize, and the Ohioana Library Association Poetry Book of the Year Award for Kettle Bottom. She is the most recent recipient of the Gift of Freedom from A Room of Her Own Foundation.

Jeremy Jones	Jeremy Jones is the author of Bearwallow: A Mountain History of a Mountain Homeland, which was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and awarded gold in memoir in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His essays appear in Oxford American, The Iowa Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University, and he co-edits In Place, a nonfiction book series from West Virginia University Press. Active Faculty Fall 2021

Kim Dana Kupperman	Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of The Last of Her (2016) and I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (2010). She is the lead editor of You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person (2013), and publisher of Essaying the Essay (2014). She is the founder of Welcome Table Press, a nonprofit dedicated to the essay and home to two online periodical series, Occasional Papers on Practice & Form and Essaying the Body Electric. She is currently working on a fictionalized biography based on the true story of a Polish Jew who was deported to a Soviet labor camp during World War II and later settled in Iran.

Laura Long	Laura Long’s novel Out of Peel Tree was published in April 2014 and was recommended as an Editor’s Pick for Oprah.com. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems and Imagine a Door. She has received a James Michener Fellowship and other awards, and her writing has been published in many literary magazines. She teaches at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, and is from Buckhannon, West Virginia.

Mesha Maren	Mesha Maren’s debut novel Sugar Run is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in January 2019. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her short stories and essays appear in Tin House, Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Hobart, Southern Cultures, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation and she currently serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution.

Karen McElmurray	Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Other stories and essays have appeared most recently in The South Dakota Review, Appalachian Heritage, and in the anthologies Red Holler; Women and Their Machines, and In Season: Stories of Discovery, Loss, Home, and Places In Between. Her writing has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, has been a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award from The Bellingham Review, and was been “notable” in Best American Essays 2016. With poet Adrian Blevins, she co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She also teaches part-time as Associate Professor at Gettysburg College.

Catherine Venable Moore	Catherine Venable Moore is a nonfiction writer and radio producer based in Fayette County, West Virginia. Before returning home to the Mountain State, she studied writing at Harvard University and the University of Montana. Her work has been published in Best American Essays, Oxford American, VICE, and other places. Her current projects include two works of narrative nonfiction set in Appalachia, to be published by Random House.

Matt Randal O’Wain	Matt Randal O’Wain holds an MFA from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he teaches creative writing at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. O’Wain is the author of Meander Belt: family, loss, and coming of age in the working class south (American Lives Series, Bison Books, 2019) and Hallelujah Station and other stories (Autumn House Press, 2020). His essays and short stories have appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, Booth, Hotel Amerika, Zone 3, among others.

Savannah Sipple	Savannah Sipple is a writer from east Kentucky. Her debut poetry collection WWJD and Other Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) explores what it is to be a queer woman in Appalachia and is rooted in its culture and in her body. With a beer-drinking Jesus as her wing man, she navigates this difficult terrain of stereotype, conservative Evangelicalism, and, perhaps most, shame. Her poems have recently been published in Appalachian Heritage, Waxwing, Talking River, The Offing, and The Louisville Review. She is also the recipient of grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Jacinda Townsend	Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction written by a woman in 2014 and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jacinda grew up in Southcentral Kentucky and took her first creative writing class at Harvard, where she earned her B.A. While at Duke Law School she cross-registered in the English department, where she took her next few formative writing workshops, and in 1999, after four years of being first a broadcast journalist and then a lawyer in New York City, went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her M.F.A. and went on to spend a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire. She recently finished a novel called Kif. Jacinda is Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College.



Kayla Rae Whitaker	Kayla Rae Whitaker’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, Lenny Letter, and others. Her debut novel, The Animators, was named one of the best debut novels of 2017 by Entertainment Weekly and one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage. A Kentucky native, she has an MFA from New York University and lives in Brooklyn.


Leader Photo © Doug Van Gundy