The M.F.A. Core Faculty are talented and dedicated teachers as well as accomplished writers, having published many highly acclaimed and prize-winning books.
Dr. Marianne Chan is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, who teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. She grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. After she earned her B.A. in English from Michigan State University, she went on to study poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned her MFA.She has a Ph.D.in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati.
Marianne is the author of All Heathens, which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Between 2017-2019, she served as poetry editor for Split Lip Magazine. She is a Kundiman fellow. Her second book, Leaving Biddle City, was released by Sarabande in summer 2024.
Dr. Jane Alberdeston Coralinis an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. For many years, she taught in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo. Her poems have been published widely in print and online publications throughout the US and Canada, including Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Paterson Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Caribbean Vistas, among others. She co-authored the novel Sister Chicas, and her new novel, Colony 51 is anticipated in 2024. She is currently working on a collection of stories titled Vivid Gods. Jane is an alumna of Cave Canem, a writers' organization for poets of African descent, and a recipient of a District of Columbia Arts and Humanities Grant. Her work has been included inStep into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature(John Wiley & Sons); and her poetry collections Waters of My ThirstandThe Afrotaina Dreams are still in circulation. She has a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Originally from Baguio, Dr. Luisa A. Igloria was appointed 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. The Academy of American Poets awarded her one of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, in support of a program of public poetry projects. She is the 2023 recipient of the Immigrant Writing Series Prize from Black Lawrence Press, for Caulbearer (2024). She is one of 2 Co-Winners of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize forMaps for Migrants and Ghosts(Southern Illinois University Press, fall 2020). In April 2021, the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) conferred on her the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas lifetime achievement award (English poetry category).
In 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selected her chapbookWhat is Left of Wings, I Askas the 2018 recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. Other works includeThe Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-LifeCrisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018),Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser(2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), and 12 other books.
Her poems are widely published in national and international anthologies, print and online literary journals includingOrion, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Diode, Missouri Review, Rattle, Poetry East, Your Impossible Voice, Poetry, Shanghai Literary Review, Cha, Hotel Amerika, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. Luisa served as the inaugural Glasgow Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University in 2018. With over 40 years of experience teaching literature and creative writing, Luisa also leads workshops at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk (and serves on the Muse Board). She is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor and University Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at , which she directed from 2009-2015. Since 2010, she's been writing (at least) a poem a day.
John McManus is a Professor of English and Creative Writing, and the author of four books: the short story collections,, andand the novel. His fiction has appeared inMcSweeney’s, Tin House, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Oxford American, and many other journals. He is the recipient of the, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, a, the, and a.
McManus’s Master of Fine Arts in fiction and screenwriting comes from theat the University of Texas. He has been in residence at the Corporation of Yaddo, The Djerassi Residents Artists Program, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Caldera Arts, Fundación Valparaiso, the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation. The Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France, awarded him the Brown Foundation Fellowship. He held the Bay and Paul Foundation Fellowship at New York’s Millay Colony for the Arts. Theaters where McManus has been a dramaturg/script doctor on projects in development include the Atlantic Theatre Company, New York Stage & Film, The Lark, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. In 2020 and 2021 he was a fellow in dramaturgy at the Banff Playwrights Lab. He is adapting his novel Bitter Milk for the screen.
Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans and raised in Pensacola, Florida. Wascom’s first novel,The Blood of Heaven, was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. It was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction and selected as one of Gambit‘s 40 Under 40. He also published Secessia (2015) and The New Inheritors (2018), and has been called "one of the most exhilarating historical novelists in the country" by the Washington Post. His work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, The Believer, and elsewhere. His latest novel, The Great State of West Florida (2024) is “a startling and unconventional neon-pink Western of vengeance, family, and first love as two warring factions vie for control of a blood-soaked Gulf Coast.” He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he currently directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at .