Permanent Faculty

Cyrus Cassells is the author of six acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, The Crossed-Out Swastika, and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, which was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and a nominee for the NAACP's Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry. In 2021, he was named 2021 Texas Poet Laureate by the Texas State Legislature. In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Among his other honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants, and a Lambda Literary Award. His most recent books are The World That The Shooter Left Us (2022; Four Way Books) and More Than Watchmen At Daybreak (2020; Nine Mile Books). His first novel, My Gingerbread Shakespeare, and his first play, Riders on the Back of Silence, are forthcoming.

Roger Jones has published three books of poetry, including  Remembering New London, Strata, and Are We There Yet?.  His poems can also be found in various journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Hawaii Review, Poet Lore, Louisiana Literature, Baltimore Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Texas Review, and Arkansas Review, among others. He has earned four Pushcart nominations, as well as won the Academy of American Poets Prize (1993), the Texas Review Southern/Southwestern Poetry Breakthrough Award (1993), the Texas Review Poetry Prize (2008), and the Snapshot Press (UK) Haibun e-chapbook Award (2012).

Steve Wilson has written or edited six books of poetry, including Lose to Find, Allegory Dance, and The Singapore Express. His most recent book is The Reaches (2019; Finishing Line Press). His poems can also be found in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Commonweal, New American Writing, and Poem, among other journals.

Doug Dorst is the author of three books of Fiction, including, S.: A Novel, co-written with J.J. Abrams. His novel Alive in Necropolis, was honored as San Francisco’s 2009 One City One Book selection, winner of the 2009 Emperor Norton Award, runner-up for the 2009 PEN/Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, and IAFA/Crawford Awards, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and one of Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2008. His short story collection, The Surf Guru, was also an NYTBR Editors’ Choice as well as a Rumpus Book Club selection. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, ZYZZYVA, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Significant Objects and Politically Inspired.

He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has received Fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society and the National Endowment for the Arts. A three-time Jeopardy! champion, Doug appeared on the show’s 2006 Tournament of Champions.

Jennifer duBois is the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2012 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award. Her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for a New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her third novel, The Spectators, was published in 2019 by Random House. She earned a B.A. in political science and philosophy from Tufts University and an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before completing a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Her writing has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, LitHub, Playboy, The Missouri Review, Salon, The Kenyon Review, Cosmopolitan, Narrative, and ZYZZYVA. 

Debra Monroe is the author of seven books: two story collections, The Source of Trouble and A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education; and one essay collection, It Takes a Worried Woman. She is the editor of the teaching anthology Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in many venues, including Longreads, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The New England Review, TheNew York Times, The American Scholar, Solstice, Guernica, Salon, Rumpus, and more. Her essays have been cited as Notable in Best American Essays many times. She is the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction and has received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Southern Graduate Colleges Outstanding Mentor Award.

Lindsay Stern is the author of three books of fiction, including Lüz and Town of Shadows. Her novel The Study of Animal Languages, an Amazon Editors’ pick, won the Lois Kahn Wallace Writers Award from the Brearley School and the Taylor Chehak Prize from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She received a Watson Fellowship (2013), was a finalist for the Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for scholarship in law and literature (2023), and was the winner of the Austin Sarat Award (2023), the Academy of American Poets Prize (2017), the Amy Award from Poets and Writers (2014), and the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History for a forthcoming essay on two lost poems by Ludwig Wittgenstein (2023). Her cover story “The Divide” (2020) was nominated for a National Magazine Award by Smithsonian.