Faculty in Poetry
Permanent Faculty
James Galvin's books include X: Poems, Resurrection Update, Lethal Frequencies, Fencing the Sky, and The Meadow. He has taught at the University of Wyoming, Grinnell College, and the University of Montana.
Mark Levine is the author of three books of poems, Debt, Enola Gay, and The Wilds, and a book of nonfiction, F5. He has written journalism for many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The New Yorker.
Cole Swensen's books include Goest, Such Rich Hour, Oh, Try, and Noon. She translates poetry from French and lives part-time in Paris. For several years, she taught at the University of Denver.
Dean Young is the author of Skid, First Course in Turbulence, Strike Anywhere, Beloved Infidel, Design with X, Elegy on Toy Piano, and embroyoyo. Two books are forthcoming: Primitive Mentor, and The Art of Recklessness, a book of prose. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Visiting Faculty, Spring 2008
Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry: Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine, and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. She is a contributing editor to jubilat and BOMB. Her website is http://www.mattheaharvey.info.
Visiting Faculty, Fall 2007
Tessa Rumsey received an M.F.A in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an M.A. in Visual Criticism from California College of the Arts. Her first book of poems, Assembling the Shepherd, won the 1998 Contemporary Poetry Series Competition and was published by the University of Georgia Press at the turn of the millennium. The Return Message, Rumsey's second book of poems, won the 2004 Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published by W.W. Norton in April 2005. Rumsey was awarded the 2004 Mary Tanenbaum Award for nonfiction from The San Francisco Foundation for "A Desert Alphabet," a work-in-progress. She has managed Small Press Traffic, a Literary Arts Center in San Francisco, and has taught at The University of Iowa, The University of San Francisco, and Stanford University. Rumsey lives in San Francisco.
Tony Hoagland has published three collections of poetry: Sweet Ruin
(winner of the 1992 Brittingham Prize), Donkey Gospel (winner of the
1998 James Laughlin award), and What Narcissism Means To Me (2003),
which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He
has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment on the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the
Poetry Society of America. In 2005 he received the Mark Twain Award
for humor in American poetry from the Poetry Foundation, and the
Folger Library's O.B. Hardisson Prize for achievement as a poet and
teacher. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the University
of Houston, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. A book of prose
about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2006.
Visiting Faculty, 2006-2007
Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Thomas Tranströmer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life. He was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry. Awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. He was also U.S. Poet Laureate.
Brenda Hillman received her B.A. at Pomona College and attended the University of Iowa, where she received her M.F.A. in 1976. She serves on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. Her seven collections of poetry – White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997) and Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005) – are from Wesleyan University Press. Among the awards Hillman has received are Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.