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Nonfiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Brenda Miller edited the anthology The Next Draft: Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her most recent collection of her own work is A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir, and she is the recipient of six Pushcart Prizes.

Senior Graphic Designer | Marketing & Communications | beilkesm@plu.edu | 253-535-7433 | Scott Beilke joined the PLU print shop staff shortly after receiving his certification for offset reprographics operator from Clover Park Vocational School in 1992.

Poetry, Nonfiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Brian Teare, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia.

Professor of Religion and Culture | Religion | suzanne.crawford@plu.edu | 253-535-8107 | Suzanne Crawford O’Brien’s area of specialization is Religion and Culture, with emphases in Native American religious traditions, and comparative studies of minority religious communities in North America, including religion and healthcare, gender and ethnicity, and religion and popular culture.

Visiting Instructor of Music, Strings, and Composition | Music | korine.fujiwara@plu.edu | 253-535-7602 | Montana native Korine Fujiwara is a founding member of the Carpe Diem String Quartet, a devoted and sought-after chamber musician and teacher, and a gifted composer and arranger. Ms.

Nonfiction, Poetry | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations, most recently, Rough Likeness (essays) and It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems).  Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley, and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry.  Recent work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays.  She is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches at writing programs around the country, including, most recently, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference.  She lives in Baltimore with her family. Mentor.

Professor Emeritus and Faculty Fellow in Humanities | Religion | torvensa@plu.edu | 253-535-8106 | Samuel Torvend teaches courses in the history of early, medieval, and reformation Christianity as well as historical courses on the reform of social welfare, Christian responses to local and global hunger, Christian art and architecture, and Christian rituals.

Assistant Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy | Marriage and Family Therapy | alexus.hamilton@plu.edu | 253-535-8167 | Dr.

Fiction, Nonfiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Fiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Irish Times and Vice, and a Best Foreign Book of the Year by Spain’s Qué Leer Magazine.  Virgin and Other Stories has been (or will be) translated into German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Italian.  She has received The Plimpton Prize for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo.   Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Die Welt, ZYZZYVA, and Oxford American, among others, has been cited as notable in Best American Short Stories, featured by Huffington Post, and anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review.  Her nonfiction has appeared in Der Spiegel, Granta, Vice, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung Magazine, and been named a Most Popular Read of the Year by Granta.  She has taught in the creative writing programs at Emory University and the University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and now teaches at Clemson University. Mentor.  Workshops and classes in fiction. Statement: “The most important thing your writing can be is interesting.  And by that I mean interesting to you, because when you’re deeply engaged in the process, the work sparks alive.  This level of engagement involves writing into places you didn’t expect and opening to the risk of surprise.