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Fellowship from the US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.  Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, the Indies Choice for Nonfiction and the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.  Her novel, Picking Bones from Ash, published by Graywolf, was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize and the Paterson Prize.  Her new book, tentatively titled A Kernel In God’s Eye, explores her family’s one

Renee Simms Fiction, Nonfiction Biography Biography Renee Simms, J.D., MFA, is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a John Gardner Fiction Fellowship at Bread Loaf, and fellowships from Ragdale and Vermont Studio Center. She’s an associate professor of African American Studies at University of Puget Sound and teaches with the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran’s low-residency MFA program. Her debut story collection Meet Behind Mars was a Foreword

Browning, and Woolf. She graduated with an M.S. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1009 and a B.A in English and Religion from St. Olaf College in 1989. Her areas of teaching expertise include the British long nineteenth century; poetry; women’s gender, and sexuality studies; narrative ethics; and writing. Her journal articles and book chapters primarily focus on Victorian women’s devotional poetry and on the lyric as form. She is also the co-editor of Cultivating Vocation in Literary

teaches a popular writing seminar on Banned Books for the First Year Experience Program.  Her constellation of courses in the English department include:  The Holocaust in the American Literary Imagination; American Literature 1914-45: Race, Sex, and War; Anne Frank as a Holocaust Icon; a senior seminar on History & Memory in US Slavery and Holocaust texts; an English Studies course on Gendered Literacy; Feminist Approaches to Literature; Women Writers and the Body Politic; and a first-year seminar on

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.  She lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Mentor. Workshops and classes in poetry. Statement: If, as Muriel Rukeyser says, poems are “meeting-places,” I am ever-ready to meet you in those places and to help you to think through the difficult pleasures of creating such encounters. I am eager, too, to discuss how you situate your work

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

Matt Young Fiction, Nonfiction Biography Biography Matt Young  is the author of the memoir, Eat the Apple (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the novel, End of Active Service (Bloomsbury, 2024). His stories and essays have appeared in TIME, Granta, Tin House, Catapult, and The Cincinnati Review among other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute for Global Good, and teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Centralia College in Washington

Jonathan M. Rizzardi Visiting Assistant Professor of Education They/Them Phone: 301-788-8270 Email: rizzardi@plu.edu Professional Biography Education Ph.D., Theatre History and Performance Studies, University of Washington, ABD M.A.T., Secondary English & Theatre, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 2013 B.A., English, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 2012 Areas of Emphasis or Expertise Theatre History and Performance Studies Arts Integration & Arts Education Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies

simply helping people discover what they already knew. I finally came to understand that’s what teaching creative writing is. My job as a writing mentor is to bring the toolbox, both literal and metaphorical. It might include kitchen utensils, glue stick and scissors, postcards, advertisements, original works of art, bottled scents, raw vegetables, or items from a recycle bin or thrift shop. It includes world literature, direct engagement with working writers, and concepts borrowed from linguistics

– one-shot 3-hour sessions, weekend retreats, and semester-long creative writing classes.  Sometimes students come into a workshop simply wanting a push, sometimes they need help finding their voices.  Everyone talks about ‘finding a voice,’ as if we all knew what this means.  We don’t.  I don’t.  What I can do in a workshop is to help students allow themselves to be clumsy, foolish, and sometimes nuts in their writing, while loosely hanging onto the reins.  What are the reins?  I don’t know that