Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing Faculty Mentor Biographies

MILE-HIGH MFA

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing PROGRAM

FACULT Y MENTOR BIOGR APHIES

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FICTION/CREATIVE NONFICTION/POETRY/ W R I T I N G F O R P E R F O R M A N C E / Y O U N G - A D U LT F I C T I O N / GR APHIC NARR ATIVE

You want to tell stories, but you can’t seem to find the time. Well now is the time.

Here’s how the story goes: Beginning

You choose to write. Every day. You apply to Regis’ Mile-High MFA, a low-residency program that lets you stay at your job and close to your family, but pushes you to make time for writing.

Middle

You work with a professional writer. You turn out pages like never before. You read great books. Between semesters, you attend residencies in Denver, honing your craft, making friends and learning to sell your work.

End

You leave the program with a writing practice, sharpened skills, a network of seasoned and aspiring writers, a publishable manuscript and an action plan for putting writing into practice in the world.

Andrea Rexilius

Eric Baus Co-Director

Co-Director

Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: How I Became a Hum (Octopus Books, 2020), The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights 2014), Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004).

His poems, interviews and essays have been anthologized in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry (McSweeney’s), 60 Morning Walks: Serial Interviews with Contemporary Authors (Ugly Duckling Presse), The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (Rescue Press), The Arcadia Project: North American Pastoral Poetry (Ahsahta Press), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow) and elsewhere.

Andrea Rexilius is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Sister Urn (Sidebrow, Spring 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012) and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011). Her creative and critical writing is featured in the following anthologies: Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (U of Michigan P), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books), Sixty Morning Talks: Serial Interviews with Contemporary Authors (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Letter Machine Book of Interviews (Letter Machine Editions), among others. She is core faculty in Poetry, and Program Coordinator for the Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University.

Eric’s approach to writing and teaching poetry celebrates discovery and surprise. He is most excited by work that has one foot firmly rooted in the concrete details of lived experience and another foot floating inside the world of dreams.

Mario Acevedo

R. Alan Brooks

Faculty Mentor Graphic Narrative

Faculty Mentor Graphic Narrative and Fiction

Mario Acevedo is the author of the bestselling Felix Gomez detective-vampire series, which includes Rescue From Planet Pleasure, from WordFire Press. His debut novel, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, was chosen by Barnes & Noble as one of the best Paranormal Fantasy Novels of the Decade and was a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. His novel, Good Money Gone, co-authored with Richard Kilborn, won a best novel 2014 International Latino Book Award. Mario lives and writes in Denver, Colorado. He’s interested in stories with nuanced characters grappling with high stakes, in modern noir, sciencefiction or fantasy settings.

Alan Brooks teaches writing for the MFA program at Regis University and Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

He is the writer/creator of The Burning Metronome and Anguish Garden - graphic novels with social commentary. He also hosts a popular comics podcast which focuses on marginalized members of the geek world. He writes The Colorado Sun’s weekly comic, “What’d I Miss?”, and has written comic books for Pop Culture Classroom, Zenescope Entertainment and more. In addition, Alan is a musician and noted stage host, regularly emceeing celebrated events, like the DINK Awards Show, Arise Music Festival and more.

Carolina Ebeid

Steven Dunn Faculty Mentor Fiction

Faculty Mentor Poetry

Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky 2016) and water & power (Tarpaulin Sky 2018). Potted Meat was a finalist for the 2017 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction, and shortlisted for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Some of his work can be found in Columbia Journal, Rigorous, Granta Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2018. He earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver, and is currently an MFA student at Stetson University.

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet.

Her first book You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior was published

by Noemi Press as part of the Akrilica Series, and selected as one of ten best debuts of 2016 by Poets & Writers. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, the NEA, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. She is on faculty at the Mile High MFA at Regis University, the bilingual MFA at the University of Texas El Paso, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. A longtime editor, she currently edits poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the multimedia zine Visible Binary. Carolina grew up in West New York, New Jersey, in a Cuban and Palestinian family.

Kathy Fish

Janna Goodwin

Faculty Mentor Fiction

Faculty Mentor Writing for Performance

Kathy Fish has published four collections of short fiction: a chapbook in the Rose Metal Press collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011), Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012), and Rift, co-authored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2015). A new collection, Wild(er) Life is set to release from Matter Press in 2018. Her story, “Strong Tongue,” was chosen by Amy Hempel for Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books).

Janna L. Goodwin is a playwright, director, performer, and producer of original, devised and communitybased work.

Her one-act and full-length plays, solo and ensemble work have been produced in Denver, San Francisco, New York and throughout New England. They include The House Not Touched By Death, Serving Time, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home

By Now, Just Pretend Everything is Perfectly Normal, Pointers, and more. Janna’s most recent comic solo piece, You Are Reminded That Your Safety is Your Own Responsibility (2017, directed by Lee Massaro) appeared at the United Solo Festival, the Voodoo Comedy Playhouse and at the Marsh Theatre.

She is writing a novel, Cowboy State, about a group of friends coming of age in Wyoming at the turn of the millennium. The story explores place, gender, history and the development and expression of a conservative political culture that reflects national and global concerns, tensions and divisions.

Steven Cole Hughes

Kristen Iversen

Faculty Mentor Writing for Performance

Faculty Mentor Fiction and Nonfiction

Steven Cole Hughes teaches playwriting at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and is a Resident Playwright at the Creede Repertory Theatre. His full-length plays include The Bad Man, Billy Hell (’08 Ovation Award for Best New Work), Slabtown, cowboyily, Arabia, Battleground State, Dogs by Seven and Poor Devils.

Kristen Iversen is the author of several books including the awardwinning Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, chosen by universities across the country for their First Year Experience/Common Read programs and now a forthcoming documentary. Her nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, American Scholar, Reader’s Digest, Fourth Genre, Beloit Fiction Journal and others. She has appeared on C-Span, NPR’s Fresh Air, and BBC World Outlook and worked extensively with A&E Biography and The History Channel. Her forthcoming book of nonfiction explores the relationship between Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain, and she is also finishing a novel.

Steven’s plays for young audiences are The Presidents!, The Wright Stuff and The Geography of Adventure.

Productions and commissions have come from Bloomington Playwrights Project, The Coterie Theatre, Creede Repertory Theatre, Curious Theatre Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, The Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the National Theatre Conservatory and the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. He won the 2011 Denver Post Ovation Award for Special Achievement for his trilogy of plays The Billy Trilogy.

Traci L. Jones

Adrianne Kalfopoulou

Faculty Mentor Young-Adult Fiction

Faculty Mentor Nonfiction and Poetry

While raising her four kids and helping with the pharmacy she owns and operates, Traci L. Jones realized that something was missing. By chance she came across an ad for the creative writing certificate at the University of Denver. She began taking courses, and in one of those courses she was given an assignment which led to her first book, Standing Against the Wind. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006, the book would win the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award. Two more books followed in 2010 and 2011, Finding My Place and Silhouetted by the Blue.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou has published two poetry collections, Wild Greens and Passion Maps, and scholarly work on Sylvia Plath in Women’s Studies and Plath Profiles. Her most recent publication, Ruin, Essays in Exilic Living (Red Hen, 2014) deals with moments that explore, in Rachel Hadas’ words, “not only cities but states of mind and soul in a pulsing, fraying time.” She is the recipient of Room Magazine’s prize in nonfiction and a “Notable Essay of the Year” in Best American Essays. Her third poetry collection, A History of Too Much, was published in 2018.

While she reads every genre of book, Jones is most interested in young-adult and middlegrade fiction. She would also be excited to help writers develop any multicultural book and even historical romance writing as well.

TaraShea Nesbit

Daniel José Older

Faculty Mentor Fiction and Nonfiction

Faculty Mentor Young-Adult Fiction

TaraShea Nesbit’s first book, The Wives of Los Alamos, draws upon archival research to consider the creation of the atomic bomb from the perspective of the nuclear physicists’ wives. The book was a national bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, a Library Journal Best Debut, the winner of two New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and published in several languages. Her nonfiction on topics as varied as scientific history, class ascension, grief, adolescence and motherhood have been featured in The Guardian, Fourth Genre, Salon, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.

She earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing (Prose) from the University of Denver and an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at New York University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Denver, the University of Washington and Miami University.

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of Salsa Nocturna, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series (Penguin) and the young adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher (Scholastic), including Shadowshaper, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award and named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read. He’s also writing a Star Wars book. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic and hear his music at danieljoseolder.net, on YouTube and @djolder on Twitter.

Lori Ostlund Faculty Mentor Fiction Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Her first book, a story collection entitled The Bigness of the World (UGA Press, 2009; reissued by Scribner in 2016), won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and the 2009 California Book Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review and New England Review, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was finalist for the 2017 Simpson Family Literary Prize.

Lori is a teacher and lives in San Francisco with her wife and cats, though she spent her formative years in Minnesota, cat-less.

Lori is interested in the ways that character and place intersect. She is also interested in the ways that humor is created on the page and in sentence-level craft.

Khadijah Queen Faculty Mentor Poetry and Writing for Performance Khadijah Queen is the author of five books, most recently I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017). Earlier poetry collections include Conduit (Akashic / Black Goat 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing. The prize included a full staged production of the play at Theaterlab NYC from December 10-20, 2015 by Fiona Templeton’s The Relationship theater company. Individual poems and prose appear in Fence, Tin House, Buzzfeed, The Offing, jubilat, Memoir, Tupelo Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, DIAGRAM, Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks (Kore Press) and widely elsewhere. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the lowresidency Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University and is raising a teenager.

Jenny Shank

Christine Sneed

Faculty Mentor Fiction and Nonfiction

Faculty Mentor Fiction

Jenny Shank’s novel The Ringer won the High Plains Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association’s “Reading the West” Book Awards. Her stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, The Onion, Poets & Writers Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals and many other newspapers and magazines.

One of her stories was listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in the Best American Essays and she’s won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the University of Southern California and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Christine Sneed is the author of four works of fiction: The Virginity of Famous Men, Paris He Said, Little Known Facts and Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry. She has published short stories and essays in various anthologies and periodicals including The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best New Stories from the Midwest, Ploughshares, Southern Review, New York Times, New England Review, San Francisco Chronicle, O Magazine and Chicago Tribune. She has received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Ploughshares’ Zacharis Award for a first book, the Society of Midland Authors’ Prize for best adult fiction, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award and she was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Evanston, IL. More information can be found on her website, christinesneed.com.

Jenny would love to work with students writing fiction and nonfiction in the form of novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, satire or anything else they can dream up. She’s especially interested in stories set in the American West, multicultural literature and humor.

Helen Thorpe

Denise Vega

Faculty Mentor Nonfiction

Faculty Mentor Young-Adult Fiction

Helen Thorpe was born in London to Irish parents. She is an awardwinning journalist who lives in Denver, Colorado. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Texas Monthly and 5280. She has also written three books, all published

by Scribner.

Denise Vega is the award-winning author of four books for middleschool and young-adult readers, including her “blog” books: Click Here (to find out how i survived seventh grade) – a Scholastic Book Club/ Fair bestselling title and a Colorado Book Award winner – and Access Denied (and other eighth grade error messages) as well as Fact of Life #31 (Colorado Book Award winner) and Rock On. Denise has taught writing classes and workshops for a variety of organizations, community education and enrichment programs and she has spoken and presented at a number of conferences. She is on faculty at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, teaching a range of classes on children’s books. She lives in Denver with her family where she writes, reads, runs, watches too much Netflix, avoids cheese and embraces French fries. Find out more at denisevega.com.

Her first book, Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, was published in 2009.

It won the Colorado Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. The Denver Center for the Performing Arts adapted the nonfiction book for the stage as a play.

Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War, was published in 2014. TIME named it the number one nonfiction book of the year. The Boston Globe called it “utterly absorbing, gorgeously written, and unforgettable.” And The New York Times said: “Thorpe achieves a staggering intimacy with her subjects.”

Her latest book is The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom.

Denise is open to working with writers of middle-grade and young-adult fiction of all genres (contemporary realistic, historical, paranormal, fantasy, etc).

Rachel Weaver Faculty Mentor Fiction and (Teaching Mentorship) Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction (Ig Publishing, May 2014), which Oprah Magazine described as a “strikingly vivid debut novel” and named to the May 2014 list of Top Ten Titles to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a top ten debut for Spring 2014 by IndieBound as an Indie Next List Pick, and by Yoga Journal as one of their top five suggested summer reads.

Weaver’s writing career began in the isolation of remote Alaska, which has shaped her teaching philosophy. She believes that there are times when isolation is necessary, but also that a strong writing community, as well as mentors who are available to help guide and problem-solve, are essential to a productive writing life. She is interested in working with novelists at any stage of the writing process.

Kathryn Winograd Faculty Mentor Nonfiction and Poetry Kathryn Winograd is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, a finalist in the Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, Air Into Breath, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry, Stepping Sideways into a Poetry, Scholastic resource book for K12 teachers and two books on online learning published by McGraw Hill. Her essays have been noted in Best American Essays, and published in journals and anthologies including Arts & Letters, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, River Teeth, The Florida Review, Essay Daily, Puerto del Sol and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, 6th editon. Her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXVIII. Poems have won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s 2011 Poetry contest on War and Peace and the 2011 Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd has been the recipient of a Colorado Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute Associateship and a co-winner of a Colorado Endowment for The Humanities Grant.

MILE-HIGH MFA

Our unique focus combines a thorough instruction in the craft and business of writing with the practical application of our students’ abilities as writers in the world. In addition to the expert guidance they receive as they progress from original drafts to final manuscripts, students will graduate the program fully prepared to embark on a writing career, bolstered and invigorated by the support of their new writing community.

DISTINCT FEATURES

• the lowest (5 to 1) average student-faculty ratio in the country • the only MFA program in the Mile-High City • one of only two Jesuit low-residency MFA programs in the country—and “Jesuit” stands for academic rigor and cura personalis (care for the whole person) • one of the only three low-residency programs that require students to use their writing talents to contribute to their community, and the only one requiring a “Writing in the World” Action Plan • the only program that offers a “ski day” during the January residency and a “whitewater adventure” during the July residency

DEGREE OVERVIEW

The Mile-High MFA requires the successful completion of four 16-week writing semesters and five nine-day residencies. Students will begin with orientation at the beginning of their first residency and end with 160-240 pages of prose in fiction or non-fiction only. Following each residency (except the last) will be a semester-long study in which students will work one-on-one with a faculty mentor. By their final residency, students will have written and revised 240-400 pages of prose (fiction, nonfiction, graphic novel, writing for performance), or 160-240 pages of poetry or flash fiction, along with at least 24 book annotations, a book-length thesis, a preface to their thesis, a critical essay in their major genre, and a “Writing in the World” Action Plan.

GENRE STUDY

Students typically choose one genre to study, in which case they participate in five residency workshops and study for four semesters in the same genre. Such students may also take one residency workshop and one semester in a different genre. Students may also choose to apply (by the end of their second residency at the latest) for a Dual-Genre Study, which entails an additional semester (for a total of five) and an additional residency (for a total of six). Dual-genre students will take three residency workshops and three semesters in their main genre (i.e. the genre in which they will write their MFA thesis) and two residency workshops and two semesters in their secondary genre.

LOW-RESIDENCY

The low-residency format offers the flexibility of working from home without sacrificing academic rigor. Indeed, the low-residency format may be said to be more rigorous than a traditional (residential) MFA program, because, instead of attending classes once or twice a week and participating in workshops, students are working intensely on their writing for 25 hours per week.

ACCESSIBLE, ENGAGING FACULTY Whereas in a traditional program students may attend class one to three times a week and rarely see their professors outside of class, in a low-residency program they will see all faculty members throughout the residency and find it easy to establish strong relationships with them, as well as with their fellow students. The accessibility of the faculty and directors, and the esprit de corps among all members of the MFA community, are what makes the low-residency degree so appealing - and this is especially true of the Mile-High MFA, where our faculty and directors make every effort to avail themselves to students, and where we do all we can to create opportunities for students to collaborate with and support one another.

RESIDENCIES

Twice a year, in January and July, students will attend nine-day residencies, from Friday evening to the following Sunday afternoon, with an “Intermezzo” on Wednesdays. Residencies are inspiring, invigorating gatherings of like-minded writers that provide students with the opportunity to learn their craft, workshop their writing, attend readings by award-winning writers, and immerse themselves in the writing life. Our brilliant yet down-to-earth faculty mentors will eat, drink, and converse with students, and provide lessons and advice on writing and the publishing world.

WRITING SEMESTERS

Each semester’s writing plan and reading list are developed by students in dialogue with their faculty mentors during the preceding residency. Students should expect to devote about 25 hours a week to this endeavor, submitting four packets of original writing (one per month) and eight critical responses (two per packet) on both canonical and contemporary books in their genres.

TUITION

Tuition for the 2020-2021 academic year: $665 per credit hour Total credits required: 54 (or 66 if optional Dual Genre Study is elected) The degree plan includes five residencies and six writing semesters. A Dual-Genre Residency and Dual-Genre Writing Semester are added if the student chooses to pursue the Dual Genre Study.

Your story starts here.

REGIS.EDU/MFA 800.944.7667 RUADMISSIONS @REGIS.EDU

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Regis University is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC).

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