Faculty

Meet the Creative Writing Faculty

Robin Metz
Director, Program in Creative Writing, Philip Sidney Post Professor of English
M.F.A., University of Iowa, 1967
"Young writers in my classes are continually encouraged to explore the artistic and natural world around them as a way of discovering and articulating the intricacies of selfhood."

Lori Haslem
Associate Dean of the College, Professor of English
Ph.D., University of Denver, 1990
"I continue to work on the popular use of the riddle in early modern England and its carryover to Shakespeare's plays, especially as those riddles pertain to issues of female sexuality and to dramatic closure."

Natania Rosenfeld
Professor of English
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1992
"Some current projects of mine include:A collection of memoir essays in which a vision is formed through errancy and movement. The book is autobiographical in exploring the formation of my own mind through travel, books, art and, especially, the clash and combination of several languages."

Robert Smith
Professor of English
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, 1992
"I have most recently co-edited a collection of essays on the 19th-Century American Writer Elizabeth Stoddard."

Marilyn Webb
Distinguished Professor of Journalism
M.S., Columbia University, 1981
Webb was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1997 book The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life, which traces the lives of 15 terminally ill patients, using their experiences to explore social, legal, and moral issues surrounding death in America.

Emily Anderson
Associate Professor of English
Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley, 2003
"I work on the implications of a narrator's point of view, the way reliability or unreliability shapes a narrative, and the interplay between forms and genres."

Monica Berlin
Associate Professor of English
M.F.A., Vermont College, 2002
"I've found myself fascinated by edges-the edges of everything-particularly the threshold of language or that moment where utterance edges toward something new, something different."

Gina Franco
Associate Professor of English
Ph.D., Cornell University, 2004
"I'm also working on superstition in nineteenth-century British Romanticism, a project that has led me to look at the tragic dramas of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley."

Nick Regiacorte
Associate Professor of English
M.F.A., University of Iowa, 1998
"Is it too much to ask for an instant of faith in Cilacchiatt's power to fly? In reading, writing, and teaching it strikes me as indispensable."

Chad Simpson
Associate Professor of English
M.F.A., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2005
"I began writing stories mostly because the works of other writers moved me-and because I wanted to be able to similarly move some potential reader who might find something I'd written in her hands."

Barbara Tannert-Smith
Associate Professor of English
M.F.A., University of Massachusetts, 1992

Cyn Kitchen
Visiting Assistant Professor of English
M.F.A., Spalding University, 2005
"I'm writing a memoir which has me thinking about the stories that our lives write. Memoir crams the writer into close proximity with their own experience, but the act of writing forces a distance that helps makes sense of it all."

Distinguished Writer-in-Residence

Robert Hellenga
George Appleton Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1969
"I'm very interested in the nature of literary experience, which is affective as well as interpretative."

Alex Kuo
Distinguished Affiliated Scholar in English
M.F.A., University of Iowa, 1963

Cooperating faculty from other programs

Neil Blackadder
Professor of Theatre
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1995

John Haslem
Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning
Ph.D., University of Denver, 1990

Frederick Hord
Professor of Black Studies
Ph.D., Union Graduate School, 1987
"My most immediate projects are in the areas of Black Studies theory, African American literary criticism, Black psychology traditions, and the status of Blacks in Latin America."

Paul Marasa
Writing Coordinator, Educational Development Program
M.A, Indiana University

Elizabeth Carlin Metz
Smith V. Brand Endowed Chair in Theatre Arts
MFA, Temple University, 1983
"I seek to integrate physical theatre techniques with more traditional Western theatre practices so as to discover new levels of expressiveness and meaning in theatre of all styles and genres and, thus, in the world."

Magali Roy-Féquière
Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1993
"My aim is to further interrogate nationalism by addressing its silences."

Emeritus Faculty
Michael Gardner Crowell
Professor Emeritus of English

Robert Riner Hellenga
George Appleton Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English

John McCall
Professor Emeritus of English, President Emeritus

Edward Lee Niehus
Professor Emeritus of English

Douglas Lawson Wilson
George Appleton Distinguished Service Professor of English Emeritus faculty