Dean Bakopoulos

Assistant Professor (M.F.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, '04)

Dean Bakopoulos was born and raised in metro Detroit, which is the setting of his first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt), a New York Times Notable Book. He has lectured at Michigan, Cornell, UW-Madison, and other universities about the economic and environmental problems facing the post-industrial Rust Belt, and has published related essays and criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, The Believer, and Real Simple. His one-act plays "Phonies" and "Wayside" have been produced at Alley Stage in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

The winner of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he is the former director of both the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Humanities Council. He is currently at work on a book of nonfiction, as well as a television series based on his first novel. His second novel, My American Unhappiness, will be published in late 2010.
  

Barbara Haas

Associate Professor (M.F.A., University of California-Irvine, '82) 

Barbara Haas is a fiction writer and essayist with three dozen publications in such journals as Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, The  Antioch Review, Quarterly West, American Literary Review,  The Georgia Review, Western Humanities Review and others.

Haas has received many honors and awards for her writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and numerous Arts Council grants.  She was a Fellow at Breadloaf.  Story Line Press published her collection of stories, When California was an Island.  Her M.F.A. is  from California-Irvine.

Lately, in the midst of climate change, Haas finds it necessary to focus on Iowa's Ice Age, especially the Des Moines Lobe, the last of the Quaternary Period glaciers to visit the area.  The first of these essays on Iowa's time-under-ice, titled "Wetlands in Waiting," appears in The Wapsipinicon Almanac, November 2009.

Debra Marquart

Professor (M.L.A., Moorhead State University)

Debra Marquart is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and an affiliated faculty member with the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine.  Ms. Marquart's work has appeared in numerous journals including the North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Sun Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, and Witness. A performance poet, Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything’s a Verb (New Rivers Press, 1995) and From Sweetness (Pearl Editions, 2002).

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories(New Rivers Press, 2001) draws from her experiences as a female road musician. Marquart continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, with whom she released two CDs: Orange Parade (acoustic rock); and A Regular Dervish (jazz-poetry). 

Marquart’s work has received numerous awards and commendations, including a 2008 Prose Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the John Guyon Nonfiction Award (Crab Orchard Review), the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater’s Prize from New Rivers Press, the Minnesota Voices Award, the Pearl Poetry Award (Pearl Editions), and the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society.

Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere received the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, the "Elle Lettres" Award from Elle Magazine, and a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” commendation. Marquart is currently at work on three books: a novel set in Greece titled Among the Ruins; a roots-travel memoir about her family’s migrations through Ukraine, Russia and Siberia, titled Somewhere Else This Time Tomorrow: On Geographical Flight & Cultural Amnesia; and a poetry collection, titled To Break Into Blossom.

Benjamin Percy

Assistant Professor (M.F.A., Southern Illinois University)

Benjamin Percy was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of a novel, The Wilding (Graywolf, 2010), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Men’s Journal, the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Orion, and many other magazines and journals. His honors include a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. His work has been translated into French (Albin Michel), Italian (Random House Italy) and German (Random House Germany), as well as published in the UK (Jonathan Cape -- Random House UK).

Filmmaker James Ponsoldt adapted Refresh, Refresh into a screenplay, which won the Lynn Auerbach Award from the Sundance Institute and a "fast track" fellowship from the LA Film Festival; it is now in pre-production. Refresh, Refresh has also been adapted into a graphic novel, illustrated by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff at First, Second Books (a division of Macmillan).   In addition to writing regularly for Esquire, Ben is working on a new novel, an illustrated collection of fables, and an original screenplay.  To learn more about him, visit his website, www.benjaminpercy.com.

Stephen Pett

Associate Professor (Ph.D., University of Utah)

Steve Pett is the author of two books, Pulpit of Bones (William Morrow), poetry, and Sirens (Vintage), a novel. His stories and poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, and Fiction Network as well as nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed on the Honor Roll in the Best American Short Stories.

Steve recently taught for two years at the Native American Preparatory School in New Mexico where he was twice picked by students as Teacher of the Year.  He received his MA from Hollins College and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah.  Steve Pett is the coordinator of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment, and the managing editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment.

Mary Swander

Distinguished Professor (M.F.A., University of Iowa)

In 2009, Governor Chet Culver appointed Mary Swander the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. Her most recent work is a book of poetry, The Girls on the Roof (Turning Point/Word Tech, 2009), a Mississippi River flood narrative. With the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre Swander is touring a performance piece of The Girls for the stage. Swander is also touring throughout the country her play Farmscape, a docudrama capturing the changing rural environment. Swander wrote the play in collaboration with her English 557 class in the fall of 2007.  Swander is the co-founder of Agarts, a national group designed to explore the intersection of the arts and agriculture, and is developing a website, The Iowa Literary Community, where anyone with an Iowa connection can post poetry and other pieces of writing.

Swander’s memoir, The Desert Pilgrim (Viking, 2003, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection), has just been re-issued by Ice Cube Press as has the memoir, Out of this World (Viking, 1995), by the U. of Iowa Press. Swander is the author of three additional books of poetry, Heaven-and-Earth House (Alfred Knopf, 1994), Driving the Body Back (Alfred Knopf, 1986), and Succession (University of Georgia Press, 1979), as well as a book of literary interviews, Parsnips in the Snow (with Jane Staw, University of Iowa Press, 1990). She has three edited collections, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards such as The Whiting Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and two Ingram Merrill Awards. 

David Zimmerman

Assistant Professor (M.F.A., University of Alabama)

David Zimmerman attended Emerson College for film studies and then went on to earn an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama. He has worked as a publicist at St. Martin’s Press in NYC and taught writing at Georgia Southern University, Dilla University College in Ethiopia, South College in Savannah and the University of Wisconsin, where he was also a fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. His first novel, Socket, was published by Anvil Press, and his second, The Sandbox, is forthcoming from Soho Press in 2010.