FACULTY OF THE GODDARD MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING
The writers who teach in the Goddard MFA in Creative Writing Program have been published and produced internationally, and are recognized in their fields. They are active writers. Collectively, current and recent faculty members have published more than 150 books, had plays produced around the world, and won most of the major U.S. literary awards, a short list of which includes: the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Fulbright Scholarship, the Creative Capital Grant for Innovative Literature, the U.S. Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award, the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry, the Chomondeley Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shubert Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the New Dramatists’ Joe Callaway Award and Whitfield Cook Award, the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays’ Roger Stevens Award, the Drama-Logue Award, and the Greenwall Foundation’s Oscar Ruebhausen Commission, the Revson Fellow for the Future of New York City at Columbia University, Stonewall Award for Improving the Lives of Lesbians and Gays in the United States, American Library Association Book Award, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, among many others.
Read more about their achievements here, and visit the Goddard College website to learn about their teaching styles.

Elena Georgiou
Program Director
Elena is the author of the short-story collection, The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018), and the poetry collections Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press) and mercy mercy me (University of Wisconsin), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. She is also co-editor (with Michael Lassell) of the poetry anthology, The World In Us (St. Martin’s Press). Georgiou has won an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work appears in journals such as BOMB, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Gargoyle, Lumina, MiPoesia, and Spoon River Review. She is an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Georgiou is an English-Cypriot originally from London, where she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life. Since then, she has lived in the US — first in New York, now in Vermont. She maintains a website at elenageorgiou.com.

Jan Clausen
Poetry, Hybrid, Prose
Jan is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, including the hybrid text Veiled Spill: A Sequence (GenPop Books, 2014). Her 1999 memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity was reissued by Seven Stories Press in 2017. Recent poetry titles include From a Glass House and If You Like Difficulty. Prose titles include the story collection Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover; and the novels Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers. Clausen’s poetry and creative prose are widely published in journals and anthologies; her book reviews and literary journalism have appeared in Boston Review, Ms., The Nation, Poets & Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books. She is the recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her website is ablationsite.org.

BEATRIX GATES
Poetry, Prose, Libretto
Bea has published five poetry collections, including Dos; In the Open, a Lambda poetry finalist; and Ten Minutes. In 2020, Gates’ chapbook, desire lines, was published by Artifact Press, with graphics by award-winning poet/book artist Heidi Reiszies, (https://www.artifactpress.com), and in Bateau, Gates’ poems and more translations of Spanish poet Jesús Aguado (w/ Electa Arenal). She was recently awarded an Alan Jutzi Non-traditional Scholar fellowship at the Huntington Library for research on astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt for “Good Seeing: Poem of the Full Sky,” and shared a Witter Bynner Translation Award with Electa Arenal for Jesús Aguado’s The Poems of Vikram Babu (HOST), and her own poetry in Arabic translation appears on the Iraqi literature site: www.alnaked-aliraqi.net/article/27446.php. Her poems & translations have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Sirena, Tarpaulin Sky, The Kenyon Review; hybrid work in MAP magazine out of Scotland, www.mapmagazine.co.uk; and her essay, “Jane Cooper: Seventeen Names for Necessity,” appears in the University of Michigan Series, A Radiance of Attention: Jane Cooper (eds, Collins & Bland, 2019). She conceived and wrote the libretto for “The Singing Bridge,” music by Anna Dembska, and they shared NEA, LEF and Davis Foundation support for the opera’s premiere at Maine’s Stonington Opera House. As a founder of Granite Press (1975-1989), she served as editor, designer, and printer. She produced her own letterpress chapbook Shooting at Night and Rosa Lane’s Roots & Reckonings with Maine Arts Commission support and entered trade publishing with Grace Paley’s first book of poetry, Leaning Forward. She closed the press with the seminal bilingual anthology, IXOK AMAR.GO, Central American Women Poets for Peace, ed. Angelsey. Editor of The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love (Anchor), she curated A Different Light’s Poetry Series at NYC’s LGBTQ bookstore from 1990-96 with emerging and well-known poets, and special events for poets lost to the community from cancer and the AIDS Epidemic. Her website is: https://beatrixgates.org.

Aimee Liu
Fiction, Nonfiction
Aimee’s work includes the new novel Glorious Boy, as well as Flash House; Cloud Mountain; and Face, and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. She is co-editor of Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, and editor of Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders. She also has co-authored several books on psychological topics. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, published as a Literary Guild Super Release, and serialized in Good Housekeeping.She’s received a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award, a Bosque Fiction award, and special mention by the Pushcart Prize. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies. A past president of the national literary organization PEN Center USA, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Her website is https://aimeeliu.net/

Rogelio Martinez
Playwrighting
Rogelio is the winner of the first ever Mid-Career Fellowship at the Lark Theater Company. Ping Pong, his play about Nixon, Mao, and the hippie that brought the two together, will be produced at The Public as part of their Public Studio series. His new play, Born in East Berlin, will be given a workshop at the Arden in January. Some of Rogelio’s plays include Wanamaker’s Pursuit (Arden Theater), When Tang Met Laika (Sloan Grant/ Denver Center/ Perry Mansfield), All Eyes and Ears (INTAR at Theater Row), Fizz (NEA/ TCG Grant/ Besch Solinger Productions at the Ohio Theatre, New Theater Miami), Learning Curve (Smith and Krauss New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2005/ Besch Solinger Productions at Theater Row), I Regret She’s Made of Sugar (winner of the 2001 Princess Grace Award), Arrivals and Departures (Summer Play Festival), Union City… (E.S.T, winner of the James Hammerstein Award), and Displaced (Marin Theater Co.) In addition, Rogelio’s work has been developed and presented at the Public Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, the Magic Theater, and Ojai Theater Company among others. Rogelio is an alumnus of New Dramatists and his plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing. He has received commissions from the Mark Taper Forum, the Atlantic Theater Company, the Arden Theater Company, Denver Center Theater, and South Coast Repertory. In the past Rogelio has been profiled in a cover story in American Theater Magazine. In addition to writing, Rogelio teaches playwriting at Goddard College, Montclair University, and Primary Stages as well as private workshops. For several years Rogelio was a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writer’s Group at Primary Stages. In television, Rogelio has written for Astroblast, a children’s television show. Rogelio was born in Cuba and arrived in this country in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift. He lives in New York with his family.

Victoria Nelson
Fiction, Memoir
Victoria is a fiction writer, dramatic writer, and essayist, author of two books of stories, a memoir, and the award-winning critical books The Secret Life of Puppets and Gothicka. She is coproducer with Benedict Cumberbatch of the Fox feature film ROGUE MALE and her play SERAPHITA has been optioned by LatitudeLink. A novel, Neighbor George, will be published in 2021 by Strange Attractor Press and Thrilling, a critical/personal essay on reading thrillers, will appear the following year from Harvard. She has held Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and has won the Modern Language Association Award for Comparative Literary Studies and the American Publishers Association PROSE Award for Excellence in Literature.

Richard Panek
Fiction, Nonfiction
Richard’s most recent book is The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet. A Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, Richard is the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the 2012 Science Communication award from the American Institute of Physics. He was also the co-author, with Temple Grandin, of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times best-seller and the recipient of the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2013. Previous books include The Invisible Century, which pairs Einstein and Freud in their investigations of new frontiers in science and philosophy—relativity and the unconscious; Seeing and Believing, which traces the history of the telescope; and Waterloo Diamonds. He also wrote the National Geographic giant-format movie Robots 3D. His educational and professional background is in both journalism and fiction, disciplines he combines in trying to illuminate the history and philosophy of science even for readers who, like himself before he begins his research, would know little or nothing about the topic at hand. His website is http://www.richardpanek.net.

Sherri L. Smith
Fiction, Graphic Novel, Young Adult, Nonfiction
Sherri is the author of nine award-winning books for young people, including the 2009 California Book Awards Gold Medalist, Flygirl,—a World War II adventure the Washington Post named a best book of the year. Her middle grade historical fantasy The Toymaker’s Apprentice, and her contemporary YA noir mystery, Pasadena, are both winners of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award. Her nonfiction book Who Were the Tuskegee Airmen? is part of the NY Times bestselling Who Was? series. Her novels appear on multiple state reading lists and have been named Amelia Bloomer, Junior Library Guild, Children’s Book Council, and American Library Association Best Books for Young People selections. She is also the recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation Award and the University of Kansas Alyce Hunley Whayne Visiting Researchers Travel Award. Sherri was a judge for the 2014 National Book Awards in Young People’s Literature and has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, the Wellstone Center, and Wassard Elea. She’s worked in comic books (The Simpsons, James Cameron’s AVATAR), animation (Disney, Tim Burton) construction (at LAX!), and make up special effects (Grimm). Sherri currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and the MFA in Children’s Writing Program at Hamline University. She returns to World War II with her newest novel, The Blossom and the Firefly, which tells the moving story of two Japanese teens— one a kamikaze pilot, the other a schoolgirl who serves on the base from which he will fly his final mission. Learn more at www.sherrilsmith.com.

Deborah Brevoort
Playwriting, Libretto
Deborah is best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie, which is produced all over the world after winning the Onassis International Playwriting Competition and the Kennedy Center Fund for New American plays award. She is a three-time winner of the prestigious Frontiers competition at Ft. Worth Opera for her opera librettos for Albert Nobbs and Embedded, with Patrick Soluri, and Steal a Pencil for Me, with Gerald Cohen (Opera Colorado premiere in 2018). Embedded premiered at Ft. Worth and Fargo Moorhead Operas in 2016. She is currently writing The Knock with Aleksandra Vrebalov for Glimmerglass Opera. She was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and On Site opera to write Murasaki’s Moon, an opera with Michi Wiancko which premiered in the Astor Garden at the Met. Blue Moon Over Memphis, her Noh Drama about Elvis Presley, is touring internationally by Theatre Nohgaku, with Noh orchestrations by Richard Emmert. She is a two-time winner of the Frederick Loewe award in musical theatre for Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing with Scott Richards and King Island Christmas with David Friedman. She wrote the book and lyrics for Crossing Over, an Amish Hip Hop musical with composer/co-lyricist Stephanie Salzman. She is currently writing the book and lyrics for Loving with composer Diedre Murray, and for Tiffany Girls with composer/co-lyricist Julianne Wick Davis. Her plays include The Poetry of Pizza, The Blue-Sky Boys, The Comfort Team, and The Velvet Weapon, which have been produced at theatres around the US. Her latest, My Lord, What a Night is having a rolling world premiere at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Orlando Shakespeare Theatre and Florida Studio Theatre. It will be produced by Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC in 2021. Deborah serves as a mentor to the NBO Musical Theatre Initiative in Nairobi, Kenya. She has received grants and awards from the Rockefeller foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, NJ State Council on the Arts and numerous others. She teaches in the graduate musical theatre writing program at NYU and the MFA playwriting program at Columbia University in addition to the MFAW program at Goddard College.

Kenny Fries
Poetry, Memoir, Libretto
Kenny is the author of In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature grant; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, recipient of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry; and Body, Remember: A Memoir; as well as editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone, which premiered at Asia Society Texas Center. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, and Japanese, and has appeared in numerous places including The New York Times, Granta, LitHub, Catapult, and Electric Literature. He was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), and has received grants from DAAD (German Academic Exchange), the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was awarded a 2019 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts fellowship residency to work on his next book, Stumbling over History: Aktion T4, Disability, and the Holocaust. Website: www.kennyfries.com.

Bhanu Kapil
Poetry, Prose, Hybrid
Bhanu is the author of six full length books: How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry, 2020), The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006; Kelsey Street Press, 2016), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015). She is currently the Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow at the University of Cambridge, England. She is the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry, (Yale University), and the Chomondeley Award, Society of Authors. A roundtable on her work appeared at the Believer, “Reading Bhanu Kapil.” She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College, and for Naropa University’s Interdisciplinary Studies program in Boulder, Colorado. Her website is thesparklyblogofbhanukapil.blogspot.com.

Susan Kim
Playwrighting, Screenwriting, TV writing, Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Fiction, Young Adult
Susan Kim writes plays, graphic novels, screenplays, YA fiction, and nonfiction, as well as documentaries and teleplays for children’s television. Her graphic novel, Brain Camp (cowritten with husband Laurence Klavan) was a Junior Library Guild Selection, a Scholastic Book Fair Selection, one of 2010’s Top Ten Great Graphic Novel for Teens by the American Library Association, and is scheduled to be republished as a mass market paperback in 2015. Their graphic novel City of Spies was chosen for the Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List by the Texas Library Association, Scripps Howard News Service’s Favorite Books of 2010, and Comic Book Resources’ Favorite Books of 2010. She also won the Writers Guild Award for Best Documentary for Paving the Way, the Drama League of New York Award for Outstanding New Play for Open Spaces, and has been nominated for national Emmy Award five times and the Writers Guild of America award three times. She lives in New York City.

Douglas A. Martin
Poetry, Hybrid, Memoir, Fiction
Douglas is the author of ten or so books, most recently Wolf (Nightboat, 2020), an anti true crime novel. Other titles span poetry and prose and include: Once You Go Back (Lambda Award Nomination for Gay Memoir/Biography and produced as an Audible title), Branwell (Ferro-Grumley Award finalist), Your Body Figured, In The Time of Assignments, and They Change the Subject, a book of stories including the Pushcart Prize nominated “An Escort” and named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year in the San Francisco Bay Times. Douglas’s first novel, Outline of My Lover, was selected by Colm Tóibín as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their multimedia live film and ballet, Kammer/Kammer, which has been performed worldwide. His books have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese, with Spanish forthcoming. As a critic, his pieces have appeared in such volumes as Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre and Biting the Error: Forty Writers Explore Narrative. Raised in Georgia, Douglas now lives in New York and divides time between Brooklyn and upstate.

John McManus
Fiction
John is the author of four books of fiction: Stop Breakin Down, Born on a Train, Bitter Milk, and his latest story collection, Fox Tooth Heart. He is contributing editor at Fiddleblack, a small press and literary journal dedicated to creative writing with a strong sense of place. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, The Oxford American, The Literary Review, and Harvard Review, among other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, a Creative Capital grant for innovative literature, and a Fulbright Scholar grant for a novel-in-progress involving gay refugees in South Africa. He grew up in East Tennessee and lives in Virginia. His website is: johnmcmanus.net.

Keenan Norris
Fiction, Nonfiction
Keenan’s novel Brother and the Dancer is the winner of the James D. Houston Award and was also nominated for the inaugural John Leonard Prize for first books. Keenan’s work has appeared in numerous forums, including recent pieces on blacks in tech and college student-athlete ethics at popmatters.com, his essay on Oscar Grant’s murder in BOOM: A Journal of California, and “Ben Carson, Thug Life and Malcolm X” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. His short stories have appeared in Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California’s Inland Empire, New California Writing 2013, Eleven-Eleven, and the Santa Monica, Evansville and Green Mountains Reviews. He has also published peer-reviewed scholarship, most recently his essay “Coal, Charcoal and Chocolate Comedy: On the Satire of Mat Johnson and John O. Killens” in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights. He is the editor of the seminal critical work Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. His commentaries on that anthology and issues related to it have been featured in the Financial Times, Huffington Post and New York Observer. Keenan is a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow and think tank member and also serves on the editorial board for Literature for Life, a Los Angeles-based online literary journal, salon, and resource for educators K-12 designed to spark a love of reading and writing. Keenan serves as guest editor for the Oxford African American Studies Center. He is an English professor at Evergreen Valley College and is also a lecturer, teaching Black Lit and Creative Writing, at California State University, East Bay. His website is: keenannorris.com

RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO
Fiction, Nonfiction
Reiko is the author of Shadow Child, a suspenseful literary historical novel published in 2018. Her first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award, and her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award Finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City and is a Hedgebrook alumna. Reiko has been interviewed widely on motherhood including on The Today Show, 20/20, and The View. Her articles on motherhood, Hiroshima, the Japanese internment camps and radiation poisoning have been published globally, including in the L.A. Times, Guardian UK, CNN Opinion and Salon, and through the Progressive Media Project. She is a faculty member at Goddard College in the MFA in Creative Writing program, and is the advisor of the national literary journal, Clockhouse. Reiko is “hapa,” Japanese/Caucasian, and was raised in Hawaii. She is the founder of the writing retreat Pele’s Fire on the Big Island of Hawaii. www.rahnareikorizzuto.com