FACULTY OF THE GODDARD MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING

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 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.

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’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 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 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’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 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.