Faculty

Ann Neelon Program Director
A native of Boston and a former Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa,Ann Neelon is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of the book Easter Vigil, which earned the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and the RPCV Writers and Readers Award. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow as well as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She is also the winner of an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and fellowships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Yaddo Artists Colony. Ann's poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Gettysburg Review,and Manoa.

Carrie Jerrell Associate Program Director

Carrie Jerrell is the author of the book After the Revival, 2008 winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Measure,Image, Subtropics, The Yalobusha Review and Sewanee Theological Review among others, as well as in a limited edition tinyside Four Weddings and a Mirror, published by Big Game Books. She was also featured on From the Fishouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets. The recipient of two Associated Writing Programs Intro Awards and five Pushcart Prize nominations, Carrie completed her Ph.D. in English at Texas Tech University, where she was honored as a Chancellor's Fellow. In addition to her Murray State activities, she serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review, and during the summer she works as Director of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, also serving on the staff of the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, a novel-in-poems published by Red Hen Press in 2007. Her work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Diagram Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, and Post Road, among other journals, and she coedited the anthology Air Fare: Stories, Poems, & Essays on Flight. Brown has served as the national publicity consultant for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and for Arktoi Books, as well as the program coordinator for the Vermont College of Fine Arts writing residency in Slovenia. She’s been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She also studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar and served as the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. A graduate of the MFA Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College, she currently teaches at University of Louisville and Bellarmine University and has worked at the nonprofit, independent literary press Sarabande Books since 1999.

Blas Falconer is our MFA program's newest poetry mentor. An assistant professor at Austin Peay State University, where he serves as the poetry editor of Zone 3 Magazine/Zone 3 Press, he is the author of The Perfect Hour and A Question of Gravity and Light. Falconer's awards include the Maureen Egen Literary Award from Poets & Writers, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, the Barthelme Fellowship and a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Tommy Hays

Before writing fiction, Tommy Hays wrote anything and everything for tiny sweatshop weekly newspapers with names like the Tugaloo Tribune, the Tri-County News and the Tribune Times. At this last paper he failed (miserably) a lie detector test and was accused of stealing $1,000 in Willie Nelson concert money. But that’s another story. Hays’ latest novel, The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin’s Press), was chosen for the One City, One Book community read in Greensboro, North Carolina and for the Amazing Read, Greenville, South Carolina's first community read. His book The Pleasure Was Mine was read on NPR’s Radio Reader and was a Finalist for the SIBA Fiction Award. Hays’ other novels are Sam’s Crossing (Atheneum) and In the Family Way (Random House), winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and a Lecturer in the Master of Liberal Arts Program at the UNC-Asheville. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and two children.

Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and earned the distinction of a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven won the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. She is the author, most recently, of The Motel of the Stars, from Sarabande Books, and is completing a new novel called Wanting Inez. Her work has won support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Women's Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Foundation. Associate Professor in creative writing at Georgia College and State University, McElmurray serves as creative nonfiction editor for Arts and Letters. She hopes, in the next year, to complete a memoir about her travels in India and Nepal and the end of a love affair.

Elena Passarello is an actor and writer originally from Charleston, South Carolina. Her forthcoming collection A Very Fine Piano: Essays on Voice will be published by Sarabande Books in the fall of 2012. Her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Slate, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review and Ninth Letter. An MFA graduate of the University of Iowa, Passarello taught at Grand Valley State University in Michigan for the past three years, where she founded the Cherry Bomb Reading and Performance Series. She recently became the first woman to win the 2011 Stella! Shout Out competition in New Orleans.

Dale Ray Phillips

"Phillips's prose flashes powerful unpredictability with every delicious little shock." - Publishers Weekly

Dale Ray Phillips is the author of the book My Peoples' Waltz, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best Stories from the South, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope, and literary quarterlies. He holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and has taught at a variety of universities, most recently at Murray State University, where he served as the Watkins Chair in Creative Writing.

Lynn Pruett is the author of the novel Ruby River, and recently contributed to the anthologies When the Bough Breaks and An Angle of Vision. Her work has also appeared in Louisville Review, Arts & Letters, American Voice, Southern Exposure, and Black Warrior Review. She has earned fellowships from Yaddo, Sewanee, Squaw Valley, and the Kentucky Arts Council, and has led fiction workshops at the University of Kentucky, the University of Alabama, and North Carolina State University. Her mother's family has lived in Calloway County since the Purchase, and her uncles still farm the original land. She currently teaches fiction writing at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Martin Roper is the author of the acclaimed novel Gone (Holt 2002), a portion of which first appeared in The New Yorker. A former Fulbright Scholar, Roper earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa, and currently directs its Irish writing program in Dublin, Ireland. He also served as the academic director for the School of Continuing & Professional Studies writing program at New York University. In the fall of 2010, he joined the Murray State University faculty as the Watkins Chair in Creative Writing.

Jeffrey Skinner's fifth book of poetry Salt Water Amnesia appeared in 2005 from Ausable Press. His works also include Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press), A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, and a winner in the 1987 National Poetry series chosen by Tess Gallagher), The Company of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series), and Gender Studies (Miami University Press). He's served as editor for two anthologies of poems, Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance and Passing the Word: Poets and Their Mentors. Skinner's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Bomb, DoubleTake, and the Georgia, Iowa, and Paris reviews. Also an accomplished playwright, his recent play Down Range will receive a full production in New York City in 2009. Skinner holds an MFA from Columbia University and teaches at the University of Louisville. He's the board president and editorial consultant for Sarabande Books, a literary publishing house he founded with his wife Sarah Gorham.

Julia Watts

A native of Southeastern Kentucky, Julia Watts is the author of nine novels, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning VOYA-recommended young-adult novel Finding H.F. Her 2007 novel The Kind of Girl I Am was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and her 2008 novel Kindred Spirits is the first in a series of middle-grade novels featuring an unlikely trio of friends: a telepathic girl, a tech-savvy boy, and a ghost. Watts has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and her essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The American Voice, Brain/Child, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, and Now and Then. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and an M.A. in English from the University of Louisville. She teaches at South College in Knoxville, where she lives with her family and numerous pets. She loves to write.