the program » mentors/faculty
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Squire
Babcock Program Director Squire Babcock worked as a ballroom dance instructor, farm hand, weigh-man in a cotton gin, hunting guide, pool table repair mechanic, small business owner, carpenter, free-lance writer and blues drummer before committing to writing and teaching. He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and is currently Associate Professor of English at Murray State. His writing has appeared in national publications including The Colorado Review, The Louisville Review, and the Old Hickory Review. His novel, The King of Gaheena, hits the shelves in October 2008, and he is currently completing a memoir titledWrestling the Horned Beast about a prominent Louisville man who at 43 decided to become a woman. |
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Ann
Neelon, Assistant Director Ann Neelon, a native of Boston and a former Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 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. Her poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Gettysburg Review, and Manoa. Her book, Easter Vigil, won both the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and the RPCV Writers and Readers Award. |
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Brian Barker's first book of poems, The Animal Gospels, won the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Agni, Quarterly West, American Book Review, The Writer's Chronicle, The Indiana Review, Blackbird, Sou'wester, and River Styx. He has earned a B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, an M.F.A. from George Mason University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. He has taught at the University of Houston and the University of Missouri and will begin as an Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Murray State in the fall of 2006. |
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Lorraine López is Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and associate editor of the Afro-Hispanic Review . Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner , Voices of Mexico , CrazyHorse, Image, Cimarron Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly/Narrative Magazine , and Latino Boom . Her short story collection, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories (Curbstone, 2002) won the inaugural Miguel Marmól prize for fiction. Her second book, Call Me Henri (Curbstone Press 2006) was awarded the Paterson Prize for Young Adult Literature this spring. Her novel, The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters will be released in fall of 2008 from Grand Central Press. She lives in Nashville , Tennessee with her husband, Louis Siegel.
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Dale Ray Phillips's stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. His collection, My People's Waltz (1999, HarperCollins/Perennial) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He holds a M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas and has taught at a variety of universities, including the University of Arkansas, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Clemson University, and most recently Murray State. |
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Lynn Pruett has written a novel, Ruby River (Grove/Atlantic) and stories and essays that have appeared in American Voice, Southern Exposure, Black Warrior Review, Tobacco, an anthology, and elsewhere. The artist-in-residence at the Carnegie Center for Literacy in Lexington, KY, she has received fellowships from Yaddo, Sewanee, Squaw Valley,and the Kentucky Arts Council. She has taught fiction workshops at the Univeristy of Kentucky, the University of Alabama, and North Carolina State Univeristy. Her mother's family has lived in Calloway County since the Purchase, and her uncles still farm the original land. Currently she is writing a novel and editing a fiction anthology. |
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Karen Salyer McElmurray, who has been a landscaper, a casino employee and a sporting towel factory worker, is in her current life a writer and a teacher of writing. She 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 was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven , was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University , McElmurray is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters. Her newest novel is The Motel of the Stars (Sarabande Books, 2008) and she hopes, in the next year, to begin a new memoir about her travels in India and Nepal and the end of a love affair. |
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Christine Hale’s creative nonfiction and short fiction have appeared in Arts & Letters , North Dakota Review, Apalachee Review, Rivendell, The Sun and many other journals. Her first novel, Basil’s Dream, is forthcoming from Livingston Press in 2008. A novel-in-progress, In the Stand, and a memoir-in-progress are both set in the southern Appalachian Mountains , where she and her parents grew up. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Ms. Hale teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville , North Carolina. |