The following are the bios of the core creative writing faculty:

 

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published three collections of poetry with the University of Pittsburgh Press, most recently Poetry in America.  Among the previous collections, Eve’s Striptease was named one of Library Journal‘s Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998, and Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing.   Her poems were awarded a 2009 NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize and appear in numerous anthologies. She thinks about the relationships writers have with the communities and places they come from and also those places they choose to inhabit. Past projects along these lines include a collection of essays, The Body and the Book:  Writing from a Mennonite Life, winner of the 2002 Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and a monograph, Fixing Tradition:  Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.  She has worked on new editions of Yoder’s 1940 local color classic Rosanna of the Amish, which is set in Centre and Mifflin Counties and Fred Lewis Pattee’s The House of the Black Ring, set in Centre County.  With Michael Tyrell she co-edited the anthology, Broken Land:  Poems of Brooklyn, published by NYU Press. And with photographer Steven Rubin, she has created a poetry collection to document the impacts of natural gas development in Pennsylvania, titled Shale Play, which was published by Penn State University Press in fall 2018. Currently, she is working with Christopher Reed to curate the exhibition and catalogue, Field Language: Paintings and Poetry by Warren and Jane Rohrer. Spicher Kasdorf currently directs Penn State’s Creative Writing Program. Links: Personal website & Penn State page.

 

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, The Evergreen Review, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Center, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California, and Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. He was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, shortlisted for UK’s The First Novel Prize in 2019, and won a 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. Samuel has taught creative writing in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States. Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the Faculty of the low-residency MFA program.   His novel is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. Links: Personal website & Penn State page.

 

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK: Madwoman, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, UK and other parts of Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. Her personal essays appear regularly in print and online. Recognition for her writing includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry, and other awards. From 2003-2017 she was the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. Links: Personal website & Penn State page.

 

Toby Thompson is the author of six books, including Fired On: Targeting Western American Art; Metroliner, Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan’s Minnesota; Saloon; and The ’60s Report. He has written for publications as diverse as Vanity Fair, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Gray’s Sporting Journal, GQ, Men’s Journal, Sports Afield, Playboy, Outside, Big Sky Journal, Western Art & Architecture, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.  He teaches creative nonfiction at Penn State University and lives in Livingston, Montana, and Cabin John, Maryland. Links: Penn State page.