AWP Board Members

Board Member Bios & Committees

Board Member Bios

Dinty W. Moore, President, Individual Members' Representative Ohio University Dinty W. Moore is Professor of English at Ohio University and a low-residency instructor for the University of New Orleans' San Miguel de Allende Summer Writing Workshops.  He has published three books of creative nonfiction, Between Panic and Desire, The Accidental Buddhist and The Emperor's Virtual Clothes, a short story collection, Toothpick Men, and the textbook, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. His essays and stories have been published in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Utne Reader, Arts & Letters, and Crazyhorse, among others.  He also edits Brevity, the on-line journal of concise creative nonfiction.  He is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

 

Denise Low-Weso, Vice President, Individual Members' Representative Haskell Indian Nations Denise Low is the author of a collection of essays, Words of a Prairie Alchemist, and two collections of poems, Thailand Journal and New & Selected Poems, 1980-1999. She edited Wakarusa Wetlands in Word & Image for the Lawrence Arts Center’s Imagination & Place Committee. In 2004, she was the guest co-editor of Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, UCLA, 28.1. Her articles, essays, and reviews of American Indian literature appear in Studies in American Indian Literature, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Indian Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, Kansas City Star, and others. Denise Low is a member of the Prairie Writers Circle of The Land Institute and the chair of the English Department at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she also teaches creative writing and American Indian Studies courses.

 

Francisco Aragón, Vice President, Individual Members' Representative Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol and the Editor of an anthology, The Wind Shifts: The New Latino Poetry. His poems have appeared in a range of anthologies, including: Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies; American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement; Bend, Don’t Shatter; Evensong: American Poets on Spirituality; and Deep Travel: Contemporary Poets Abroad. In the area of literary translation, he has published a number of books, including three by Francisco X. Alarcon: Body in Flames, Of Dark Love, and Sonnets to Madness and other Misfortunes. His limited edition chapbooks include Tertulia and Light, Yogurt, Strawberry Milk. His honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award. Francisco Aragón is currently the Director of Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he oversees, among other projects, Momotombo Press.

 

Terry Blackhawk, Treasurer, Individual Members' Representative InsideOut Literary Arts Project Terry Blackhawk is the author of three collections of poems—Body & Field, Escape Artist, and The Dropped Hand; two chapbooks (including a Greatest Hits from Pudding House Press); and poems and essays featured in anthologies from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and elsewhere. Her honors include the Foley Poetry Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities Teacher-Scholar Award, the Michigan Governors' Award in Arts Education, four Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Residence grant. Terry Blackhawk is the Executive Director and founder of InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a writers-in-schools program serving students in Detroit's public schools.

 

Steve Heller, Secretary, Pacific West Representative Antioch University Steve Heller is Professor & Chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Prior to L.A., he taught at Kansas State University for 22 years, including 15 as Chair of the Creative Writing Program. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University and an EdD in English Education from Oklahoma State. His first novel, The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, received the Friends of American Writers Award and was a selection of Book-of-the-Month Club and QPB. Heller's individual short stories and essays have appeared widely in journals such as Manoa, New Letters, Colorado Review, and Fourth Genre, and have been reprinted in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, and Living Blue in the Red States. He has been a resident of Yaddo and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship Grant and numerous other writing awards and distinctions. He helped found two literary journals, Hawai'i Review and Mid-American Review.

 

Ron Tanner, Board Advisor Loyola College Ron Tanner has published stories and essays in such magazines as The Iowa Review, West Branch, and the Massachusetts Review, and has won many awards, including a Faulkner Society gold medal and a Pushcart Prize. In 2008, he received a Best of the Web award and a Story South Million Writers award for fiction. His collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, won both the G.S. Sharat Chandra Award and the Towson Prize for Literature and is now in its second printing. He teaches writing at Loyola University, in Baltimore, Maryland.

 

Judith Baumel, Northeast Representative Adelphi University Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. She is Associate Professor of English and was Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She blogs at http://www.judithbaumel.com. She also lectures on modern and contemporary American poetry at Oxford University, UK. A former director of the Poetry Society of America, her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her work is represented in a number of anthologies including Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry ; Gondola Signore Gondola: Poems on Venice; and Poems of New York (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets). Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and Now (University of Miami Press, 1996). Judith Baumel was born in The Bronx in 1956. She attended The Bronx High School of Science, Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. She was awarded Adelphi University’s 2009 President’s Award for Excellence in Outstanding Service to the University. She has received awards from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Bronx Recognizes Its Own, Laurence Goldstein Award in Poetry from MQR, and fellowships for residencies at Yaddo, Saltonstall, Millay, among others.

 

Kathryn Kysar, Individual Members' Representative Anoka-Ramsey Community College Kathryn Kysar is the author of a book of poetry Dark Lake and the editor of a collection of essays, Riding Shotgun:  Women Writing about Their Mothers.  Her poems have been heard on A Writer's Almanac  and published in many literary magazines including Great River Review, Midland Review, Mizna, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Talking Stick.  A winner of the Lake Superior Writer's and SASE  poetry contests, Kysar has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities,  Norcroft, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts.

 

Martin Lammon, Southeast Representative Georgia College & State University Martin Lammon holds the Fuller E. Callaway endowed Flannery O’Connor Chair in Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University and coordinates the MFA in Creative Writing Program there. His collection of poems News from Where I Live won the Arkansas Poetry Award, and his poems and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in such journals as Black Warrior Review, Connecticut Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, and West Branch.W. S. Merwin selected his poems for a 1997 Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. He is also the editor of Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry, part of the University of Michigan Press’s distinguished Poets on Poetry Series. He is editor and founder of Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, which debuted in 1999. From 1998-2003, he served on the AWP Board of Directors and was president from 2000-2002. An active member of AWP for 20 years, Lammon helped to establish the endowment for the AWP Award Series Donald Hall Poetry Prize, and he was especially active in fund raising efforts for the AWP conferences in New Orleans (2002) and Atlanta (2007). In 1995, he sold his house, took a leave of absence from his teaching job, and lived for a season in Costa Rica. That experience is the subject of his recently completed creative nonfiction memoir, Almost Paradise: A Romance. Early versions of chapters from that memoir were selected as runner-up for the 2003 Iowa Award in Literary Nonfiction, published in The Iowa Review, and co-winner of the Lamar York Prize, published in The Chattahoochee Review. Lammon has also recently completed a new collection of poetry, All Souls, featuring previously uncollected poems first published in The Atlanta Review, Chelsea, The Dos Passos Review, Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Margie Review, Mid-America Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. Since 1997, he has lived in Milledgeville, Georgia, with his wife, Libby.

 

Roger Lathbury, AWP/GMU Liaison George Mason University Roger Lathbury teaches at George Mason University & he is the publisher of Orchises Press.

 

Richard Robbins, Midwest Representative Minnesota State University Richard Robbins studied as an undergraduate at San Diego State University and as a graduate student at the University of Montana. His first collection, The Invisible Wedding, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1984 as part of its Breakthrough Series. This was followed by Famous Persons We Have Known, published in 2000 by Eastern Washington University Press, and The Untested Hand, released in 2008 by The Backwaters Press. Radioactive City was published by Bellday Books in 2009, and Other Americas by Blueroad Press in 2010. Over the years, he’s received various awards and fellowships, including those from The Loft and the McKnight Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Poetry Society of America. He currently directs the creative writing program and Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

 

Jerod Santek, WC&C Representative Loft Literary Center Jerod Santek is Program Director at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where he administers mentorships, grants, and fellowships for writers. A poet and fiction writer, his work has appeared in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Blithe House Quarterly, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

 

Luci Tapahonso, West Representative University of Arizona Luci Tapahonsois Diné (Navajo) and a Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is author of six books of poetry; of which the most recent is A Radiant Curve (University of Arizona Press). She is a recipient of a number of awards, including the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Circle of Writers. She also delivered the 2007 Walter Capps Lecture at the National Federation of the State Humanities Councils.

 

Katherine M. Turner, Appointed Board Member Katherine M. Turner was admitted to bar, 2005, New York; 2006, District of Columbia; U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit; U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan. She was educated at Georgetown University (B.A., summa cum laude, 2001); Harvard Law School (J.D., cum laude, 2004). Phi Beta Kappa. Primary Editing Chair, Harvard Law Review. Law Clerk to the Hon. Bruce M. Selya, U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, 2004-2005. She is a member of the New York State Bar Association; American Bar Association.

Committees

Conference (DC 2011)
Francisco Aragón, Chair
Alan Cheuse
Charles Jensen
Kate Kysar
Denise Low-Weso
E. Ethelbert Miller
Dinty W. Moore
Matt Burriesci (staff)
Christian Teresi (staff)

Development
Kate Kysar, Chair
Francisco Aragón
Martin Lammon
Jerod Santek
Matt Burriesci (staff)

Finance
Terry Blackhawk, Chair
Roger Lathbury
Katherine Turner
Matt Burriesci (staff)
Roberto Perales (staff)

Membership
Judith Baumel, Chair
Terry Blackhawk
Steve Heller
Terry Ryan (staff)

Nominations and Documents
Richard Robbins, Chair
Terry Blackhawk
Katherine Turner

Pedagogy
Steve Heller, Chair
Richard Robbins

Personnel
Dinty W. Moore, Chair
Francisco Aragón
Judith Baumel
Roger Lathbury

Professional Standards
Steve Heller, Chair
Judith Baumel
Martin Lammon
Richard Robbins
Luci Tapahonso

Publications
Roger Lathbury, Chair
Kate Kysar
Dinty W. Moore
Jerod Santek
Supriya Bhatnagar (staff)

Strategic Planning
Denise Low-Weso, Chair
Dinty W. Moore
Jerod Santek
Luci Tapahonso
Matt Burriesci (staff)
Supriya Bhatnagar (staff)
Terry Ryan (staff)

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