Endowed Chair
Each year, our University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing teaches one graduate MFA workshop in the Fall. The Chair also visits undergraduate classes, gives one public reading, and supports a range of MFA programming.
Layli Long Soldier
Endowed Chair of Creative Writing
2024-2025
Wednesday, April 16, 3pm: Endowed Chair Reading @ Wittliff Collections: Layli Long Soldier
Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection, Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, “Whereas We Respond”, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Mai Der Vang
Pulitzer Prize finalist
2025-2026
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, PRIMORDIAL, is forthcoming in 2025 from Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
(source: ABOUT – MAI DER VANG)
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
National Book Award Finalist
2022-2024
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the author of the novel Woman of Light and the story collection Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, The Clark Prize, The Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of an American Book Award. She is the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been honored with the Denver Mayor's Award for Global Impact in the Arts and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Award. She has written for The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, ELLE, O: the Oprah Magazine, The American Scholar, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Tin House. Fajardo-Anstine earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida.
Téa Obreht
National Book Award finalist
2020-2022
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She currently lives in Wyoming.
(Source: Tea Obreht)
Karen Russell
Pulitzer Prize finalist
2017-2020
Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, Tin House, and The New York Review of Books, and anthologized in The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Short Stories series. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award and the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list. (She is now decisively over 40.)
She has taught literature and creative writing as a visiting professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she now lives in Portland, OR with her husband and two kids.
(Source: Bio - Karen Russell)
Ben Fountain
National Book Critics Circle Award winner
2014-2016
Ben Fountain's novel BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK received the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award, the PEN/New England Cerulli Award for Excellence in Sports Writing, and the Jesse Jones Award for fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in both the US and the UK (international authors division). Fountain's short story collection BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award. Fountain's short fiction has appeared in Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, the Paris Review, Esquire, the Sewanee Review, DALLAS NOIR, and HAITI NOIR II, among other publications. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere, and his reportage on post-earthquake Haiti was broadcast on the radio show This American Life.
Fountain grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina and is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University Law School. A former attorney in private practice, he has lived in Dallas, Texas for over thirty years.
(Source: Amazon.com: Ben Fountain)
Cristina García
National Book Award finalist
2012-2014
Cristina García is the author of eight novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Here in Berlin, and Vanishing Maps.
Additional publications include two Latinx anthologies (Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature); books for young readers (The Dog Who Loved the Moon, I Wanna Be Your Shoebox, and Dreams of Significant Girls); and a collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death.
García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fifteen languages. She’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has taught at universities nationwide.
She is also a working playwright with recent productions at GALA Theatre in Washington D.C. and Central Works Theater in Berkeley, CA.
(Source: Bio - Cristina García)
Robert Stone
National Book Award finalist
2010-2011
Robert Stone (1937— 2015) was an American author of fiction about individuals in conflict with the decaying late 20th-century Western societies in which they live.
Stone served in the U.S. Navy before attending New York (1958–59) and Stanford (1962–64) universities. He wrote advertising copy and newspaper articles and became friends with such writers as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. A Hall of Mirrors (1967), his first novel, revolves around a right-wing radio station in New Orleans and its chaotic “Patriotic Revival”; Stone adapted the book for the screenplay of the film WUSA (1970). His second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974), concerns the legacy of corruption of the Vietnam War. It won the 1975 National Book Award, and Stone cowrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978).
In the late 1970s, Stone visited Central America, the setting of his novel A Flag for Sunrise (1981), about four individuals in a corrupt poverty-stricken country ripe for revolution. Children of Light (1986) features a debauched screenwriter and a schizophrenic actress, both in decline. Stone’s fifth novel, Outerbridge Reach (1992), was a well-received story of a foundering marriage and an around-the-world sailboat race. Later works by Stone include Helping (1993), Bear and His Daughters: Stories (1997), Damascus Gate (1998), and Fun with Problems (2010). His final work, Death of the Black-Haired Girl (2013), is a psychological thriller.
(Source: Robert Stone | Britannica)
Li-Young Lee
American Book Award winner
2008-2009
Li-Young Lee is the author of six books of poetry, including his newest collection, The Invention of the Darling. His earlier collections are The Undressing, Behind My Eyes; Book of My Nights; Rose, winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; The City in Which I Love You, the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and will be reissued by BOA Editions in 2012. Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
(Source: Li-Young Lee - Blue Flower Arts)
Tim O'Brien
National Book Award winner
2003-2004
2005-2006
2007-2008
2011-2012
Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the acclaimed novels The Things They Carried and July, July. In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. He has been the recipient of various honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. O'Brien lives in Austin, Texas.
(Source: Amazon.com: Tim O'Brien)
Denis Johnson
National Book Award winner
2006-2007
Poet, writer, and playwright Denis Johnson was born in Munich, Germany, where his father worked for the State Department. He grew up in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington DC, and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. At one time addicted to drugs and alcohol, Johnson’s literary output increased significantly after he became sober.
Johnson published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of 20. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (1982), and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (1995). His poems often depict characters on the margins of society.
Johnson is the author of numerous novels, including Fiskadoro (1985), Nobody Move (2009), and Tree of Smoke, a novel about covert operations in the Vietnam War, won the 2007 National Book Award. Jesus’ Son (1992), his collection of short stories that focus on the lives of drug addicts, was made into a film of the same name in 1999. He received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Whiting Writer’s Award.
(Source: Denis Johnson | The Poetry Foundation)
Barry Hannah
Pulitzer Prize finalist
2004-2005
Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. He was the author of eight novels and five short story collections. He worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin. His work was published in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, and a host of American magazines and quarterlies. In his lifetime he was awarded the The Faulkner Prize (1972), The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction, The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award, the PEN/Malamud Award (2003) and the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of natural causes.
(Source: Barry Hannah | Goodreads)
Ai
National Book Award winner
2002-2003
Ai (1947-2010) is the author of eight books of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Vice. In addition to the National Book Award, Ai’s work was awarded an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, for Sin, and the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets for Killing Floor. During her lifetime she received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught at Oklahoma State University.
(Sources: Ai | The Poetry Foundation, Ai - National Book Foundation)