Creative Writing Faculty and Thesis Advisors

Creative Writing Faculty and Thesis Advisors

Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. Her most recent book of poetry, Good Boys, was published with Tin House Books in 2020. Her forthcoming collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, will also be published by Tin House Books in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She is a former Yaddo fellow, holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. In 2021, she was a book reviewer for the Poetry Foundation. 

David Gates is the author of the novels Jernigan and Preston Falls, and two story collections, The Wonders of the Invisible World and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me. His stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, Esquire, Tin House and GQ, and The Best American Short Stories. He’s published nonfiction in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times magazine, Esquire, GQ, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Tin House, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Oxford American and The Journal of Country Music, as well as Newsweek, where he was a Senior Writer. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Lee Clay Johnson is the author of the novel Nitro Mountain (Knopf), which won the 2017 Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His stories have appeared in The Southampton Review, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, Oxford American, The Common, Appalachian Heritage, Salamander, and the Mississippi Review.  He holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from the University of Virginia.  He has been awarded residency fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He grew up around Nashville in a family of bluegrass musicians and currently serves as Director of the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph's University. 

Erinrose Mager's work appears in La Vague, Prelude, The Poetry Project's The Recluse, DIAGRAM, jubilat, Fence, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere—and was selected by Matt Bell for Wigleaf’s Top 50 in 2020. She is co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, 2020-21 Clemens Doctoral Fellow, and 2015 recipient of the Carrie S. Galt Prize. Erinrose earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD in Literary Arts from the University of Denver. 

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award, and the story collection Cool For America. His stories have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, and his essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, and VICE. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the UCross Foundation, he has taught writing classes at Tufts University, Boston College, Catapult, and elsewhere. 

Catherine (Kate) Meehan is a Lecturer in English and the Program Director of ACES, an undergraduate writing program designed for recent immigrant and international scholarship students at St. Joseph's University. She holds a BA from Georgetown University, MA from Middlebury College and an MFA from The Writer’s Foundry, where she graduated in 2015 with a thesis in poetry. Meehan has received grants to attend the Bread Loaf School of English, and was awarded a place among the 2018 cohort of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. With fifteen years of experience teaching creative writing, literature, and composition on the east and west coasts of the U.S. and the south coast of India, Meehan is a proud recipient of the S. Mary Florence Burns Faculty Award for Teaching Impact and Excellence. She has served as a poetry judge for the PEN America Prison Writing Contest. Meehan's poems have appeared in Barn, Swallow and Spoke 5. Her poetry collection, Kept at Bay, explores bodies of water and the water in our bodies and life along the Great South Bay.

Carly Joy Miller is the author of Ceremonial (Orison Books, 2018), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2017 Orison Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Like a Beast (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Rick Campbell Prize.  

 

Alicia Mountain is the author of High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Thin Fire was published by BOAAT Press. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Pleiades, and The Georgia Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Montana and a PhD from the University of Denver. She was the 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. Dr. Mountain's second collection, Four in Hand, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in early 2023. She is a lesbian poet and writer based in New York City.

Cleyvis Natera is a Dominican immigrant and a writer. She's received awards and fellowships from PEN America, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review's Summer Workshop, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work was most recently anthologized in Marita Golden's "Us Against Alzheimer's," and has also appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Washington Post, The Women's Review of Books, Kweli and Asterix. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Skidmore College and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University. Her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, is forthcoming Spring 2022 from Penguin Random House. 

Christina Olivares is the author of Future Botanic (Get Fresh Books, winter 2022), No Map of the Earth Includes Stars (winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize) and Interrupt (a Belladonna* Collaborative chaplet). Olivares is a queer American-Cuban from the Bronx. She believes in the abolition of poverty and of the carceral state and in the radical project of imagining our liberation. She works as an educator.

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them (Penguin Press), a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice; Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press); and What Was It For (Rescue Press), winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize, Her writing appears in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, and Poetry, and she has been awarded fellowships at American Library in Paris and the James Merrill House. She holds a PhD from Harvard and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Raphel is a Lecturer in the English faculty at CUNY Baruch, where she teaches First-Year Writing and Great Works. She is also on faculty with the Berlin Writers' Workshop and serves as a mentor with the Periplus Collective.

María Alejandra Barrios Vélez is a writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her stories have been published in places such as Hobart Pulp, Reservoir Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, Shenandoah Literary, Vol.1 Brooklyn, El Malpensante, Moon City Review, Fractured Lit, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She was the 2020 SmokeLong Flash Fiction Fellow. Her work is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022 and The Offing. Her work has been supported by organizations such as Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Arts Center, and the New Orleans Writing Residency. She's represented by Amanda Orozco at Transatlantic Agency.

Irvin Weathersby is a Brooklyn based writer and professor from New Orleans. He is a 2022 ACLS/Mellon Community College Faculty Fellow and teaches at Queensborough Community College and in the graduate creative writing program at City College. His writing has appeared in Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He has received funding and support from the Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation, the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award, and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference where he was named the 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College. His memoir in essays, IN OPEN CONTEMPT, is forthcoming from Viking and explores art, racial justice, and public space.

Lily White graduated from Oberlin College. After moving to New York, she began a career as a composer, jazz saxophone player, and piano teacher – performing in clubs, catering halls and jazz festivals around the world. In 2013, she graduated with an MFA in creative non-fiction from Bennington College. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, The Bennington Review, The Southampton Review, Caffeine Presse and the NY Times. She continues to play music as well as teaching piano and writing. She began as an assistant administrator at St. Joseph’s University in the fall of 2023.

Photo by Enid Farber.