Faculty

Chris Feliciano Arnold is the author of The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon, a work of narrative nonfiction to be published by Picador USA in March 2018. He has written essays and journalism for Harper's, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Outside, Vice News, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Folha de S. Paulo, Salon, McSweeney's, The Millions and more. His fiction has been published in Playboy, The...

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and longlisted for a Golden Poppy Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Syzbist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the 2017 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the 2017 Norma Faber First Book Award. A chapbook, Black...

Ari Banias is the author of the poetry collections A Symmetry (W.W. Norton, 2021), Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016), as well as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, A Public Space, and in numerous anthologies, including We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). He's the...

Stephen Beachy is a past winner of the Michener Award in fiction. He is the author of several novels and two novellas, including The Whistling Song, Distortion, Some Phantom/No Time Flat, boneyard, and Glory Hole.  His work has also been published in High Risk 2, New York Times Magazine, Bomb, and Best Gay American Fiction 1996. He's the prose editor of Your Impossible Voice.

Author of novels Bridge of Time (2012), The Haunting of Charles Dickens (2010), winner of the Northern California Book Award, an Edgar Award nominee, and a Judy Lopez memorial Honor book, Steinbeck's Ghost (2008) which was a Smithsonian Notable Book, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Children's Book of the Year, and the winner of the Beatty Award from the California Library Association, and Fliegelman's Desire (1990); stories, After the Gold Rush (2006); and nonfiction...

Professor Kirstin Chen is the author of novels Counterfeit (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2022), Bury What We Cannot Take, and Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. More information about her work can be found on her website, www.kirstinchen.com, and via Twitter at @kirstin_chen.

Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018”; House A (2016), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay (2011), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. Her poetry and lyric essays appear in Tin House, Conjunctions, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Catapult, Hong Kong...

Kate Folk is a writer based in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, One Story, Granta, and Zyzzyva. Recently, she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She's also received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her story collection, Out There, and a novel, are forthcoming from Random...

Heather June Gibbons is the author of the poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir (University of Utah Press), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Sore Songs (Dancing Girl Press), and Flyover (Q Avenue Press). Her poems have appeared in publications such as Best New Poets, Blackbird, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, New American Writing, and the San Francisco Chronicle. A...

Professor Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, is published by Riverhead and is being translated into seven languages. Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries received the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize, and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York...

Professor Lauren Markham can be found on Twitter and on her website. Her recent essays include: "Letter Writing in a Pandemic," Lithub, 2020 The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed, Lithub, 2020 No End in Sight, VQR, 2020 For Me, With Love and Squalor, Longreads, 2018 "If These Walls Could Talk," Harper's, 2018 (included in Best American Travel Writing, 2019) Death of a Valley, Guernica, 2015

John McMurtrie is senior editor of Stranger’s Guide, a literary travel magazine launched in 2018. He was books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle from 2008 to 2019. His reviews, essays, and features have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Literary Hub, and Alta.

Nayomi Munaweera is the author of the novels Island of a Thousand Mirrors, which won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013, and What Lies Between Us, which won the Sri Lankan National Book Award for best English novel and the Godage Award. She is anthologized in Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian-American Women on Obedience and Rebellion, and All the Women in My Family Sing.

Brittany Perham is the author of the poetry collections Double Portrait, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and The Curiosities. She’s recipient of the Wallace Stegner and Henry Hoyns fellowships, as well as fellowships and awards from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the James Merrill House Foundation, and the University of Kentucky.

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, the Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley and her MFA from San Francisco State University. Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. She is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the...

Professor Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday, 2018) a silver medal winner in first fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, The Believer, and elsewhere. A new work of non-fiction, a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds, is coming from Doubleday in 2022.

Nina Schuyler is the author of The Translator, winner of the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award and short-listed for the 2014 William Sarayon International Prize for Writing, and The Painting, named a Best Book by San Francisco Chronicle and nominated for the Northern California Book Award. Her short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American New Voices. She writes a column for Fiction Advocate, “Stunning Sentences,” and reviews children’s books for The Children’s...

Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn,...

K.M. (Karl) Soehnlein is the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award (novel); the Henfield Prize (short fiction); and the SFFILM/Rainin Filmmaking Grant (screenwriting). He is the author of the novels Army of Lovers (Forthcoming, Sept. 2022), The World of Normal Boys (2000), You Can Say You Knew Me When (2005), and Robin and Ruby (2010). He has been published in the nonfiction anthologies, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys and Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and in The Village Voice,...

Monica West is the author of Revival Season, published by Simon & Schuster in 2021. Revival Season is the story of 15-year-old Miriam Horton who suffers from a crisis of faith after witnessing a startling act of violence on the summer revival circuit. When Miriam returns home, she discovers a secret that shatters the gendered limitations of her faith. Monica has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from the Whiting Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and Hedgebrook. She is currently...