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...

Ari Banias is the author of the poetry collection Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016) and 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, Ploughshares, Poetry, A Public Space, and in numerous anthologies, including Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. He's the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in...

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...

Kirstin Chen is the author of the novels, Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners. She was the fall 2017 NTU-NAC National Writer in Residence in Singapore, and has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference.

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...

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...

R.O. Kwon's first novel, The Incendiaries, is forthcoming in 2018 from Riverhead. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NOON, VICE, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Omi International, and the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony.

Lauren Markham is author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, which won the Northern California Book Award and the California Book Award Silver Prize, was longlisted for the Pen America Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award. She’s written for Harper's, Guernica, Orion, The New York Times, Narrative, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor.

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...

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday, 2018). She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the San Francisco Writer's Grotto. She is the book columnist for KQED.

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...

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 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, San Francisco Magazine, and Out. He is a member of...

Arisa White is the author of the poetry collections Hurrah’s Nest, finalist for the 2013 Wheatley Book Award, 82nd California Book Award, and nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Award, A Penny Saved, and You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened. She's the recipient of fellowships from Headlands Center for the Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2005, 2014, and 2016.