Faculty

Laleh Khadivi is the author of The Kurdish Trilogy which includes The Age of Orphans (2009), The Walking (2013), and A Good Country (2017).

Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, VQR, and The Sun.

She has worked as a documentary filmmaker since 2000 and her films have been screened in festivals and on various cable networks. 

Author of four full-length collections of poetry, The Michaux Notebook (FMSBW), Afterlives (Bootstrap Press, 2016), Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books, 2011), nominated for a California Book Award, and Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press, 2009), and over a dozen small books, including Muddy Waters (State Champs, 2022), Selected Prose (2008-19) (Blue Press, 2020), Daily Vigs (Bird & Beckett Books, 2019), Vesper Chimes (Gas Meter, 2014), Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006) and Negative...

Dave Madden is the author of The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy, as well as a collection of short stories. His essays have appeared in Defector, the Guardian, Lit Hub, Harper's, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He's received fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

D. A. Powell's books include Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004) and Chronic (Graywolf, 2009), both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), winner of the 2013 Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Powell's awards include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kingsley Tufts Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the California Book Award. He has taught at Columbia University, University of Iowa, and...

Susan Steinberg is the author of four books of fiction: Machine (Graywolf Press), Spectacle (Graywolf Press), Hydroplane (FC2), and The End of Free Love (FC2).

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists Fellowship, Professor Steinberg has also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, 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...

Kate Folk is the author of Out There (Random House '22), a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, One Story, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva, among others. A 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, she's also received support from MacDowell, Willapa Bay AiR, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She...

Kimberly Garrett has worked for over 24 years at the University of San Francisco. She has worked as a Program Assistant in the Department of English, the Honors Program in the Humanities, the Peace Review Journal, the MFA in Writing Program, and the Comparative Literature and Culture. From 2021-2024 she served as a Program Assistant Lead, ably managing 2 diverse teams of fellow PAs and creating a professional development training and retreat calendar. She is an USF alumna, having graduated with...

Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere.  She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue...

Miah Jeffra is the author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and St. Lawrence Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel, winner of the Clark-Gross Award, and is co-editor of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. His work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, DIAGRAM, storySouth, and many others. Miah is the co-founder of the Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary...

R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit, a novel, will be published in May 2024 with Riverhead. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, has been translated into seven languages and was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. Kwon and Garth Greenwell co-edited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book and recipient of the inaugural Joy Award.

Kwon’s writing has appeared in The...

Lauren Markham writing regularly appears in outlets such as Guernica, Harper's, Orion, Zyzzyva, Freeman's, Lithub, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, which was the winner of the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize; it was also named a Barnes & Noble Discover...

Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other...

K.M. (Karl) Soehnlein is the 2024 recipient of the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. He has also received a Lambda Literary Award (novel); IPPY Award (LGBTQ+ Fiction); the Henfield Prize (short fiction); and the SFFILM/Rainin Filmmaking Grant (screenwriting).

He is the author of the novels Army of Lovers (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...

Former president, AWP. The Brenda Ueland Prose Prize and the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize. Author of three short story collections: The End of the Class War (1999), finalist for the 2000 Western States Book Award, Curled in the Bed of Love (2003), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Mechanics of Falling (2009), winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction; a biography: Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA...

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute, from Nightboat Books. Other works include: Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (poems, 2012) and King of Shadows (essays, 20008). His writing has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern...