2025 Faculty

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. OBIT, her fifth book of poems, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. OBIT was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Other books include The Trees Witness Everything and her nonfiction book, Dear Memory. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Victoria is the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry @ Tech.

Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 collections of poetry, most recently In a Few Minutes Before Later. Her previous titles include Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, winner of the Northern California Book Award; Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize; and Practical Water, which received the Los Angeles Times Prize for Poetry. She has authored a prose book, Three Talks and has co-translated At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar. With Patricia Dienstfrey, Brenda co-edited the collection The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. A longtime faculty member of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Brenda is Professor Emerita at St. Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems. His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Major has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Major serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review, the host of the award-winning podcast The Slowdown, and as an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brian Teare is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days. His poem, “Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man),” published in that collection, won the 2020 Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Lan Samantha Chang’s novel The Family Chao was chosen for Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List and won an Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction. A 25^th anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories, was recently published by W.W. Norton & Company. Sam also is the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, as well as Inheritance, which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her short stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. Since 2006, she has directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and daughter.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel, The Residue Years, won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Mitchell’s essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by 15 publications, and his book Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, was a USA Today bestseller.  Mitchell holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Lewis & Clark College; and has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His work has been featured on the covers of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, Marie Claire and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, and The Guardian. Mitchell holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University. He also regularly delivers lectures and keynote addresses, and, as a formerly incarcerated person, visits prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad.

Margot Livesey grew up in a boys’ private school in the Scottish Highlands, where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York, she spent most of her 20s working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book was a collection of stories called Learning By Heart. Since then, Margot has published nine novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field. Her 10^th novel, The Road from Belhaven, was published in 2024. She also is the author of The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing.  Margot has been the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Currently, she teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.

Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, which was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. It also was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Slate, Buzzfeed and others. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, New York magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Sarah grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at 17. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He has published many books of poetry, including Field Guide, Praise, and his latest, Summer Snow: New Poems. His collection of poems titled Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, is a recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He translated many works of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he has edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Tranströmer; The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp).

Caroline Goodwin: Faculty Reading Series Community Class

Caroline Goodwin moved from Sitka, Alaska, to the San Francisco Area to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry in 1999. Her most recent collections are Old Snow, White Sun; Madrigals, and Matanuska. She lives on the San Mateo coast and teaches at the California College of the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies, and UC Berkeley Extension. From 2014-2016, she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California.

Didi Jackson: Community Poetry Class

Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and World Literature Today among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith. Didi is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.