Faculty

Keith Abbott
BA, San Francisco State
MA, Western Washington State

Keith Kumasen Abbott teaches writing and art at Naropa University.  Publications include the novels Gush, Rhino Ritz and Mordecai of Monterey; the short story collections, Harum Scarum, The First Thing Coming, and The French Girl.  He wrote a memoir of Richard Brautigan, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America (Capra, 1989) and contributed to Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writing and Life. (McFarland & Co, 2006) for which he chaired a symposium and contributed an essay.   His story “Spanish Castle” was optioned by Ziji Productions, and he co-wrote the screenplay; recently his novel Racer has been shortlisted for the Berlinale Film Conference 2007.  His latest poetry book was Next Door to Samsara (Fell Swoop, 2005) and his poems appeared in the recent anthologies Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull, 2006) and Rimbaud Après Rimbaud (Except Collection Textual, 2004).  His art/calligraphy appear in Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma magazines and in group and/or solo shows in San Francisco, Denver, Boulder, Shanghai, Seoul and San Antonio.

Junior Burke, Chair
BFA, University of Illinois
MFA, The Naropa Institute

Junior Burke, department chair, is a prose writer, dramatist and lyricist. His novel, Something Gorgeous, was published in 2005 by Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish. In fall 2004, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art presented Someone Else’s Dream, a cycle of his songs. In 1999, he won an Essay Award from New Millennium Writing, one of six writers cited nationally. He is also the director of Naropa’s low-residency MFA Creative Writing program. He received his MFA from the Kerouac School at Naropa University and teaches fiction and dramatic writing workshops and courses in literary studies.

Reed Bye
BA, University of Colorado
MA, University of Colorado
PhD, University of Colorado

Reed Bye is a poet and songwriter. His most recent book is Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems (United Artists Books, 2005). Other published works include Passing Freaks and Graces, Gaspar Still in His Cage and Some Magic at the Dump. A CD of original songs, Long Way Around, was released in 2005 by Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Angel Hair Anthology, Sleeping on the Wing and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Colorado and teaches poetry writing workshops and courses in classic and contemporary literary studies and contemplative poetics.

Indira Ganesan

BA, Vassar College
MFA, University of Iowa

Indira Ganesan is a novelist and fiction writer. She is the author of The Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) and Inheritance (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. A two-time Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the MacDowell Colony and the Paden Institute for Writers of Color. She also teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and teaches fiction and essay writing workshops.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Bobbie Louise Hawkins is a fiction writer, monologist, performer and poet. Her most recent book is Bijou (Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish, 2005). She has published more than ten books of fiction, performance monologues and poetry, including My Own Alphabet and One Small Saga, and two CD’s, Live at the Great American Music Hall and Jaded Love. In 2001, Life As We Know It, a one-woman show, was performed in Boulder and New York City. She teaches fiction writing workshops and courses in literary studies.

Anselm Hollo
University of Helsinki
Institute of Tübingen

Anselm Hollo is a poet, translator and essayist. He is the author of more than thirty books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House, 2001). Other titles include Maya, Pick up the House, Corvus, Guests of Space. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into Finnish, French, German, Swedish and Hungarian. He is recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, grants from The Fund for Poetry, and the Government of Finland’s Distinguished Foreign Translator’s Award. Authors whose works he has translated include Paul Klee, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Paavo Haavikko and Mirkka Rekola. He teaches poetry and translation workshops and courses in literary studies.

Bhanu Kapil
MA, State University of New York, Brockport

Bhanu Kapil writes at the intersection of poetry, prose, non-fiction and a kind of irreversible yet mutable "document." What is a document? What are you here to write at all? As a teacher, Bhanu focuses on generative, experimental writing practice: making a space where the writing can evolve from deep images, watermarks of all kinds, to become a completely alive, connective, reaching thing. And what does writing extend towards, what does it touch? What does it touch in order to change, to become something else? Bhanu has written three full-length works, in an on-going attempt to answer these questions [what are your questions?] -- The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), and Humanimal, a project for future children (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press). Nationally, she has given readings of her work and presented lectures/panel talks on monsters, cyborgs, architecture, and hybridity; most recently as part of a CalArts conference on experimental writing at the LAMoca. Currently, she is writing a novel about delinquent chimpanzees.

Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press) and Apostrophe (Apogee Press). She has been a winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize, the National Poetry Series and three Gertrude Stein awards for innovative poetry. Robinson has also been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a recipient of a grant from the Fund for Poetry. In 2008, she was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Robinson is a co-editor of Instance Press and EtherDome Chapbooks.

Andrew Schelling
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz
Special Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Andrew Schelling is a poet, translator and essayist, whose writings are known for their ecological focus and an engagement with the poetic traditions of Asia. He is the author of over a dozen books, most recently Two Elk: A High Country Notebook (bootstrap productions, 2005), The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom, 2005), and Kamini, a lithographed artist book designed by Ken Botnick at M-Dash Studio. Other titles include Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry, a collection of essays, Wild Form, Savage Grammar, and Erotic Love Poems from India, a translation of the eighth century Sanskrit collection Amarushataka. In the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, he co-edited the journal of experimental poetics, Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K." His translations from Sanskrit, Pali, and related Indian vernaculars appear in many anthologies. Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992. Schelling also serves on the faculty of Deer Park Institute in the town of Bir, Himachal Pradesh, India. At Naropa he oversees the MFA concentration in translation, and teaches poetry and translation workshops, courses in literature and ecology-based poetics, and the Sanskrit language.

Steven Taylor

BA, Glassboro State College
PhD, Brown University

Steven Taylor is a poet, musician, song writer and ethnomusicologist. He has published two books of poems and a musical ethnography, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He has composed music for the theater, film, radio drama, and installations, and made more than a dozen records with various artists. He has toured and recorded with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, the Fugs, and the New York hardcore band False Prophets. He teaches poetry workshops and literary theory classes in the MFA and BA programs and the history of the avant-garde in the lower division.

Anne Waldman
Co-founder, Distinguished Professor of Poetics
SWP Chair and Artistic Director

Anne Waldman is an internationally known poet, performer, professor, and editor with strong personal links to the New York School, the Beat Literary Movement and the experimental strands of the New American Poetry. She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a program she co-founded with poet Allen Ginsberg in 1974. She is the author of more than thirty books including Outrider: Essays, Interviews, Poetry (La Alameda Press); In the Room of Never Grieve: New & Selected Poems with a CD produced by her son Ambrose Bye (Coffee House Press); Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin Poets); Vow To Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos (Coffee House Press); Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin Poets); the 20th anniversary edition of Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights Books); and Iovis: Books I & II (Coffee House Press). She is also the editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications), and co-editor of Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School (University of New Mexico Press) and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics In Action (Coffee House Press). New CDs include The Eye of the Falcon (Farfalla/McMillan & Parrish) with Ambrose Bye. She was an assistant director (1966–1968) and the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1968–1978). She was the director of curriculum for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna in fall of 1999. Recent conferences and festivals include China, Berlin, Rome, Quebec, Luxembourg, Prague, Vienna, Britain, Spain, London, Italy, Prague, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. She was a fellow at The Bellagio Center and participant in the Dodge Festival. She was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria and a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation and is a winner of The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. Anne Waldman’s considerable literary archives reside at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which hosted a symposium and exhibit from that collection in March of 2002.

Adjunct Faculty and Staff

Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson’s poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Sleeping Fish, The Recluse, Jacket, Rain Taxi, Marginalia, CAB/NET, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Parcel, Cranky, and others. A graduate of the Kerouac School, he is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver, where he is a contributing poetry editor at the Denver Quarterly. He also co-edits the magazine Thuggery & Grace.

Lisa Birman
SWP Director

Lisa Birman, MFA Naropa University, is a poet and writer from Melbourne, Australia. She is Director and BA Coordinator of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program as well as the Writing Faculty and Faculty Director for Naropa’s Study Abroad Program in Prague. She has taught at Naropa University, the University of Colorado, and several universities in Australia. She is co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and her work has appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter, 26, admit2, Square One, Thuggery & Grace and sub-scribe. Lisa is a freelance proofreader and copyeditor, and she is the co-founder of Movie Star Press. She teaches Collaboration/Crossings and Collisions for the MFA in Creative Writing.

Amy Catanzano
BA, Colorado State University
MFA, University of Iowa

Amy Catanzano is a poet, adjunct faculty, and the administrative director of the Department of Writing & Poetics in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She is the author of two books: iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Press, 2008) and the forthcoming collection Multiversal, selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize with Fordham University Press. Catanzano’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines such as Conjunctions, Fence, Volt, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, and Colorado Review and is included in the forthcoming anthology, A Best of Fence. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English from Colorado State University. Recent projects include a cross-genre manuscript titled Starlight in Two Million: A Neo Scientific Novella. She is also developing a lyric essay, “Quantum Poetics: The Science of Imaginary Solutions,” in which she investigates poetry in relation to theoretical physics such as string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity.

J’Lyn Chapman

J'Lyn Chapman recently received her PhD at the University of Denver, studying text and image in the work of W.G. Sebald. In addition to working at Naropa, she’s teaching a Women’s Literature course at CU Boulder. J’Lyn is a writer, working on a series of lyrical essays that include images of birds. Her work can be found in Sleepingfish, Fence, Thuggery & Grace, and Conjunctions. Her chapbook, Bear Stories, was recently published by Calamari Press.

Jack Collom

Jack is a poet, essayist and creative writing pedagogue. His most recent collection of poems is Exchanges of Earth & Sky (Fish Drum, 2006). His major collection, Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000, was published by Tuumba Press in 2001. Other volumes include Little Grand Island, Arguing with Something Plato Said, 8-Ball and Entering the City. His work has been published in countless magazines and anthologies in the United States and abroad. His essays on teaching and anthologies of children’s poetry appear in Moving Windows and Poetry Everywhere. He has produced two CD’s of original work performed in collaboration with musician/composer Ken Bernstein and been awarded two NEA fellowships. He received his MA in English from the University of Colorado, and teaches courses in eco-literature and outreach teacher-training.

Danielle Dutton
BA, History, University of California at Santa Cruz (1997)
MFA, Creative Writing, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002)
PhD, English/Creative Writing, University of Denver (2007)

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) and SPRAWL (Clear Cut Press, forthcoming 2008). Recent work has also appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, The Brooklyn Rail, Shiny, CutBank and Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry. She teaches in Naropa’s low-residency MFA program and is managing editor at Dalkey Archive Press.

Alan Hartway, Fr., Interdisciplinary Studies Chair
BA, St. Joseph College
MFA, The Naropa Institute
PhD Candidate, University of Colorado

Alan Hartway has taught at Naropa since 1999 and was an undergraduate advisor until 2004. He is currently faculty instructor and the chair of Interdisciplinary Studies. He was an adjunct faculty for St. Mary of the Plains College of Dodge City, Kansas. He is an ordained Catholic priest in the Society of the Precious Blood; he has served as pastor for twelve years, director of publications for his community and director of formation for priesthood candidates for five years. He is also currently contracted full time with the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, a lay Catholic missionary organization grant funding projects in developing countries. Alan graduated with an MFA Writing and Poetics from Naropa in 1996. He has studied with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. He is currently engaged in graduate degree work at the University of Colorado in classics and Greek.

Barbara Henning

Barbara Henning is the author of two novels, seven books of poetry and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her most recent book is a collection of sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists, 2007). A collection of prose poems and stories, Thirty Miles to Rosebud, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. In the 90's Barbara was the editor of Long News in the Short Century. She was born in Detroit, relocated to New York City in the early eighties and has recently moved to Tucson, Arizona.  In Tucson, she’s on the board of POG and Chax Press. She’s currently teaching writing workshops for Naropa’s low residency MFA program and in the MFA program at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

Carrie Kilfoil

Carrie Kilfoil is the undergraduate advisor for the BA in Writing and Literature. She holds a BA in English Literature and History from Miami University and an MA in English Literature from the University of Kentucky, where she specialized in 19th century British literature, eco-criticism, and the rhetoric of environment. She has taught writing and advised at the University of Kentucky and the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and has presented her critical work at several national and local conferences. She is also a part-time lecturer in the University of Colorado Program for Writing and Rhetoric and a certified Hatha yoga instructor.

Brad is a poet, letterpress printer and bookbinder. He is the editor and publisher of Smokeproof Press in Boulder, Colorado. His book of poetry is Pointing at the Direction of Sound (Rodent Press,1996). He teaches letterpress printing and bookmaking.  

Maureen Owen

Maureen Owen is a poet, editor and publisher. She is the author of ten poetry titles, most recently Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has had work most recently published in YAWP magazine, Columbia Review, and Talisman #28-29. Other books include Imaginary Income, Zombie Notes, a brass choir approaches the burial ground, The No-Travels Journal, and Untapped Maps. A special selection of poems from her title Erosion’s Pull, in collaboration with the stunning art of New York artist Yvonne Jacquette, is available from Granary Books. Her work has been included in several anthologies including Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing By Women. She has taught numerous workshops and classes in poetry and book production and her awards include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry and a Poetry Fellowship from the NEA. She has received grants, awards and fellowships for her writing from, among others, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Inc., the Fund for Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served as program coordinator at The St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. She attended Seattle University and San Francisco State University and teaches Creative Writing and courses in literary studies both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program. She is editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night.

Jennifer Phelps

Jennifer Phelps is a poet, writer and MFA student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She was selected for one of the Graduate Assistantships in the Writing and Poetics Office for the 08-09 school year. A former high school English teacher and college administrator, she published her first book, Grandmother God in 1998 (Eyries Press). She proofreads and edits for the Boulder Friends of Jung and studies at the Denver Jung Institute.

Michelle Naka Pierce, Associate Professor
BA, University of New Mexico
MA, University of New Mexico, with distinction
MFA, Naropa University

Michelle Naka Pierce is a poet and specialist in writing pedagogy. Her latest book is Beloved Integer (PUB LUSH/Bootstrap). She is also the author of 48 Minutes Left (belladonna* books) and co-author of Tri/ Via (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH) with Veronica Corpuz. She has taught at Sakuragaoka koko in Yokohama, the University of New Mexico, and the Workshop for Language and Thinking at Bard College. She is the former director of the Naropa Writing Center and co-developed the curriculum in the Core writing seminars. Courses she’s taught for the Department of Writing and Poetics include Hybrid Forms, Poetic Operation, Experimental Women Writers, Collaborative Poetics, and Currency of the New Millennium. Her interviews and creative work have appeared in Teachers and Writers Magazine, Rain Taxi, Traverse, Aufgabe, Interlope, and Shiny.

Julia Seko

Julia Seko is a letterpress printer, book artist and proprietor of P.S. Press. Trained in letterpress printing at the Women's Graphic Center in Los Angeles, she is adjunct faculty in the Writing & Poetics Department at Naropa University and is active in the Book Arts League, a nonprofit community book arts organization. For the past fifteen years she has taught book arts and letterpress printing in the Boulder/Denver area through various institutions and organizations including the Book Arts League, University of Colorado extension and Naropa University, where she helped set up the letterpress studio. Her letterpress work is in university and private collections and has been exhibited in the United States and Ireland.

Sara Veglahn
BA English, University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse (1996)
MFA Creative Writing, University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2005)
PhD English/Creative Writing, University of Denver (2009)

Sara Veglahn is the author of four chapbooks: Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008); Falling Forward (Braincase Press, 2003); Another Random Heart (Margin to Margin, 2002, reprinted by Lettermachine Editions, 2009); and That We Come to a Consensus (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005), a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in 26, Conjunctions, Fence, Sleepingfish, Tarpaulin Sky, Thuggery & Grace, Trickhouse, and elsewhere. She teaches prose workshops and literature seminars in Naropa's Department of Writing and Poetics and is the current Associate Editor of the Denver Quarterly.