Faculty

Ranked 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, as well as 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 essay “Rhythm-A-Ning: Philip Whalen’s Rhythmic Inventions” is reprinted in The Beats and Philosophy forthcoming from the University of Kentucky Press Popular Culture series. His essay “The Things I Used To Do” will appear in the forthcoming anthology, The Writing Workshop Model: Is It Still Working? (University of Pittsburg Press). For Western Literature Association’s October 2008 conference he presented, "Twisting in the Wind: A Memoir of Ken Kesey" about Kesey's Naropa workshop and also his play Twister, staged in Boulder July 4, 1994. His story “Spanish Castle” was optioned by Ziji Productions, and he co-wrote the screenplay; recently his novel Racer was 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, Naropa University

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.

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 most recently from Kelsey Street Press, Humanimal, a project for future children. 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 Inaudible Trumpeters (Harbor Mountain Press), Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press), and Apostrophe (Apogee Press). Robinson has an essay in the new book on Lorine Niedecker, Radical Vernacular, and work forthcoming in a new Norton Anthology called American Hybrid. A new book called The Orphan & Its Relations will be out from Fence in November. Robinson has been a winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize, the National Poetry Series, and three Gertrude Stein awards for innovative poetry. She 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, essay writer, and translator. His work is known for its focus on ecology & natural history, as well as a studied engagement with the poetic traditions of Asia. He has written or edited sixteen books, and produced a large number of chapbooks, broadsides, journals & other samizdat publications. Old Tale Road (Empty Bowl Press, 2008) is his latest book of poetry, and he edited The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom, 2005). Currently he is at work on an anthology of India’s medieval bhakti (devotional) poetry for Oxford University Press, Delhi. Eliot Weinberger once wrote that Schelling “is the latest incarnation in an American poetic lineage that began with the Transcendentalists and moved west with Rexroth and Snyder,” noting the “conjunction of wilderness expertise” with homegrown radical politics and an immersion in Asian literatures. Schelling has published six books of translation from India’s old languages, including Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, which received the Academy of American Poets 1992 prize in translation, and was reissued in 2008 by White Pine Press. He is a faculty at Deer Park Institute in the Kangra Valley, North India. At Naropa Schelling teaches poetry, translation, courses in bioregional poetics, and Sanskrit. He oversees the Kavyayantra Press, the Kerouac School’s letterpress print shop.

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 has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University and currently serves as Artistic Director of the Summer Writing program. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text Outrider. Manatee/Humanity was recently published by Penguin in 2009. She is also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800-page epic Iovis trilogy, forthcoming in 2010. She is editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa, with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She was an assistant director (1966–1968) and the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1968–1978) as well as the director of curriculum for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna in the 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 a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria as well as 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 and 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.

Ranked Faculty from Other Departments

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.

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

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of Beloved Integer (2007) and co-author of TRI/VIA (2003). Her work has been anthologized in For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals, and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Former director of the Naropa Writing Center (2000-2007), she has taught at Bard College, University of New Mexico, and Naropa University, where her focus includes avant-garde poetry, hybrid writing, and gender/women's studies. Excerpts from her manuscript She, A Blueprint for InterSurface, with art by Sue Hammond West, have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Trickhouse, Mandorla, Upstairs at Duroc (France), and elsewhere. Michelle spent her recent sabbatical living in London and writing her new manuscript, tentatively titled Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, which explores Rothko’s floating borders in the Seagram Murals in relation to unstable cultural borders. While abroad, she read at Openned (London) and at the Ivy Writers series (Paris), in addition to traveling to Barcelona on a grant.

Emeritus Faculty
Staff and Adjunct Faculty

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.

Erik Anderson
BA, Creative Writing & Literature, University of Michigan
MFA, Writing & Poetics, Naropa University
PhD, English, University of Denver

Erik Anderson's creative and critical work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Sleeping Fish, The Laurel Review, Trickhouse, The Recluse, Jacket, Rain Taxi, Dear Camera, The Collagist, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Parcel, and many others. A graduate of the Kerouac School, he holds a PhD from the University of Denver, where he was a contributing poetry editor at the Denver Quarterly (from 2006-2009). He co-edits the magazine Thuggery & Grace and is adjunct faculty in the department.

Lisa Birman
SWP Director

Lisa Birman, MFA Naropa University, is a poet and writer from Melbourne, Australia. She is Director and BA Coordinator of The Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program, and adjunct faculty for Naropa’s MFA in Creative Writing. She is the author of for that return passage – A Valentine for the United States of America (Hollowdeck Press), and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House Press). Recent work has appeared in Trickhouse, Tarpaulin Sky, Bombay Gin, not enough night, Square One and thuggery & grace. Lisa is a freelance proofreader and copyeditor, and co-founder of Movie Star Press

Tara Blaine
MFA, Writing and Poetics, Naropa University

Tara Blaine is the publisher of The American Drivel Review and a writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. She is also a creative writing professor and commercial ad writer. She lives in Portland, OR.

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

Amy Catanzano is a lecturer, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing and literature, and the administrative director of the Department of Writing and Poetics. She is also managing editor of Naropa's literary journal, Bombay Gin. She is the author of Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009), selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize, and iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs, 2008). Her poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction appear in literary journals such as Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky, La Petite Zine, Conjunctions, Volt, and Colorado Review and in A Best of Fence anthology. An essay, "Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light," in which she investigates poetry and prose in relation to theoretical physics such as string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity, appears on Jerome Rothenberg's blog, Poems and Poetics. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

J’Lyn Chapman
MA, English, University of Central Florida
PhD, English, University of Denver

J'Lyn Chapman holds a PhD from the University of Denver, where she studied text and image in the work of W.G. Sebald. She is the Graduate Academic Advisor and a lecturer in the Department of Writing and Poetics. As a writer, J'Lyn is working on a series of lyrical essays about sorrow and memory as well as a critical essay on images and text. Her work can be found in Sleepingfish, Fence, Thuggery & Grace and Conjunctions. Her chapbook, Bear Stories, was published by Calamari Press.

Jack Collom
MA, English, University of Colorado

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.

Megan DiBello
BA, Marymount Manhattan College
M.F.A, Candidate, Naropa University

Megan is a Poet at the Jack Kerouac School. She was selected for one of the Graduate Assistantships in the Writing and Poetics Office for the 09-10 school year. She has been published in Symposium, Fact-Simile Magazine, The Bathroom, Flaneur Foundry, and Monkey Puzzle Press.

Kika Dorsey
PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle

Kika Dorsey has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she also published and performed her poetry extensively. She is published in numerous journals, including The Denver Quarterly, The California Quarterly, The Comstock Review and Anyone is Possible. She has taught literature, film and writing at the University of Washington, The University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College and Front Range Community College. She has also worked freelance as a proofreader, editor and translator of German. She lives in Boulder with her husband, two children, old dog and three birds. 

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 S P R A W L (Siglio Press, forthcoming 2010). Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Brooklyn Rail, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, Where We Live Now: An Annotated Reader, and other magazines and anthologies. She manages production and design at Dalkey Archive Press and teaches prose/literature courses in Naropa’s low-res MFA.

Ariella Ruth Goldberg
BA, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts
MFA Candidate, Naropa University

Ariella Ruth Goldberg is a poet and performer. Her first chapbook is an extended poem titled The Lower Forty. She has interned at Small Press Traffic, a literary arts center in San Francisco, has read and selected poetry submissions for Epiphany, a New York-based literary journal, and was an assistant editor for Letters to Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, and Community, released Winter 2008 from Saturnalia Books. Ariella is the Graduate Assistant for Publications in the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University.

HR Hegnauer
BA, English, The Evergreen State College
MFA, Writing & Poetics, Naropa University

HR is a writer, book designer and Kerouac School alumna. Since graduating from Naropa with her MFA in Writing and Poetics, HR has been a designer for several publishing companies in New York City, as well as a freelance website designer. She was the first recipient of the kari edwards' memorial scholarship from the Summer Writing Program, and her creative work has appeared in Meridian, Tendrel, and Slightly West. HR recently exhibited her photography in the show Shutterings West, which was a benefit auction for Pride for Youth, a project of the Long Island Crisis Center. HR also works as the designer for the department’s literary journal, Bombay Gin. She maintains a website of her design work at hrhegnauer.com.

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.

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. Maureen is editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night.

Gwendolyn Robeson
MS, Counseling and Student Personnel, Oklahoma State University
BA, French, Oklahoma State University
BS, Secondary Education, Oklahoma State University

Gwen serves as the Undergraduate Academic Advisor for Writing and Literature. She believes the university experience is one of whole person development. She particularly enjoys advising for the opportunity it provides to accompany and support students on this journey. Gwen endeavors to serve as a resource for students as they discover all that Naropa offers to facilitate their growth.

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
PhD, University of Denver
MFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
BA, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

Sara Veglahn is the author of Another Random Heart (Letter Machine, 2009), Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008), That We Come to a Consensus—a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon (Ugly Duckling, 2005), and Falling Forward (Braincase, 2003). Her fiction and poetry have appeared numerous journals, including: Conjunctions, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Trickhouse, and Bombay Gin. She served as the poetry editor for Art New England and as the associate editor for the Denver Quarterly, and has taught writing and literature courses at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Denver, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and in the department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University.