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.

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.

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.

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

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, where she teaches 19th Century U.S. Literature as well as graduate seminars in contemporary poetics and prose. She is also a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of two books: iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Press, 2008) and the forthcoming collection Multiversal, which was selected by Michael Palmer for the 2008 Poets Out Loud Prize with Fordham University Press. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, Columbia Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Facture, Fence, Web Conjunctions, Volt and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of a Maytag Fellowship and Teaching Award. Currently, she is at work on a neo-scientific novella and a project on the subject of quantum poetics.

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.

Jen Davis
Honors B.S. Ohio University

Jen Davis is the Graduate Research Assistant for Publications for the Writing & Poetics Department.  She works with the staff of Bombay Gin, the literary journal, and other departmental publications.  A graduate of Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, she writes creative non-fiction and literary journalism.  Jen has taught courses on Middle Eastern dance at Ohio University and served as the student for Publications and Communication for the Honors Tutorial College.  She has also worked as a staff writer for Southeast Ohio Magazine and worked in the editorial department at Cleveland Magazine.  She has articles and essays in these publications and many others.  She’s an MFA candidate in prose at the Jack Kerouac School.

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 and eco-criticism. She has taught writing and advised at the University of Kentucky, the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and Westwood College, and has presented her critical work at several conferences, including the Hawaii International Conference on the Arts and Humanities. She is also a certified Hatha yoga instructor.

Todd McCarty
BA, Naropa University

Todd McCarty, graduate academic advisor for the Department of Writing & Poetics, has been involved with the Naropa writing community for nearly ten years. He is a poet, performer, small press editor and independent radio producer. His audio collaboration with Jered Ebenbeck, entitled Subliminal Guild, ran for three and a half years on local radio station KGNU. This audio project included interviews and readings with local, national and international poets and writers mixed into an audio collage format. He’s also worked as office manager for the Naropa University Archive Project.

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.  

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.

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.