Faculty
Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and Julia & Rodrigo, winner of the 2012 Gival Press Novel Award. His latest book, The Rink Girl: Stories, won the 2018 Prize Americana (Hollywood Books). He wrote the script for the award-winning Peace Corps film How Far Are You Willing to Go to Make a Difference? Brazaitis’ writing has been featured on the Diane Rehm Show and the Leonard Lopate Show as well as on public radio in Cleveland, Iowa City, New York City, and Pittsburgh. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University.
John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican-American poet and writer. Featured by Publishers Weekly as a “Writer to Watch”, he is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His prose and poetry have been published in PANK, The Rumpus, F(r)iction, Joyland Magazine,and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. Where There Was Fire, a GMA “Buzz Pick” and National Bestseller, is his debut novel.
Sara Henning is the author of Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, First Prize in the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (Passaic County Community College), and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University.
Amy M. Alvarez is the author of the poetry collection Makeshift Altar (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Obsidian, Colorado Review, The Ohio Review, The Acentos Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, VCCA, and Furious Flower Poetry Center Fellow. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. Born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents, she worked at public high schools in the Bronx and Boston before coming to West Virginia University to teach writing.