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Antioch University

California, United States

Low-residency program

Antioch University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program is devoted not only to the education of literary and dramatic artists but to community engagement and the pursuit of social justice. The program features one-on-one mentoring with a variety of successful, publishing writers and includes instruction in craft, revision, and critical reading and thinking skills. The rights and ethical responsibilities of creative writers are also addressed, along with practical career concerns related to the business of writing and publishing. The MFA program prepares students for careers and meaningful lives as writers, editors, teachers, and engaged literary citizens.

Antioch's MFA program has distinguished itself from other MFA programs through our award-winning faculty in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, literary translation, playwriting, screenwriting, and writing for young people, as well as through innovative features such as the MFA field study, the Art of Translation course, Lunch Ticket (our online literary journal), and Lit Cit (our student-led podcast). The program is also remarkable for its successful publishing, and award-winning graduates.


Contact Information

400 Corporate Pointe
MFA in Creative Writing Program
Culver City
California, United States
90230-7644
Phone: 310-578-1080, x 3201
Email: ntruhan@antioch.edu
http://antiochla.edu/MFA



DEGREE PROGRAMS

Graduate Program Director

Lisa Locascio Nighthawk
400 Corporate Pointe
MFA in Creative Writing Program
Culver City
California, United States
90230-7644
Email: llocascio@antioch.edu
URL: http://antiochla.edu/MFA

Antioch University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program is devoted not only to the education of literary and dramatic artists but to community engagement and the pursuit of social justice. The program features one-on-one mentoring with a variety of successful, publishing writers and includes instruction in craft, revision, and critical reading and thinking skills. The rights and ethical responsibilities of creative writers are also addressed, along with practical career concerns related to the business of writing and publishing. The MFA program prepares students for careers and meaningful lives as writers, editors, teachers, and engaged literary citizens.

Antioch's MFA program has distinguished itself from other MFA programs through our award-winning faculty in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, literary translation, playwriting, screenwriting, and writing for young people, as well as through innovative features such as the MFA field study, the Art of Translation course, Lunch Ticket (our online literary journal), and Lit Cit (our student-led podcast). The program is also remarkable for its successful publishing, and award-winning graduates.

Type of Program: Low-Residency Program
Largest Class Size: 6
Smallest Class Size: 4
Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Playwriting, Screenwriting, Writing for Children, Literary Translation
Tuition $20,000
Duration of Study: 2 years
Unit of Measure: Credits
Total Units for Degree: 48
Other Requirements: See program description.
Application Requirements: Transcripts, Writing Sample, Application Form, Letters of Recommendation, Other




FACULTY

Gayle Brandeis

Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Grief (Overcup Books). Previous books include the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis (Beacon Press); the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns (Black Lawrence Press), shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Prize; the craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne); the poetry collections The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) and Dictionary Poems (Pudding House); the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize judged by Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Self Storage (Ballantine), a Target Breakout Book, Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns, a statewide read in Wisconsin. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Salon, Longreads, The Rumpus, The Nation, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and have received several awards, including the Columbia Journal Creative Nonfiction Prize, the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Sierra Arts Foundation, and Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2016, 2019, and 2020. Gayle was named the 2018 Multi-Genre Maverick Writer by the Willamette Writers. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986, and in 2004, The Writer magazine named Gayle a Writer Who Makes a Difference.

Gayle holds a BA in Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing from the University of Redlands and an MFA in Creative Writing / Fiction from Antioch University. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012- 2014 and currently lives in Highland Park, IL.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/gayle-brandeis/


Carol Potter

Carol Potter’s most recent book of poems, What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess, was awarded the 2021 Pacific Coast Series Award from Beyond Baroque Books. Of What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess, Ellen Dore Watson writes:

The first three poems in this book will tell you why you need to read it entirely. Carol Potter’s imagination is positively athletic. Muscular, agile. These are poems in which “satisfying” and “close to ruin” can reside in the same moment. This is a poet who can also strike you with quiet recognition: “Sometimes you just need to rest your face.” Check out the love poem “Stealth, or A Sweet Bit of Stealing.” Potter brings playfulness to every poem, no matter how dead serious. One might wonder—amidst all these shenanigans—how does she also manage to be wise? Such is her gift.

—Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager

Other books include Some Slow Bees, which winner of the 2014 Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press, Otherwise Obedient (Red Hen Press, 2007), a finalist in the Lambda LGBT awards for 2007, and Short History of Pets which won the 1999 Cleveland State Poetry Center Award, and the Balcones Award. Two previous books were published by Alice James Books, Upside Down in The Dark (I995) and Before We Were Born (1990).

Publications include poems in The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, The Kenyon Review, and many other journals.

Potter’s work has also appeared in numerous anthologies including The Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses, December 2001, and most recently in The Road Taken, an anthology of contemporary Vermont poets.

Other awards a grant from the Vermont Council of Arts, 2019, a Pushcart Prize in 2001, The 2015 Ekphrasis Poetry Award, The 2015 Northampton Arts Biennial Poetry Contest, The New Letters Award for Poetry in 1990, the Tom McAfee Discovery Award from The Missouri Review, and three Massachusetts Council of the Arts Awards, and the 2004 A Center for the Arts Poetry Award. Potter was also the writer in residence at the Thurber House in April of 2003. She has had residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay Colony for the Arts, Cummington Community of the Arts, Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain, Villa Montalvo, and Centrum.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/carol-potter/


Sharman Apt Russell

Sharman Apt Russell (creative nonfiction faculty) is the recipient of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing for Diary of a Citizen Scientist (Oregon State University Press, 2014), which also won the WILLA Award and was named by The Guardian as a top ten nature book. The Burroughs Medal was first given in 1926 and recipients include Aldo Leopold, Roger Tory Peterson, Rachel Carson, and contemporary writers like John McPhee and Barry Lopez. Her forthcoming Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, 2021) combines her longtime interest in the environment with her longtime interest in hunger.

She is now working on a memoir project about test pilots and the Mojave Desert that she loves and doubts in equal measure. Recent work in fiction include Knocking on Heaven’s Door (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), an eco-sci-fi set in a Paleoterrific future, winner of the Arizona Authors Association and New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Science Fiction, and her award-winning YA Teresa of the New World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), a story of plagues, were-jaguars, and the dreamscape of the sixteenth-century American Southwest.

Sharman’s Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist was one of Booklist’s top ten books in religion. Her Hunger: An Unnatural History was written with the help of a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work has been translated into nine languages and her essays published in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. Sharman has also been awarded a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Henry Joseph Jackson Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has thrice judged the PEN Award in Children’s Literature.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/sharman-apt-russell/


Alistair McCartney

Alistair is Teaching Faculty in the MFA and UGS programs at Antioch. He works closely with all MFA students and faculty in multiple capacities, directs the Undergraduate Studies’ Creative Writing Concentration, advises UGS Applied Arts and Media students and UGS’s Two Hawks Quarterly Journal, and curates Antioch’s Literary Uprising reading series. He is the author of 2 experimental novels, The Disintegrations: a Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) and The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.) The Disintegrations won the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley award for LGBTQ Fiction. TEOTWB was a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award 2009 and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 2009. McCartney’s writing has also appeared in journals such as Hotel, Light/Air, LIT, Fence, Nat.Brut, Vestiges, 3:AM, Animal Shelter (Semiotexte), Bloom, Dream Pop, Five 2 One, 1913, and the James White Review. Born in Perth, Western Australia, he lives in Los Angeles. A graduate of Antioch University MFA’s inaugural year, he has presented at institutions throughout the country, including CUNY Grad Center, PEN Center USA, Teacher’s and Writer’s Collaborative New York, Cal Arts, UC Santa Cruz, and UW Madison. In 2019, he was Artist in Residence for Art Workshop International in Italy. He is currently working on a novel and a book of poetry. You can learn more about his writing at www.alistairmccartney.com.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/alistair-mccartney/


Jim Krusoe

Jim Krusoe (fiction) has published two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press. Since then he has had five novels published by Tin House Books: Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You, Parsifal, and The Sleep Garden (2016). His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Field, North American Review, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, and Santa Monica Review, which he began in 1988. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Manoa, Brief Encounters, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and in the Tin House Writers’ Notebook. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a reading fellowship from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. He has also published five books of poems. He is currently working on a novel.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/jim-krusoe/


Terry Wolverton

Terry Wolverton is the author of eleven books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her most recent collection, Ruin Porn, consists of poems she created using the dis•articulations process she pioneered. Her novel-in-poems, Embers, was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Book Award.

Insurgent Muse: life and art at the Woman’s Building, a memoir published by City Lights Books, was named one of the “Best Books of 2002” by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publisher’s Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award.

Her novel, Bailey’s Beads, was a finalist in the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Awards for 1997; Kirkus Reviews said of it, “her ambitious debut…features…a stark but melodious prose style…confident style and affecting characters.”

Her fiction, poetry, essays, and drama have been published in periodicals internationally, including Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train Stories, The Stinging Fly, and Zyzzyva, and widely anthologized. She has also edited several successful literary compilations, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning His: brilliant new fiction by gay men and Hers: brilliant new fiction by lesbians, volumes 1, 2, and 3.

Wolverton spent her early years working in experimental theatre and performance art. She has collaborated as a writer with Heidi Duckler Dance Theater on the site-specific performances subVersions, Under Eden, After Eden, Cover Story, Cleopatra and Catch Your Breath. Wolverton also worked with composer David Ornette Cherry to adapt Embers as a jazz opera and produced concert readings as part of the ALOUD series at the Central Library and at Grand Performances.

Wolverton has taught creative writing since 1977; in 1997, she founded Writers at Work, a center for creative writing in Los Angeles, where she offers several weekly workshops. She spent thirteen years at the Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, eventually serving as its executive director.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/terry-wolverton/


Brad Kessler

Brad Kessler is a critically acclaimed novelist whose work has been translated into several languages. He won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction for his novel, Birds in Fall, a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Whiting Writers Award. He is an educator and farmer and author of the literary non-fiction Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese. His other books include the novel, Lick Creek, and The Woodcutter’s Christmas, and the forthcoming novel, North (2021, The Overlook Press/Abrams). His work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Bomb, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. He teaches creative writing at the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and has lectured at – among other places – Northwestern University, Smith College, The New School University, and the Kenyon Writers Workshop. He lives on the smallest licensed goat dairy in the state of Vermont where he makes cheese alongside the photographer and activist, Dona Ann McAdams.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/brad-kessler/


Francesca Lia Block

Francesca Lia Block has published over 25 works of fiction, non-fiction, short stories, and poetry for adults, young adults, and children, including the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement award-winning Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books. She has also published various essays, interviews and reviews. She was a finalist for Professor of the Year at University of Redlands and currently teaches at UCLA Extension, St. Mary’s College of California, Litreactor, and privately. Francesca is honored to be a part of the Antioch Los Angeles MFA program.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/francesca-block/


Genevieve Hudson

Genevieve Hudson is the author of Boys of Alabama: a novel (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2020), which Oprah Magazine selected as a recommended book to read in 2020. Her other books include the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and Pretend We Live Here: Stories (Future Tense Books, 2018), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and named a Best Book of 2018 by Entropy.

Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected by them for The Best Queer Internet Writing of 2017, and appears in McSweeney’s, Catapult, Tin House online, No Tokens, Joyland, Bitch Magazine, The Rumpus, and other places. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. You can find her on Instagram @gkhudson or on Twitter @genhudson. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/genevieve-hudson/


Victoria Patterson

Victoria Patterson (fiction) is the author of the novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture.” She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle. Her newest story collection is The Secret Habit of Sorrow (Counterpoint Press, 2018). She lives in South Pasadena, California with her family.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/victoria-patterson/


Jaswinder Bolina

Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet and essayist. His poetry collections include The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2012), Carrier Wave (2006), and the chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His first collection of essays Of Color is being released by McSweeney’s in June 2020. His poems and essays have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have been included in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry and The Norton Reader. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/jaswinder-bolina/


Natashia Deón

Natashia Deón is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee in Fiction, a practicing criminal attorney, and author of the critically acclaimed and widely reviewed novels, The Perishing and GRACE, which was named a Best Book by the New York Times and awarded Best Debut Novel by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. A PEN America Fellow, Deón has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Prague’s Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a professor of creative writing at Yale, UCLA, and Antioch University. Her personal essays have been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed and other places.

Deón was a 2017 U.S. Delegate to Armenia as part of the U.S. Embassy’s reconciliation project between Turkey and Armenia in partnership with the University of Iowa and is a Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellow. In that role, she founded REDEEMED, a criminal record clearing and clemency project that pairs writers with those who have been convicted of crimes.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/natashia-deon/


Vandana Khanna

Born in New Delhi, India, Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. Her third collection of poems is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2023, and her previous books have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, New England Review, Guernica, and Narrative, as well as on BBC 3. She serves as co-poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/vandana-khanna/


Sarah Van Arsdale

Sarah Van Arsdale is the award-winning author of four books of fiction and two books of poetry. Her most recent book, Taken, is a poetry collection that braids her personal experience with our current political and cultural landscape; it was published in October 2021, by Finishing Line Press.

Her fourth book of fiction, a collection of novellas titled In Case of Emergency, Break Glass, was published by Queens Ferry Press in 2016. Her third novel, Grand Isle, was published by SUNY Press in 2012. Her second, Blue, winner of the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2003, and her first, Toward Amnesia, was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in literary magazines including Guernica, Passages North, The New Guard, and Bayou; her essays on craft have appeared in The AWP Writers’ Chronicle, and The Writer.

She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. In addition to teaching in the Antioch/LA low-residency MFA program, she has taught with Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy, at New York University, with Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, and she is on the faculty of Writers Harbor/Maine Media in Rockport, Maine. For seven years, she curated BLOOM, a reading series in New York City, and serves on the board of the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction. She also works as a private manuscript coach. More of her drawings, short films, and writing can be seen at sarahvanarsdale.com.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/sarah-van-arsdale/


Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet, and the author, most recently, of the novel Very Cold People. Her nonfiction books are 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, and her other books include the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise and the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape.

Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/sarah-manguso/


Aminah Mae Safi

Aminah Mae Safi is the author of four novels, including Tell Me How You Really Feel (Feiwel & Friends) and Travelers Along the Way: a Robin Hood Remix (Feiwel & Friends). She’s an erstwhile art historian, a fan of Cholula on popcorn, and an un-ironic lover of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Her writing has been featured on Bustle and Salon and her award-winning short stories can be found in Fresh Ink (Crown Books) and the forthcoming First Year Orientation (Candlewick Press, 2023).

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/aminah-mae-safi/


Pitor Florczyk

Piotr Florczyk is an award-winning poet, scholar, critic, and translator of Polish poetry. His most recent books are From the Annals of Kraków, a volume of poems based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, and several volumes of translations, including Building the Barricade by Anna ?wirszczy?ska, which won the 2017 Found in Translation Award and the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, The Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Notre Dame Review, New Orleans Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, West Branch, The Louisville Review, World Literature Today, The Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, America Magazine, Poetry International, The Yellow Nib, and other journals and magazines. He is a founding editor of Calypso Editions, a cooperative press dedicated to publishing poetry and prose in translation. His new co-founded press is called Textshop Editions.

Piotr Florczyk has been a fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the Czes?aw Mi?osz Institute, the Polish Book Institute, and the Delaware Division of the Arts, and has taught poetry, translation, and literature undergraduate and graduate courses at Claremont McKenna College, SDSU, University of San Diego, Antioch University Los Angeles, University of Delaware, and at UC Riverside. He is a doctoral candidate at USC and lives in Redondo Beach with his wife and their daughter.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/piotr-florczyk/


Lisa Locascio Nighthawk

Lisa Locascio Nighthawk’s debut novel, Open Me, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. A New York Times Editor’s Choice, Open Me was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and was reviewed in The New York Times Review of Books, The New Yorker, and on NPR. Lisa is also the editor of an anthology, Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, published by Outpost19 Books.

Lisa’s stories, essays, and poems have been published in n+1, The Believer, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Tin House, and many other places. Her essay “Byzantium,” was selected for inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and she was awarded the 2017 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction International Literary Award for her essay “Protest,” which later appeared in The Southampton Review. Lisa is editor of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7x7LA and Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their cat, Sybil.

Prior to joining Antioch, Lisa held teaching positions at UCLA (where she was Lecturer of Scandinavian), Wesleyan University, the University of Southern California, Colorado College, and New York University, among other institutions.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/lisa-locascio/


Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several award-winning nonfiction books including Reclaimers, stories of indigenous women reclaiming sacred land and water, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, and three essay collections, Potluck, Now Go Home, and most recently, Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. She has also written a novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14-year-old snowboarder and her activist father, and her first chapbook of poetry, At Mile Marker Six, will appear in Fall 2021. Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have recently appeared in Fourth Genre, Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and Hotel Amerika. After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and, in addition to Antioch, has served as a visiting writer at Whitman College, St. Lawrence University, and the University of Montana.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/ana-maria-spagna/


Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), is inspired by her family’s immigration stories and her time volunteering with the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com.

Bermejo was chosen as the first “Poet in the Parks” resident at Gettysburg National Military Park in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and the National Parks Arts Foundation in Fall 2017. Locating the Dead, a chapbook inspired by her time at Gettysburg during the first half of the Trump administration was published by A-B Projects as part of the collaborative art exhibit, “The Stacks.” “Battlegrounds,” a poem from this collection was featured as an Academy of Poets’ Poem-a-Day and on Poetry Unbound.

A former Steinbeck fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund/Money for Women grantee, and Tucson Festival of Books 3rd place poetry winner, she was once selected by her mentor, Eloise Klein Healy as a Los Angeles Central Library ALOUD newer poet. She has received residencies with Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Miresa Collective.

Bermejo is co-founder and director of Women Who Submit, a literary organization fighting for gender parity by empowering women and non-binary writers to submit work for publication. She received a BA in Theatre Arts from California State University of Long Beach and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She teaches adult writing workshops with UCLA Extension and children’s poetry workshops throughout LA County.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/xochitl-julisa-bermejo/


Ross Brown

Ross Brown began his writing career on NBC’s award-winning comedy The Cosby Show and went on to write, produce and create comedies for ABC, CBS, and The WB. He is the author of the book Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet. His full-length plays Hindsight and Trapped have had staged readings at The Pasadena Playhouse and The Barter Theater in Virginia. His short plays have been performed in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minnesota. Prior to his writing career, Professor Brown worked as an assistant director on feature films including National Lampoon’s Vacation.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/ross-brown/


Nikki Darling

Nikki Darling holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. Her debut novel, Fade Into You, was published by Feminist Press in 2018. She is completing her second book, The Call Is Coming From Inside the House. She lives in L.A. with her cat and a small dog.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/nikki-darling-phd/


Anjali Enjeti

Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and journalist based near Atlanta. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, which the Washington Post called “a nuanced and much-needed journey into exploring what it means to be American,” and The Parted Earth, a novel that the Star Tribune called, “a novel with the gravitas to transform.” Her other writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Catapult, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and elsewhere. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University.

Since 2017, Anjali has been working on getting out the vote in Georgia’s AAPI community. In 2019, she co-founded the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats. In the fall of 2020, she was a member of Georgia’s AAPI Leadership Council for the Biden Harris campaign. She currently serves as a Fulton County poll clerk. For her writing and activism, she has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, Peacock’s Zerlina, WABE’s City Lights, Georgia Public Broadcasting’s On Second Thought, and WUTC’s Scenic Roots.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/anjali-enjeti/


Colette Freedman

Colette Freedman is an internationally produced playwright with over 50 produced plays and musicals. Her play Sister Cities has been produced around the country and internationally, including Paris (Une Ville, Une Soeur), Rome (Le Quattro Sorelle), and Australia. She also wrote the novel and the film which stars Jacki Weaver and Alfred Molina. She has authored ten books and is currently working on her eleventh. In collaboration with New York Times best-selling author Michael Scott, she wrote the thriller The Thirteen Hallows (Tor/Macmillan) Her other novels include The Affair and The Consequences (Kensington), Anomalies with Sadie Turner (Select Books) and I Wrote That One, Too with Steve Dorff (Backbeat Books). She also wrote the film And Then There Was Eve which won best feature at the LA Film Festival 2017 and co-produced the film Quality Problems, which won several film festivals. Her film Miles Underwater is currently in post-production, as well as her film 7,000 Miles starring Wendie Malick about Amelia Earhart. She has produced and co-written several over a dozen Lifetime thrillers with Brooke Purdy. Colette has several scripts in development, including Joint Venture, Scattering Rachel, and The Last Bookstore, which won Grand Prize at the CWA awards, We Screenplay’s Diverse Voices, Best SciFi Feature Action on Film, and Richmond International Film Festival. Currently, her musical Serial Killer Barbie (Heuer Publishing) is gearing up for a tour of New Zealand, and Mozart the Musical, which she conceived of with Tegan Summer, is set to play at Carnegie Hall in October 2022.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/collette-freedman/


Reyna Grade

Antioch alumna, Reyna Grande, is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us (Atria 2012), where she writes about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home was released in 2018. Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains (Atrial 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (2009) which were published to critical acclaim. The Distance Between Us is also available as a young readers edition.

Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges, and cities across the country. Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The young reader’s version of The Distance Between Us received an International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award in 2017. Writing about immigration, family separation, language trauma, the price of the American Dream, and her writing journey, Reyna’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, CNN, The Lily at The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, among others. Reyna is a proud member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros, where she has also served as faculty. She has also taught at several writers’ conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and VONA (Voices of Our Nation’s Arts). She has two forthcoming books: A Ballad of Love and Glory, a novel set during the Mexican-American War (Atria, March 2022); and a collection of essays by and about undocumented Americans called Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings (Harpervia, June 2022).

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/reyna-grande/


Guadalupe García McCall

Born and raised in Eagle Pass, Texas, Guadalupe García McCall is the award-winning author of several young adult novels, some short stories for adults, and many children’s poems. Guadalupe has received the Prestigious Pura Belpre Award, a Westchester Young Adult Fiction Award, the Tomás Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award, and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, among many other accolades. She is an advocate for literacy, diverse books, and Own Voices. In her travels, she is always looking for a good taco place and she never met a chocolate mole sauce she didn’t love! She lives in the San Antonio area with her husband and sons. She likes to cook, garden, write, draw, and play with her granddaughter.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/guadalupe-garcia-mccall-mfa/


Tomas Moniz

Tomas Moniz’s debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad and Rad Families anthologies. He’s a 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts and a 2022 UCross resident. He teaches creative writing at Berkeley City College. He has stuff on the internet but loves pen pals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley, CA 94703. He promises to write back.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/tomas-moniz/


Josh Roark

Joshua Roark serves as faculty for Antioch’s Post-MFA Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing. He is the editorial director of the publishing collective for emerging authors, Discover New Art, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry. He published a chapbook of sonnets, Put One Hand Up, Lean Back, with Unsolicited Press. He and his wife live happily in Los Angeles.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/josh-roark/


Aditi Khorana

Aditi Khorana is the author of two Young Adult novels, Mirror in the Sky (Penguin/Razorbill 2016), named “one of the most powerful reads of the year” by Paste Magazine, and the critically acclaimed feminist historical fantasy, The Library of Fates (Penguin/Razorbill, 2017). Both her novels are Junior Library Guild selections. Her first book is the subject of a TEDx talk, Harnessing the Power of the Unknown. She is a member of the advisory board of the House of Beautiful Business, headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, where she gives talks and workshops on feminist myth and the need for more inclusive narratives.

In a former life, Aditi was a producer at CNN, PBS, and ABC News. She also worked as an entertainment marketing consultant for various Hollywood studios, including FOX, SONY and Paramount. Her work has been featured on NPR, and in Los Angeles Review of Books, NBC News, Buzzfeed, EW, Bustle, Seventeen, Huffington Post, and Paste Magazine. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in International Relations and Modern Culture and Media, and has an MA in Global Media and Communications from the Annenberg School for Communications. She volunteers with 826LA, The Library Foundation of LA, and The Hammer Museum, teaching writing workshops for teens and kids.

https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/aditi-khorana/





COMMUNITY

Ilya Kaminsky, Alexander Chee, R.O. Kwon, Lilliam Rivera, Tyrese Coleman, Toni Jensen, Vanessa Hua, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Nicole Hodges-Persley, Tananarive Due, Isabel Quintero, Isabel Yap, Nadxieli Nieto, Ilana Masad, Kavita Das, Melissa Broder, Milan Chakraborty, Neelanjana Banerjee, Jessica Johns.