Kevin Adler (PhD/Fiction)

Ashley Akenson (MFA/Poetry)

Amanda Arnold (MFA/Poetry)

Sara Bartlett (MFA/Poetry)

Laura Beasley (MFA/Poetry)

Before beginning work as an MFA fiction candidate, Brett Bender worked as an archivist, bibliographer, and high school teacher. As an undergraduate he attended the University of Georgia, University of South Carolina, and Georgia State University. In 2007, he won the Creative Loafing Fiction Contest. He lives in the Home Park neighborhood of midtown Atlanta.

Laura Black (MFA/Poetry)

Kristen Blanco (MFA/Fiction)

Elizabeth Blount (MFA/Poetry)

Melissa Bower (PhD/Fiction)

Amber Nicole Brooks (MFA/Fiction) lives and writes in Decatur, Georgia. Her fiction has appeared in Stacatto Magazine and gsu review, and she was awarded third place in the 2007 Playboy College Fiction Contest.

Jody Brooks (MFA/Fiction)

Christopher Bundy (PhD/Fiction) returned to the United States after five years of living in and traveling through Asia. He received an MFA from Emerson College in Boston, MA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Terminus Magazine, The Sunday Reader, The Beacon Street Review, Creative Loafing, and Japanophile, and in the anthology Where Love is Found. He was a 2002 finalist in the AWP Thomas Dunne Novel competition, and First Runner-up in the 2005 Writers Exchange Contest for Fiction, sponsored by Poets & Writers Magazine. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Jennie, and his daughter Harper Lily.

Matthew Byers (PhD/Poetry)

Judith Carson (MFA/Poetry)

Laura Carter (PhD/Poetry)

Dawn Cloud (MFA/Fiction)

Bradley Denton (PhD/Poetry)

Travis Denton (MFA/Poetry)

A native New Yorker, Mike Dockins (PhD/Poetry) received a B.S. in 1999 from SUNY Brockport, and an MFA in 2002 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, Indiana Review, West Branch, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, and elsewhere, and they have also been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. His first book of poems, Slouching in the Path of a Comet, was recently published by Sage Hill Press, and a poem from the collection will appear in Best American Poetry 2007. Mike is currently poetry editor for Terminus magazine (www.terminusmagazine.com) and a co-founding editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics (www.redactions.com). Mike moonlights as a singer-songwriter; his acoustic band CLOP released its fourth album of original tunes in June 2005.

Julie Douglas (MFA/Fiction)

Kara Eidsvik (MFA/Fiction)

Kathleen Fesuk  (PhD/Poetry)

Marc Fitten (PhD/Fiction)

Kerin Flatley (PhD/Fiction) is originally from Massachusetts. She received her bachelors degree from Fairfield University in Connecticut and her masters degree from Boston University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing. In between, she edited for various technology publications and spent a summer working as an assistant to Maya Angelou. Since moving to Atlanta she has been awarded an Agnes Scott College Writer's Award in Fiction and First Place in Creative Loafing's 2005 Fiction Contest.

Jeanne Finelli (MA/Fiction)

Peter Fontaine (PhD/Fiction) is a Master of the Arts in English Literature from UNLV who has recently turned his ambitions toward becoming a professional liar. A native of California and a former resident of Las Vegas, he recently made Atlanta his home to pursue his PhD in Creative Writing. His work has been published in Rainbow Curve and Vagus Nerve. He lives with his fiancee Cara and her cat Bella.

Corey Green (MFA/Poetry): Although I was born and raised in Bee Branch, Arkansas, an unbelievably small town, I now live in Atlanta, Georgia, where I am studying for my M.F.A. My most formative experiences are not only living in England and China, but also my four factory jobs and my rather lengthy stint in a feed mill. My poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and appeared in canwehaveourballback?, Diner, Poetry Motel, RedActions, Segue, storySouth, and many others.

Jessica Hand (MFA/Poetry)

Benjamin Hanna (MFA/Fiction)

Shelley Helms-Fleishman (MFA/Poetry)

Bret Hewit (MA/Fiction)

Katherine Hyon (PhD/Fiction)

James Iredell's (PhD/Fiction) fiction has appeared in the Chattahoochee Review (Summer 2006), and his poem "The World of O" appears in the anthology We Are What We Watch: Poets Respond to Movies, Television, and Media (Syracuse UP, 2006).

Dionne Irving (PhD/Fiction)

Robert Ivey (MA/Poetry)

Robin Kemp (PhD/Poetry) holds a BA from GSU and a MFA from the University of New Orleans. She had the Letter of the Month in the March 2006 issue of Poetry, her entries on Atlanta poet Turner Cassity and on New Formalism appear in the new Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, and she has entries on Kate Chopin and William Stafford in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004). Her poem "Pantoum for Ari Fleischer" appeared in Texas Poetry Journal, where her interview with R.S. Gwynn will appear next year. She is coediting an anthology of post-Katrina poetry by New Orleans poets, and has work forthcoming in two other anthologies. Robin owns the Formalista listserv, which brings together experts on versification, translators, and women poets writing in or curious about form and meter.

Katherine Kincer (MFA/Poetry)

Charlotte Kuehn (MFA/Fiction)

Liane LeMaster (MFA/Fiction) was born in West Virginia and grew up in North Carolina. She graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in theater and spent ten years producing plays and managing a theater company in Chicago. She has been published in the Mississippi Review, the Chattahoochee Review and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Jessica Lindberg (MFA/Poetry) grew up in Decatur. She earned her BA in Spanish from Earlham College, a small Quaker school in Indiana. She and her husband fled to the northwest corner of Georgia when Decatur got too big for its britches. She now lives in Rome with her husband and two sons.

Monica Magnan (MA/Poetry)

James Davis May (PhD/Poetry)

James Miller (PhD/Poetry)

Sam Miller (MA/Fiction) grew up in the southeast (Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama) and graduated from the University of Texas (Austin) in 2000. After some time in Dallas, Baltimore and New York, he returned to Georgia and entered the New South's Writing Workshop. His fiction has recently appeared in McSweeny's and AGNI.

Delisa Mulkey (PhD/Poetry)

Candace Nadon (PhD/Fiction)

Derek Nikitas (PhD/Fiction) was raised in Manchester, NH and Rochester, NY. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2000, then sought adventure in the Czech Republic, England, and Costa Rica. Before coming to GSU, he taught for four years in Delta College, and innovative interdisciplinary program at the State University of New York at Brockport. He has published stories in The Ontario Review, Chelsea, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Traffic East and The Pedestal Magazine. Joyce Carol Oates nominated him for a Pushcart Prize in ’05. His first novel, Pyres, was released by St. Martin’s Minotaur in October 2007.

Beth Powell (MFA/Fiction) is an Atlanta almost-native, and has easily amassed the most in-Atlanta years of anyone, although she’s also lived in Florida, Rhode Island, North Carolina and Austria. She taught English after completing an MA/Lit and was later a daily reporter and a freelance feature writer and editor. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in publications including The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Atlanta Magazine and Southpoint, and in the collection True South. By day, she designs and develops web-based training. She and her husband have a son and daughter who’re in school on the West Coast. You can access her web site at: www.bethpowell.net.

Calaya Michelle Reid (PhD/Fiction) is a native of Westbury, NY. She's a graduate of New York University and the University of Georgia (BA, MA). Her first novel (written as Grace Octavia) is Take Her Man (Kensington Books, 2007). She lives in Atlanta and has a second Grave Octavia novel forthcoming from Kensington Books.

Shannon Rentner (MFA/Fiction)

Michele Rozga (PhD/Poetry) is the winner of the 2007 Southeast Review Poetry Contest, and the 2003 Agnes Scott College Writers' Festival Competition Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in GSU Review and the Southeast Review.

Heather Russel (PhD/Fiction)

Jenny Sadre-Orafai (MFA/Poetry) writes both poetry and prose. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the following publications: Wicked Alice, Poems Neiderngasse, SubtleTea, Lily, Verse Libre Quarterly, can we have our ball back?, Red River Review, FRiGG, Sein und Werden, and Plainsongs. Her prose has appeared in Rock Salt Plum Review and in the forthcoming Seal Press anthology, Waking Up American. She has hosted numerous open mics, in addition to competing in slams. She has also recorded a spoken word album. Sadre-Orafai currently serves as Senior Poetry Editor for the online journal, JMWW.

Emily Schulten (PhD/Poetry)

Caren Scott (MFA/Poetry)

Austin Segrest (MFA/Poetry)

Michelle Shamasneh (MA/Poetry)

Rochelle Spencer (PhD/Fiction)

Cheryl Stiles (PhD/Poetry), a Marietta native, has published poems and essays in Poet Lore, The Atlanta Review, Storysouth, SLANT, Plainsongs, Red River Review, POEM, Heliotrope, Ink Pot, and The Healing Muse. Her work has also been included in several anthologies including Sincerely Elvis, a collection of original poems about Elvis Presley. She recently completed a book of essays, On Nelson Street, and she is currently seeking a publisher for her first book length poetry manuscript entitled Ball Lightning. While enrolled in classes at GSU, she also works fulltime as a reference librarian at Kennesaw State University.

William Taft (MFA/Fiction)

Robert Trott (PhD/Fiction)

Lydia Williams (PhD/Fiction) moved with her family from St. Louis, Missouri to Scarcely, Arkansas when she was twelve. She's lived in the South ever since, mostly as a preacher's kid, an actress, and a nerd. Recently, she's published fiction in The Dead Mule, The Rose and Thorn, Night Train, and JAW. She lives with her husband in Duluth.

Sarah Winterfield (MFA/Fiction)

Jennifer Yucra (MFA/Poetry)