Amy Ash

amykierzek@yahoo.com
Writing Sample

I earned my MFA from New Mexico State University in 2006 and chose to pursue a PhD in Creative Writing at KU, one of the few universities in the country that offers a Creative Writing PhD. What I like best about the program is that the teaching opportunities are great and the writing community is strong. There is no other town like Lawrence in the Midwest. My work has been published in Lake Effect, Inkwell, Desert Voices, and Cimarron Review.

Andy Andregg

andyanderegg@gmail.com

BA in English, Creative Writing from the University of Oklahoma.
Lawrence has the best Indian lunch buffet imaginable and a brewery with $1.25 pints on Mondays. We have a reading series on the second floor of a bar/coffee shop and a writers' collective that hosts benefit parties, collaborations with visual artists, roasts, conference trips, and caravans to readings. But-wait-there's-more: teaching experience in creative writing, workshops, funding, and a chamois cloth with a travel case! The thing I love best about the KU MFA Program is that we are all homies, homies who have miniature spiral notebooks in our chest pockets to write down the things we say to each other when we all talk about books and writing at dinner, after movies, on porches, and during rock shows.

Robert J. Baumann

baumann.baumann@gmail.com
http://mitzvahchaps.blogspot.com
http://wufgood.blogspot.com
http://anactualkansas.blogspot.com

If you imagine Pat Morita alive, drunk, and laughing: that is pretty much my life.

Benjamin Cartwright

bendeancartwright@gmail.com

B.A. in Humanities, Washington State University, M.A. English, Kansas State University.
I’m a native of Washington State but have been bouncing around between the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest for a number of years. Lawrence is the bees’ knees because of the low cost of living and vibrant arts community. I chose KU for my MFA because I feel that living in a small, lively University town is the perfect environment for writing. I’ve had poetry published in Organization and Environment, The Sunflower Anthology, The Palouse Poetry Project, Touchstone, LandEscapes, The Spokesman-Review and the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Several years ago I composed and sold poems to strangers at Farmer’s Markets in Idaho, Washington and Oregon. I’ve also worked on several poetry pieces involving projections of found-object slides, musical accompaniment, and occasionally, a megaphone.

Mickey Cesar

mikkirat@sunflower.com
http://sunflower.com/~mikkirat

Mickey Cesar was born in Plattsburgh, New York, and lived in Dayton, Satellite Beach, Austin, Wichita and Omaha. He briefly attended Kansas University before joining the Navy where he trained in San Francisco and was assigned to a destroyer in Norfolk, traveling extensively in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Mickey lived in Lawrence until he was mobilized as an Army Reservist, where he served as a Staff Sergeant in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

His poems have appeared in Rockhurst Review, Coal City Review, I-70 Review, The Other Side of Sorrow, Present Magazine, Seveneightfive Magazine, Flutter and other publications; he also has been published as a "Pocket Poet" by Unholy Day Press (Kansas City, 2004). His first book, “Vanishing Point” was released by 219 Press (Perry, KS) in January 2005. Having completed a Bachelor’s Degree in English following his discharge from the Army, Mickey is pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry at Kansas University.

Dennis Etzel Jr.

detzeljr@ku.edu
http://dennisetzeljr.blogspot.com/
http://topcitypoetry.blogspot.com/

My interests are Contemporary American Poetry, poetry as survival, feminist poetry, Two-Spirit poetry, ecopoetry, ecofeminist poetry, flarf poetry, flarfists, and Audre Lorde's use of the erotic as empowerment. I graduated from K-State with an MA (literature and creative writing emphasis), while earning a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. My primary interest is (you guessed it!) poetry, followed by short stories. I chose KU because my friend Ben suggested it, and I really love it. I live in Topeka with my wife and son, and teach at Washburn University. I also host the Top City Poetry Reading Series.

DaMaris Hill

dhill@ku.edu
http://www.utoronto.ca/wjudaism/contemporary/contemp_index2.html

DaMaris is a student in the PhD English-Creative Writing Program. She is a graduate of Morgan State University with a MA in English. Her story "On the Other Side of Heaven - 1957" won the 2003 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction frames issues race and gender within the context of capitalism and marginalization using various settings around the globe. The majority of her poetry is spiritually based and addresses issues of gender, race and identity in a Capitalistic society. Eager to express the lives and accomplishments of underrepresented women, she is currently writing a novel about female juvenile delinquents during the Great Depression. Some of her writing is published in African American National Biography Project, Warpland, Women in Judaism and The Sable Quill. She chose the University of Kansas because the Department of English offers an eloquent blend of diverse scholars and writers within one community.

Kari Jackson

karijack@ku.edu
http://www.spontaneousoverflow.blogspot.com/

B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from Kansas State University. I grew up in Kansas, and, well, I’m still growing up in Kansas. And once I’m fully grown, or graduated, from Kansas, I’ll spread what I know to those who aren’t blessed with Kansas soil. I happened upon English rather unconsciously my first semester at Hutchinson Community College and have fallen deeper and deeper into the language and literature since. I slowly convinced myself that it was not foolery to major in creative writing, that it could carry me if I wanted and needed it to. So I got myself into KU’s MFA program and kept writing, and I couldn’t have found a better place to live and be and learn. I am challenged here, and I can write here. And it’s because the people—the professors, the MFA mates, the community—want you to write and want to hear you, read you, know you and your work. Come here to Mt. Oread, circled in hills and green and distant water towers, and try to convince yourself that you have nothing to write about.

Chloé" Jones

1142 Oak Street
Williamstown, KS. 66073
785.597.5105
lauramo@ku.edu

BFA from the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.
Published in Slide Down Fiction, Gangsters in Concrete, Velle Magazine, and Wylion Magazine. I moved back to Lawrence last year and bought an old church with my boyfriend, Charley. We’ve been slowly fixing it up and making it more “homey” and less “Jesusy”. I grew up in Lawrence. I chose to move back and get my MFA from KU because I wanted to be in a town that allowed me more time and space to write and think. The low cost of living and close proximity to great art, food, and music made moving to Lawrence an easy choice. Big cities make you poor! Being poor makes you work too hard and writing becomes secondary to scraping together enough money for rent and ramen noodles. I wanted to put myself in a position to truly focus on being a better writer and teacher, and the MFA program at KU offers you every opportunity to do so.

Jameelah Lang

jumeeluh@ku.edu

B.A. in English Literature, University of Kansas.
I spent a good deal of my undergraduate career trying to convince myself that I didn’t love writing so that I could possibly make a lot of money. When I decided to admit to being a writer, KU’s MFA program seemed like the natural choice. As an undergraduate here, I took a few fiction courses and had the chance to work with some of the MFA faculty. They worked hard to encourage my work on an individual basis, and they were receptive to a lot of different styles of writing—which made the program particularly attractive to me. I also had the chance to work as a reader for Cottonwood, a literary magazine based out of our department, which gave me valuable experience in the writing and editing processes. The best thing about our program is that, because its new and growing, we get to play a role in shaping the direction it takes. We have recently begun forming a writers’ collective as a way of unifying our program’s writers and connecting them to writers and artists within the community at large.

Natalie McAllister

785.331.6398
lunar@ku.edu

I grew up with a little bit of Southern, a little bit of Switzerland, and a whole lot of Kansas. I graduated from KU in 2007 with a BA in English and a minor in Germanic Languages and Literature, and I just couldn't seem to pull myself away from Lawrence and the majestic Wescoe Hall. I'm currently on the fiction track in the MFA program, which is filled with super-talented writers and a lot of well-read readers. Most of my writing focuses on heritage, land (literally-- often dirt), and finding the funny in the sad. If I'm not writing, reading, or teaching, the best place to find me is on a horse.

Joe Miller

2023 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2558
gobodog@gmail.com
www.kansascitysoil.blogspot.com
www.kcjoe.com

BFA Film Studies, University of Colorado. I would like to be a professor and to live on a nice piece of land on the edge of a lovely college town with my wife and my dogs and cats and maybe a goat or two. That’s the main reason why I’m in the MFA program at KU. For most of the past 15 years I’ve worked as a journalist, and that industry is going to hell. Five years ago, I left a newspaper to write a book that was published in 2006. It’s called Cross-X and it’s about an inner-city high school debate squad. Right after it came out I helped this weird guy named Funkhouser get elected as mayor of Kansas City, and for a while I worked in his office, until it got too weird. Now newspapers are the new mausoleums, and I’m not yet a corpse. So I’m here digging the academic life, and writing ‘net copy about credit cards to make ends meet. Plus I grow delicious vegetables.

Chris Nelson

roboman79@aol.com
Writing Sample

Chris Nelson was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, but has been living in Lawrence, Kansas since 1995. He received his undergraduate degree in Creative Writing at KU and has been in the KU MFA Writing program since 2005. He primarily writes Fiction and poetry, and is working with both forms for his MFA. He also writes sketch comedy as one of the head writers for Lawrence’s semi-annual Victor Continental Show and has written several plays and movie scripts, many of the plays having been performed in Lawrence by KU’s English Alternative Theater, Card Table Theater and Buoys of Freedom Productions. He has two cats, loves robots, and fears the coming zombie apocalypse. He is also in the habit of speaking of himself in the 3rd person for internet bios.

Benjamin R. Smith

b-smitty@ku.edu
Writing Sample

Born, bread, raised, and educated in the state of Kansas, Benjamin Smith is a gemini and an M.F.A. student in Playwriting with aspirations of great fame and fortune. He chose the K.U. M.F.A. program because he liked the idea of staying a Jayhawk for as long as possible. A two-time recipient of the Grant K. Goodman Playwriting Award, Ben was also a 2009 runner up for the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award. In his spare time he sells doughnuts at Muncher’s Bakery, offering entertainment and incite to those who might solicit it from him. He enjoys long walks, used book stores, summer rain storms and the occasional bad pun.

Louise Stauffer

stauffer@ku.edu

B.S. in journalism from University of Kansas. I am so surprised that I actually made a good decision. This MFA program lets me write, it lets me read, it lets me teach, and it lets me talk about all of those things as much as I want, which is easy, because everyone here is into all of said topics. Here, we write things that we all read and take seriously. We give feedback, we give encouragement, and we remind each other why we are writers.

Elliott Stevens

785.864.2558
rhaodsstevens@gmail.com

I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii and went to school in Bennington, Vermont. Last year, I lived in Detroit and supported myself by selling beer and hotdogs at professional baseball and football games. I haven't published anything yet, but I do work for America's greatest living essayist, Edward Hoagland. A selection of his journal entries that I helped to edit appeared in the Autumn 2004 issue of The American Scholar. I also transcribed a short story of his called "The Devil's Tub," which appeared in the October 2005 issue of The Yale Review.

Cote Smith

smith.cote@gmail.com

I graduated from KU in 2005 and promptly moved to Seattle to work/write for a quarterly magazine called the Internationalist (www.intmag.org). They published a poem of mine, so naturally I fell in love with the entire staff and the magazine itself, which focuses on international cultures, affairs, and politics—in a cool way. They also taught me to write, which was very kind of them. I'm still involved with the Internationalist, writing the occasional web piece and print article, but I came back to KU because of my unrelenting affinity for both the English Department and allergenic hills.