Resident Faculty

	Michael Adams, formerly the graduate adviser and associate director of the MCW, is the Director of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship Program of the University and the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the author of short stories, essays, novels—Blind Man’s Bluff; Anniversaries in the Blood—and a college textbook, The Writer’s Mind: Making Writing Make Sense. A member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, he is also a former member of the Texas State Bar Plain-Language Committee who has conducted legal writing seminars for the U.T. School of Law and consulted on legal writing for corporations and distinguished law firms.
	Edward Carey is a novelist whose books include The Iremonger Trilogy: Heap House, Foulsham, and Lungdon; Observatory Mansions; Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. He is as well a playwright (Sulking Thomas, Captain of the Birds, adaptations of Süskind’s The Pigeon and Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice) and visual artist. He frequently teaches fiction workshop and a reading course in traditions of fairytales. Website.
	Oscar Casares (Fiction) is the author of the collection Brownsville, and the novel Amigoland, both published by Little, Brown. A graduate of the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa and recipient of fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Arts, his short fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Northwest Review, and Threepenny Review. He is also a regularly contributing essayist for Texas Monthly magazine. Website.
	Steven Dietz (Playwriting, Screenwriting) is the author of over 30 plays seen at over 100 regional theaters in the U.S., Off-Broadway and internationally. Honors include Kennedy Center Fund for New American Play Awards (Fiction and Still Life with Iris); the PEN USA West Award in Drama (Lonely Planet); the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play (Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure); the 1995 Yomuiri Shimbun Award for his adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel, Silence; and the Edgerton New Play Award (Rancho Mirage). Recent work includes the Pulitzer-nominated Last of the Boys and the widely-produced Becky’s New Car and Yankee Tavern. Mr. Dietz has sold screenplays to Sony and True Pictures, and also worked as a writer and story editor for ABC and Warner Brothers Television.
	Liz Engelman, (Area Head of Playwriting & Directing) has worked widely in new play development, including at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, ASK Theatre Projects, New York Theatre Workshop, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, South Coast Rep, Denver Center, and Florida Stage. She received her BA in Theatre from Brown, and her MFA Dramaturgy from Columbia. Engelman is the co-editor with Michael Bigelow Dixon of several collections of plays and a book on playwriting exercises; two volumes of monologues with Tori Haring-Smith; and a collection of Hedgebrook plays with Christine Sumption. She is also dramaturg and founder and director of Tofte Lake Center at Norm’s Fish Camp, a creative retreat in Minnesota.
	Laura Furman, emeritus (Fiction, Non-fiction) is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Subtropics, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She has written four collections of stories (The Glass House, Watch Time Fly, Drinking with the Cook, The Mother Who Stayed) two novels (The Shadow Line, Tuxedo Park), and a memoir (Ordinary Paradise). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Paisano Project, and the NEA. Now retired from regular teaching, she is series editor of the PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories. Website.
	Stephen Harrigan’s (Fiction, Screenwriting, Non-fiction) books include the novels Aransas, Jacob’s Well, The Gates of the Alamo, Challenger Park, Remember Ben Clayton, and A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, as well as the works of nonfiction A Natural State, Comanche Midnight, and Water and Light. His articles and essays have been published in Texas Monthly, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Life, Slate and National Geographic. As a screenwriter, Harrigan has written movies and miniseries for TV, among them The Last of His Tribe (HBO), King of Texas (TNT), Cleopatra (ABC), and The Colt (Hallmark Channel). Website.
	Kurt Heinzelman (Poetry) co-founded The Poetry Miscellany and is currently Editor-at-Large for Bat City Review. A scholar of British Romanticism and modern poetry, he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was twice a finalist for the Poetry Book of the Year from the Texas Institute of Letters (The Halfway Treeand Black Butterflies. His third book, The Names They Found There, was Notable Book of the Year by Poetry International, and his latest collection is Intimacies & Other Devices. He has served as Executive Curator of the Ransom Center and as Director of Education at the Blanton Museum. An Honorary Professor at Swansea University (Wales), he has been since 2005 a judge of the International Dylan Thomas Prize.
	Bret Anthony Johnston (Fiction/Screenwriting) assumed the directorship of MCW in summer 2017. He is the author of the award-winning story collection Corpus Christi, the novel Remember Me Like This, a New York Times Notable Book, and the screenplay for a documentary film, Waiting for Lightning, which was released by Samuel Goldwyn Films. He is as well the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer and directed the creative writing at Harvard University for 12 years. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Award.
	Stuart Kelban (Screenwriting) has written nearly a dozen feature-length screenplays and worked with Warner Brothers, Sony Studios, Twentieth-Century Fox and Mandalay Pictures developing material for Denzel Washington, Sean Penn, Samuel Jackson, and Goldie Hawn, as well as directors John Woo and Dean Perisot. His television work includes drama pilots for NBC and UPN and a miniseries for HBO. He received his MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Virginia.
	Peter LaSalle’s (Fiction) books include the novels Strange Sunlight and Mariposa’s Song, five story collections—The Graves of Famous Writers, Hockey Sur Glace, Tell Borges if You See Him, What I Found Out About Her, and Sleeping Mask (forthcoming Jan 2017)—and a collection of essays on literary travel, The City at Three PM: Writing, Reading, and Traveling. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, such as Paris Review, Tin House, Zoetrope, Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, Sports’ Best Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He has received an NEA Fellowship, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, and the Award for Distinguished Prose from the Antioch Review.
	Richard Lewis (Screenwriting) has worked as an editor, producer, director, and/or writer for National Geographic, A&E, PBS, Sierra Club Productions, and Devillier-Donegan Enterprises. His production, Chimp Rescue, premiered on National Geographic Explorer and won a Genesis Award for Best Cable Documentary. Most recently, he worked on The Living Weapon for PBS’s American Experience.
	Kirk Lynn is the head of UT’s Department of Theatre & Dance playwriting and directing program, as well as playwright-in-residence and one of six co-producing artistic directors of Austin’s Rude Mechs. With the Rudes, Kirk has written and adapted more than a dozen plays, including Lipstick Traces, Cherrywood, and The Method Gun. Most recently, he has three plays in New York City in spring 2014: Bum Phillips, All American Opera at LaMama; Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra at Playwrights Horizon; and Stop Hitting Yourself at Lincoln Center’s LCT3. Kirk received his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers in 2004 and has published a novel, Rules for Werewolves and is developing projects for television, as well.
	James Magnuson, emeritus (Fiction) was the Director of the MCW from 1993 until 2017 and is the author of almost a dozen novels—among them Without Barbarians, Ghost Dancing, Windfall, The Hounds of Winter, and Famous Writers I Have Known—and a dozen plays, which have had production at Playwright’s Horizons, Hudson Guild, and St. Peter’s Gate. He received the Hodder Fellowship of Princeton University for his plays, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an award from the Texas Institute of Letters for his fiction. His career also includes a stint as a series television writer in Hollywood. Website.
	Elizabeth McCracken (Fiction) is the author of two short story collections, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry and Thunderstruck; two novels, The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again; and a memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. A graduate of the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Story Prize. She holds the James Michener Chair in Fiction and is director of the New Writers Project in the U.T. Department of English. Website.
	Cindy McCreery, formerly of the UC Santa Barbara Film Studies faculty and the ULCA Professional Program in Screenwriting faculty, is a graduate of the Walt Disney/ABC Feature Writing Fellowship. Her recent projects include two episodes of the Stephen King show HAVEN (on SyFy); UNPLUGGED (original cable movie for Disney); POWDER PUFFS (Disney); SOCCER MOM (New Line Cinema); ELEPHANT WILD (National Geographic Films); FREE WILLY: ESCAPE FROM PIRATE COVE (Nat’l Geographic/Warner Brothers); an adaptation of RISING STAR (Disney); as well as pitches sold to Paramount and MGM and spec scripts for Radar Pictures and Unique Features. Her “Writing for Series Television” course gets student scripts out to industry review by producers and networks.
	Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, (Copper Canyon 2006) winner of the Hayden Carruth Award; Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon 2009), a Library Journal best book of the year; and Little Stranger (Copper Canyon 2013), a Lannan Literary Selection and named best book of the year by Coldfront magazine, Black Warrior, and Columbus Alive. Her chapbook, The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to those of Whales Is a Family Resemblance, was a winner of the 2015 Essay Press contest. Her fourth collection, Late Empire, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. Recipient of a Lannan Writing Residency, a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum, Olstein is also the lyricist for Cold Satellite, a rock band fronted by songwriter Jeffrey Foucault.
	Charles Ramirez-Berg (Screenwriting) is the author of Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion and Resistance and Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983. In addition, he has published many scholarly articles on Latinos in U.S. films and on Mexican cinema. He writes screenplays, has published fiction, poetry, and co-authored a children’s book, The Gift of the Poinsettia with Chicana poet Pat Mora.
	Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collection King Me (Copper Canyon) and recipient of honors and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He earned his MFA from the Michener Center in 2010 and his PhD in English from UT's Dept of English, and he previously taught at University of Illinois/Chicago.
	Beau Thorne is an MFA graduate of the MCW (2005) whose recent credits include CONTROL, a psychological horror movie commissioned for Sony Pictures; BOMBTOWN, a historical drama set in Los Alamos, NM, a co-written spec television pilot, with Oliver Stone attached to produce; HIDING IN TIME, a futuristic action movie adapted from the graphic novel, commissioned by Warner Brothers; MAX PAYNE, a crime thriller adapted from the Rockstar video game, released in 2008 by 20th Century Fox, starring Mark Wahlberg; and CURE, a medical thriller sold to Warner Brothers with Vertigo Entertainment.
	Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collections Minor Robberies and Wait Til You See Me Dance, (forthcoming Spring 2017); a memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; a novel Vacation, winner of the Cabell First Novel Award; and a graphic novel,I, Parrot, with the illustrator Elizabeth Haidle (forthcoming). Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, and McSweeney's. The recipient of four Pushcart Prizes and a grant from Creative Capital for Innovative Literature, she is also the PEN Prison Writing Mentor and teaches a monthly workshop at Connally Penitentiary.
	Dean Young (Poetry) has published a dozen books of poetry, including Elegy on Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Primitive Mentor, a finalist for the 2009 Griffin Prize in Poetry; a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness; and his newest poems, Shock by Shock. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was selected as Texas’s 2014 Poet Laureate. He was on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop until becoming the William Livingston Chair of Poetry with MCW and the UT Department of English/New Writers Project in 2008.