Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi is the author of Now It's Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Finalist for the LA Times Book Award, Wesleyan, 2014); Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011); The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003); Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). In 2004 Salt Publishing of England reprinted an expanded edition of his first book as Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad.

His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He has twice been the recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. In 2018, Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi.

He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and Tamaas.

His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). He served as Poetry Editor for The Nation (2007-2011).

http://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/member/peter-gizzi-english

Noy Holland

Noy Holland is the recipient of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story “Tally” was included in Best American Short Stories, and read by Suzzy Roche at Symphony Space in New York City. Her books include I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories; the novel Bird; and three collections of short fiction and novellas-- Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published fiction and essays in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others.

http://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/member/noy-holland

Edie Meidav

She is the author of Kingdom of the Young (2017, Sarabande); Lola,California (Farrar Straus, 2011/12); Crawl Space (Farrar Straus, 2006/7); The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton, Mifflin, 2000/1). Honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Howard Foundation, Whiting Foundation, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Bard Fiction Prize for a writer under 40, creative Fulbrights for work in Sri Lanka and Cyprus, and residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, Fundacion Valparaiso, Vermont Studio Center and elsewhere. Her work has been called an editors’ pick by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other sites. She has served as a judge for Yaddo, the PEN/Bingham first novel award, the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and as an editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal as well as a contributing editor at the International Literary Quarterly, while continuing as a senior editor for Conjunctions. She has taught or spoken at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in California, the Home for Cooperation in Cyprus, and elsewhere. Currently, with MFA writers, she is working on creating the UMass MFA Radio Project, working with New England Public Radio and the Holyoke Care Center to create bridges between MFA writers and the voices of underserved communities.

Her recent or deeper background includes Amherst, Berkeley, Brooklyn, Colombo, Cortona, Foix, Haifa, Havana, Managua, Manhattan, Nicosia, Przmsl, Rhinebeck, Samara, Toronto.

http://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/member/edie-meidav-englishmfa

Sabina Murray

Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Human Zoo. She is also the author of the novel Valiant Gentlemen, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, and the short story collection The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. Other published books are Slow Burn, A Carnivore's Inquiry, Forgery, and Tales of the New World. A collection of ghostly fiction, Vanishing Point (TBD), is forthcoming from Grove. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. She has written on Sebald for the Writers Chronicle, Wordsworth for the Paris Review blog, time theory and historical fiction for LitHub, Duterte and the Philippines for VICE, Spam (the meat) for The New York Times, and published gothic fiction in Medium. She is a former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, N.E.A. Grant recipient, Magdalen College of the University of Oxford Research Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellow. She has received the Samuel Conti Award from the University of Massachusetts and the Fred Brown Award from the University of Pittsburgh. Murray teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

http://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/member/sabina-murray

Jeff Parker

Jeff Parker is the author of the nonfiction book Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). With Pasha Malla, he co-assembled the book of found sports poetry Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion (Featherproof), and with Annie Liontas he edited A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors (UMass Press). His short fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and many others. With Mikhail Iossel he co-edited two volumes of contemporary Russian prose in translation, Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House) and Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive). He also co-translated the novel Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin from the Russian. He has taught at Eastern Michigan University, the University of Toronto, the Russian State University for the Humanities, and the University of Tampa, and he currently teaches in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the cofounder and Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. Read more about Professor Parker's work at www.thebackoftheline.net.

http://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/member/jeff-parker

Abigail Chabitnoy

Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. She is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (forthcoming, Wesleyan 2022) and How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award, and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). She was a 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon Writers Workshop and the recipient of the 2020 Witter Bynner Native Poet Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, CO. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and will be joining the faculty as an assistant professor at UMass Amherst in the fall of 2022. Abigail holds a BA in Anthropology and English from Saint Vincent College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. Find her at salmonfisherpoet.com.

https://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/member/abigail-chabitnoy