BFA in Creative WritingVisiting Writers SeriesThe BFA in Creative Writing program presents a visiting writers series at each residency. Visiting writers are generous with their expertise and share their craft with students through readings, workshops, and informal discussions. Below is a list of some of the program's recent and upcoming visiting writers.
Upcoming Visiting Writers
Jenny Boully is the author of the forthcoming not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The Body: An Essay (Essay Press), and the chapbook Moveable Types (Noemi Press, 2007). Her work has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry, Language for a New Century, and Great American Prose Poems. Her work has been published in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, Columbia, Verse, Seneca Review, Conduit, and other places. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and holds previous graduate degrees in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and Hollins University. She teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. Visit her at jennyboully.blogspot.com.
Dubbed by Patricia Smith as “…his own revolution” and by Thomas Lux "a poet of blue lightning and white hot passions" Roger Bonair-Agard is a veteran of the spoken-word scene and a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion. He is the author of Tarnish and Masquerade (Cypher Books, 2006) and co-author of Burning Down the House (Soft Skull Press, 2000). His most recent book of poems is GULLY (Cypher Books, Peepal Tree Press, 2010). Roger moved to the United States from his native Trinidad and Tobago in 1987. Intending to begin university and eventually pursue law, Roger found himself instead exploring the seediest sides of New York City life. From Harlem to Brooklyn to Washington Heights, his poems explore the intersection between his twenty plus years as an immigrant in America and the Trinidad from which he came. Roger has appeared three times on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour amongst other television and numerous radio appearances. For the last ten years he has worked with the youth at Urban Word in New York City, and for the last seven with the youth at Volume in Ann Arbor and Poetry Youth Organizations in Seattle, San Francisco, and the Adirondack Valley, NY. He is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the LouderARTS Project in New York. He has also been Adjunct Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Fordham University. Currently Roger is writer-in-residence with Vision Into Art, and Poet In Residence with Young Chicago Authors. He teaches poetry at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, IL. Roger is a Cave Canem fellow, and has studied under YusefKomunyakaa, Cornelius Eady, Marilyn Nelson, and ToiDerricotte. He has led countless workshops and lectures, and has performed at many American universities as well as international festivals in Germany, Switzerland, Milan and Jamaica.
Bio coming soon.
Past Visiting Writers
Author of Crows over the Wheatfield, November 22, 1963, Divine Sarah, and other works.
Author of The Haunted House, The End of Youth, The Dogs: a Modern Bestiary City, What Keeps Me Here, and other works.
Author of To after that (Toaf), Newcomer Can’t Swim, Juice, A picture-feeling, Clamour, and other works.
Author of Bridge Suite, Medea, and other works.
Douglas Kearney Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press. His book, The Black Automaton, published by Fence Books, won the National Poetry Series Prize in 2008. In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers’ Award and in 2007, the Poetry Society of America named him a notable New American Poet. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena and now living with his family in California’s San Fernando Valley, he earned a BA from Howard University, an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts (where he now teaches) and held fellowships with Cave Canem, Callaloo and Idyllwild. Visit him online at http://www.douglaskearney.com/p-p. Photo Credit: Los Jackson
Author of Godmother night: a novel, The Body of the Goddess: Sacred Wisdom in Myth, Landscape and Culture, and other works.
Author of Instrumentality and Wanton Textiles, editor of Drunken Boat, and co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and Beyond.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, the story collection Minor Robberies, and the novel Vacation, a New York Times Critics’ Choice and winner of the Cabell First Novel Award. Her work has been published in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, the Boston Review, NOON, and elsewhere. A Harper’s Bazaar “Name to Know in 2011,” she has received two Pushcart Prizes and a Creative Capital Grant for Innovative Literature. She is an assistant professor at Wesleyan University. Photo Credit: Margaret Olin
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Jenny Boully - Appearing at the Fall 2011 Residency 
Roger Bonair Agard - Appearing at the Spring 2012 Residency
Evie Shockley - Appearing at the Fall 2012 Residency
Adam Braver 
Rebecca Brown 
Renee Gladman 
Rachel Pollack 
Ravi Shankar 
Deb Olin Unferth