Fall 2013 Writing Classes – Instructor Bios

ALIKI BARNSTONE is a poet, translator and critic. Her most recent
collection, Bright Body, was published by White Pine Press in 2011.
She is also the author of Dear God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak 
(the Sheep Meadow Press, 2010), Blue Earth (Iris Press, 2004), 
Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002), Madly in Love (Carnegie-
Mellon, 1997), Windows in Providence (Curbstone, 1981), and 
The Real Tin Flower (1968), among others. Aliki is a professor
of English at the University of Missouri.

KELLY BARTH lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her partner, landscape
painter Lisa Grossman. Her memoir My Almost Certainly Real
Imaginary Jesus was released from Arktoi Books, an imprint of
Red Hen Press, in September.

CATHERINE BROWDER is a Kansas City–based fiction writer and
playwright, with two published story collections (The Clay That Breathes, 
and Secret Lives) and a feuillet (The Heart). Her new collection of 3
novellas is forthcoming from BkMk Press. Her stories have won awards
from Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, American Fiction I and Kansas
Quarterly, and have also appeared in such magazines as Nimrod,
New Letters, Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review and in several
anthologies, including Kansas City Noir. Her plays have been
professionally produced, regionally and in NYC. She’s received
fiction fellowships from the NEA and the Missouri Arts Council,
as well as other awards. She’s an advisory editor for New Letters 
magazine, where her book reviews appear, and a faculty member
of the New Letters Weekend Conference. 

DARREN CANADY’s work has been seen at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre
Center, the Alliance Theatre, the Quo Vadimus Arts’ ID America Festival,
the Fremont Centre Theatre, Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre, and the
BE Company. Darren holds a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon
University and MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University. He was
a 2006-7 fellow in the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace American
Playwrights Program, and former member of Primary Stages’ Dorothy
Strelsin New Writers Group. He was a participant in the T.S. Eliot US/UK
Exchange. He currently teaches playwriting at the University of Kansas.

GARY GILDNER is the author of 21 books, including The Second Bridge
(a novel), Somewhere Geese Are Flying (new and selected stories), The
Warsaw Sparks and My Grandfather’s Book (memoir), and Cleaning a
Rainbow (his latest collection of poems). He has received The National
Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non-fiction,
the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos
Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. His stories and essays have appeared
in New Letters, The Georgia Review, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The
Southern Review, Grand Street, Antaeus, The Paris Review, and in many
anthologies and textbooks. He lives in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains
with his wife Michele.

MEGAN KAMINSKI is the author of Desiring Map ( 2012) and six
chapbooks of poetry, including This Place(2013) and Gemology 
(2012). Her writing has recently appeared in American Letters &
Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, South Dakota Review,
and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at
the University of Kansas and curates the Taproom Poetry Series
in downtown Lawrence.  http://www.megankaminski.com/

LOUISE KRUG is the author of the memoir Louise: Amended (2012).
The memoir is about the brain surgeries she underwent in 2006 to
remove a bleed in her brain stem, and her subsequent recovery.
She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at the
University of Kansas, where she teaches creative writing and literature,
and lives in Lawrence with her husband and daughter.

DONALD LEVERING was born in Kansas City, educated at Baker
University, The University of Kansas, Lewis and Clark College,
and Bowling Green State University, where he received his
M. F. A. in Creative Writing. He has worked as a groundskeeper
in Oregon, teacher in the Diné (Navajo) Nation, and human
services administrator in New Mexico. He was the recipient of a
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in poetry,
winner of the Quest for Peace Writing Contest in rhetoric, and
an Academy of American Poets Featured Poet in the Online
Forum.  In 2012, he was a prizewinner in the Atlanta Review 
International Poetry Competition and took third place in the
Hackney Award, as well as placing as a finalist for the Jane
Kenyon Award. A species conservation volunteer and human
rights activist, he is the father of a son and daughter and
lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with the artist Jane Shoenfeld. 
His most recent collections are The Number of Names (2012),
and Sweeping the Skylight (2012). His latest book is Algonquins
Planted Salmon (2012).

KATHRYN NUERNBERGER is an assistant professor of Creative
Writing at University of Central Missouri and the poetry editor
for Pleiades. Her first book, Rag & Bone, won the Elixir Press
Antivenom Prize, and new poems appear widely in journals
including Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and
Versedaily.com.

LINDA RODRIGUEZ’s second Skeet Bannion novel, Every Broken Trust
(St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books), was selected by Las Comadres
National Latino Book Club. Her first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret,
won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition,
was a Barnes & Noble mystery pick, and is a finalist for the International
Latino Book Award. For her books of poetry, Skin Hunger (Scapegoat Press)
and Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press), Rodriguez has received many
awards and fellowships, including the Thorpe Menn Award, the Midwest
Voices and Visions Award, the KC ArtsFund Inspiration Award, and the
Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award. She is the president of the Borders
Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a founding board member of
Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of
the Macondo Community, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers
and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, and International
Thriller Writers. She was formerly director of the University of Missouri-
Kansas City Women’s Center. She blogs about writers, writing, and the
absurdities of everyday life at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

PHILIP STEPHENS is the author of a novel, Miss Me
When I'm Gone (Plume/Viking Penguin, 2011), a collection
of poems, The Determined Days (The Overlook Press,
2000), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA West
Award, and a chapbook, The Signalmen, a recipient of
the Hanks Chapbook Award from the St. Louis Poetry
Center. His work is included in the anthologies Kansas
City Noir (Akashic Books, 2012), Best Music Writing
2004 (Da Capo Press, 2004), American Poetry: The
Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)
and Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of Expansive
Poetry (Word Press, 2005), and has appeared in The
North American Review, The Oxford American, The
Southwest Review, Bomb, Mead, and the Birmingham
Poetry Review, among other venues. He has worked
as a railroad signalman for the Southern Pacific Railroad,
a meter reader, a newspaper reporter, and an editor. 

ALARIE TENNILLE, Emeritus Board of The Writers Place, is now retired
from her career as an editor and writer and focusing on her poetry writing.
As a child, she was interested in art, especially the French Impressionists.
She's taken art and architectural history classes, loves to visit museums,
and finds art a big inspiration to her writing. Alarie's chapbook, Spiraling
into Control, is available on Amazon.com. Her poems have appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies including The Kansas City Star, Margie,
Poetry East, English Journal, I-70 Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Southern
Women's Review, and The Whirlybird  Anthology of Kansas City Writers.