Our Students
UW-Milwaukee's community of writers is diverse. Our students don't conform to a particular demographic; rather, they come from varied backgrounds and possess a variety of life experiences. The result is a community in which this wealth of diversity creates lively, constructive interaction and collaboration.
And we do mean community. You will find that our writers help each other grow in both workshops and in their interactions outside the classroom.
Please take a moment to get to know us!
Drew Blanchard is a Ph.D. in Irish Studies and twentieth-century American poetry. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Notre Dame Review, Meridian, An Sionnach and is currently the Managing Editor of the Cream City Review. He holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Iowa and an MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Drew has been awarded a Chancellor's Graduate Student Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Award, and the William H. Harrold Award in Poetry. He has recently presented papers at the American Conference for Irish Studies on Alice McDermott and George Bernard Shaw and presented a paper at Tulane University on the poems of Elizabeth Bishop.
Christi Clancy is at work on her Ph.D. with a focus on fiction. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hobart, the Wisconsin Academy Review, the Cream City Review, on literarymama.com and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Yabalusha Review. She won the Ellen C. Hunticut award for fiction, and her work was a finalist for the Charles Johnson award for student fiction. She won a scholarship to study with Robert Olen Butler through the San Juan Writer's Conference, and her work has been featured as a "work of the day" on the Emerging Writers Network.
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| Grad students Jay Johnson, Mike Clark, and Drew Blanchard enjoy a pint at November's student/faculty reading. |
Paul Dworschack-Kinter began the program as a poet and then moved into fiction. Having come to creative writing through the school of fine arts, he continues to play with clay, paint and digital media. Currently in the Ph.D. program, he's a blurred genre (so, too his writing). His scholarly interests revolve around mythology and magical realism with strong leanings toward Celtic Studies. He is currently working on finishing his course work, finding time to write and working on a Secret Project.
Ellen Elder is a doctoral student in creative writing working in poetry and fiction. She has degrees from The University of Chicago and Miami University, where she received The Academy of American Poet's Prize. She spent her summers growing up in Ireland. Her fiction was nominated for the 2006 Best New American Voices and recent work has appeared at Exquisite Corpse (www.corpse.org) and is forthcoming at DMQ Review (www.dmqreview.com) and in the The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems (Red Hen Press). She is co-poetry editor at Cream City Review. Her interests include confessional poetry, Modernist British and Anglo-Irish writers, memoir, and Italian and French languages. She is currently at work on a memoir.
Trent Hergenrader is a second-year Ph.D. student working primarily in speculative fiction. A graduate of the 2004 Clarion Writers workshop, Trent's short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Cicada, and the UK publication Black Static. He has received honorable mentions in both The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. His academic interests include magical realism, Native American literature, visual narratives, and the rhetoric of technology.
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| Ellen Elder with Professor Sheila Roberts |
Ann Stewart is a native of Michigan. She received her Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan and her Master's degree in Creative Writing for Miami University-Ohio. After working briefly as an editor for an Ann Arbor free publication, she joined the program at UWM in order to follow her dream of becoming a great writer of fiction. She currently works as an editor at UWM's literary journal, Cream City Review, and she teaches both Creative Writing and first-year composition. My publications have been in: ESC!, 101: The Journal of the Image Warehouse, Words and Images, and Common Review.
Born in Timisoara, Romania in 1974, Gene Tanta immigrated to Chicago in 1984 with family. He earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 2000. He translates contemporary Romanian poetry and makes visual art with found materials. Mr. Tanta's Publications include: Epoch, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (two poems with Reginald Shepherd). Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he is also the Art Editor for Cream City Review.
Some of Gene's work can be found online:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile//59351.html
http://www.milkmag.org/tantapage.htm
http://www.beardofbees.com/acosmei.html
http://www.uglyaccent.com/GTanta.htm
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/gene_tanta01.shtml
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/Secure/ecommerce/Catalog.asp?prdc=29
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=7118
Dawn Tefft is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as well as co-poetry editor for Cream City Review. Recent publications include poems in Witness, Third Coast, and Court Green. Her e-chapbook Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations was published through, and can be found at, Mudlark (http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark29/contents.html). Her poem "In the House of the House of Miniatures" was nominated for a Pushcart by Witness in '07. She has presented at Writing By Degrees: The 9th Annual National Graduate Creative Writing Conference and at Wesleyan's Tongue & Ink Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference, both in '06. Her scholarly interests include Modern Fantastic Literatures: Magical Realism, Slipstream, Science Fiction, and Fantastic Poetry; Marxist Feminism; and Postcolonial Theory.
Katy J. Vopal is a fiction writer currently working on her doctoral dissertation novel, The Way Back to August. Her academic concentration is adolescent literature. A former newspaper reporter, she is currently on faculty at Lakeland College and Ottawa University where she teaches creative writing, composition, American Literature, Child and Adolescent Literature, Women in Literature, and a variety of communication courses. Her short fiction has appeared in Upstreet, Quality Women's Fiction, Characters: Kids' Short Story and Poetry Outlet, Dan River Anthology, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, Scrivener's Pen and other publications. Judy Blume is her hero.
David Yost is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in creative writing. As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, he's worked teaching infant nutrition in Mali and teaching English to Burmese refugees in Thailand, the setting for much of his fiction. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Witness, Mid-American Review, the minnesota review, The Red Rock Review, Flyway, Lake Effect, South Carolina Review, and other publications, while his scholarly articles have appeared in MELUS and War, Literature, and the Arts.