Faculty members bring their professional experience to students in the classroom. Read about their recent accomplishments.
Faculty
Matt Donovan
Co-Chair, Creative Writing and Literature
MFA, New York University
MA, Lancaster University
BA, Vassar College
Matt Donovan is the author of Vellum (published by Houghton Mifflin), which received the 2007 Bakeless Poetry Prize and won the 2008 Levis Reading Prize, sponsored by Virginia Commonwealth University.
Donovan's poems have been published in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, The Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His nonfiction work has appeared in AGNI, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, Pen America, and Poetry International. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Poetry Fellowship, a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship. Donovan is a 2011-2012 recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature. He is currently on sabbatical in Italy. Read about his experience in Italy.
Dana Levin
Co-Chair, Creative Writing and Literature
MA, New York University
BA, Pitzer College
Dana Levin's first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005. The Los Angeles Times says of her work, "Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us." Her poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin’s most recent book is Sky Burial (Copper Canyon, 2011).
Emily Rapp
Faculty, Creative Writing and Literature Department
MFA, The University of Texas at Austin
MTS, Harvard University
BA, Saint Olaf College
Emily Rapp is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir. Rapp was born in Nebraska but grew up in Wyoming and Colorado. A former Fulbright scholarship recipient, she was educated at Harvard University, Saint Olaf College, Trinity College-Dublin, and The University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry.
Her essays and stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, the Los Angeles Times, The Sun magazine, and other publications. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her work, including from The Atlantic Monthly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, and The Corporation of Yaddo. In 2006, she received the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Formerly a core faculty member with the Antioch University-Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing program, she has also taught for UCLA Extension and the Gotham Writers' Workshop.
