Linda Bensel-Meyers studied dramatic theory at the University of Chicago (BA 1975) and Renaissance drama and rhetoric at the University of Oregon (PhD 1985). From 1986-2003, she directed the Writing Programs at the University of Tennessee, where she uncovered systematic academic fraud in the athletic program. In 1999, she released documents to The New York Times and ESPN to expose the need for college athletic reform. Her reform efforts included speaking nationally, including before the Knight Commission on Collegiate Sports, and as keynote speaker for the National Institute for Sports Reform. Her awards include the distinguished Service Award from the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame and the Robert M. Hutchins Award for Academic Integrity. She came to DU in 2003.

Clark Davis came to DU in 2000. His primary areas of interest include early and nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the New England tradition. He regularly teaches courses on the American Puritans, early American poetics, the Transcendentalists, and the American novel and short story.

Prof. Davis’s research has been devoted primarily to major figures of the mid-nineteenth century, Melville and Hawthorne in particular. In recent years, however, he has devoted more time to the twentieth century, completing the first full-length literary biography of William Goyen, author of The House of Breath and Arcadio. For more information see: https://portfolio.du.edu/cldavis

Donna Beth Ellard is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature, specializing Old English poetry. Her research and teaching interests are eclectic and include Anglo-Saxon literature, archaeology, and historiography; biolinguistics and biosemiotics; and psychoanalysis and Deleuze studies. She is currently at work on a manuscript titled Anglo-Saxon Bodies, English Minds, and post-Saxon Futures

Rachel Feder is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century British literature focused on Romantic poetry. Her work rethinks the history of literary experiment within a broad intellectual-historical framework that includes mathematical debates, daily writing, and contemporary poetry. Rachel’s articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including ELH, Studies in Romanticism, and Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons; she is also the author of a poetry chapbook from dancing girl press.

I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee; raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and educated at Beloit College, George Mason University, and the University at Buffalo. My scholarly and creative interests are poetry and poetics; 19th- and 20th-century American literature; and critical theory. Kids: check; pets: nyet. You can find out more about my work here.

Tayana Hardin is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature. Her teaching and interdisciplinary research bridge the literary, the embodied, and the historical, and rely on the disciplinary insights of African American and American studies, feminist and gender studies, and performance studies. Dr. Hardin's commitments to teaching, reflexive pedagogical practices, and intellectual community-building were recognized by the University of Denver when she was named the 2017 William T. Driscoll Master Educator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the following journals: Dance Chronicle; The Black Scholar; Journal of Transatlantic Studies; Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture; and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.

Doug Hesse is Professor and founding Executive Director of Writing at the University of Denver, where he was named University Distinguished Scholar.  Hesse is currently President-Elect of the National Council of Teachers of English.  Previously, he chaired the Conference on College Composition and Communication, was President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and held leadership roles within MLA.  He spent 20 years at Illinois State University, where he directed the writing program, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and the University Honors Program.  Hesse’s numerous articles and four co-authored books focus on creative nonfiction and the personal essay; on narrative, rhetoric, and belles lettres; and on professional issues in writing programs.  He’s been keynote or plenary speaker at some forty conferences, and he has consulted and completed program reviews at some fifty colleges and universities.  His current projects include a longitudinal study of 60 undergraduate writers, archival work on the correspondence of the first astronomer at the University of Denver, a collection of personal essays, and a defense of journalism in composition studies.  Hesse’s PhD is from Iowa. He’s an avid hiker and photographer, and he sings professionally with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus. 

W. SCOTT HOWARD received his Ph.D. in English and Critical Theory from the University of Washington. His teaching, research, and publications engage the fields of Renaissance/early modern literature and culture; modern and postmodern American poetics and poetry; literary theory, historiography, and digital humanities. He teaches in the Department of English and also in the Emergent Digital Practices Program, the Critical Theory Program, the University Honors Program, and the DU-Iliff Ph.D. Program. His work has received support from the Modern Language Association, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. 

Portfolio:

Laird Hunt is the award-winning author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), originally from Smokeproof Press, though now re-released by Marick Press, and five novels from Coffee House Press: The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), The Exquisite (2006) Ray of the Star (2009) and Kind One (2012), which was a finalist for both the 2013 Pen/Faulkner award and the 2013 Pen USA Literary Award in Fiction and the winner of a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. A new novel, Neverhome, will be published in the United States by Little, Brown and by Chatto in the UK. His translation of Oliver Rohe’s Vacant Lot was published by Counterpath Press, who also published his co-translation with Anne-Laure Tissut of Arno Bertina’s Brando, My Solitude. He is published in France by Actes Sud, and has novels either published or forthcoming in Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey. His writings, reviews and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad in, among other places, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, Grand Street, The Believer, Fence, Conjunctions, Brick, Mentor, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. On faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program since 2004, where he edits the Denver Quarterly, he has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and was in residence at Marfa (Lannan Foundation) this past summer.

Eleanor McNees is Professor of English specializing in 19^th and 20^th century British literature with an emphasis on Virginia Woolf and her Victorian predecessors. She received her BA from Colgate University, her MA from Northwestern University and her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In addition to her book, Eucharistic Poetry, she has edited collections of essays on the history of the novel, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf, as well as an annotated edition of Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel, The Years.  Her essays have appeared in a variety of journals from Victorian Periodicals Review to the Dickens Quarterly. 

Maik Nwosu is Professor of English specializing in African, African Diaspora, postcolonial, and world literatures; semiotics and critical theory. He worked as a journalist (and received the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the Year) before moving to Syracuse University, New York for a Ph.D. in English and Textual Studies. Nwosu is a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; the Civitella Ranieri Center, Umbertide, Italy; and the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is also a member of the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars. Nwosu's published works include fiction (A Gecko's Farewell, Alpha Song, Invisible Chapters, and Return to Algadez), poetry (Suns of Kush), a coedited anthology (The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo), and critical studies (The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema: A Poetics of Laughter and Markets of Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational).

Bin Ramke's twelve books of poems include Missing the Moon (Omnidawn, 2014), Wake (Iowa, 1999) and The Difference between Night and Day (Yale, 1979). He has taught at Columbus, Georgia and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He edited a poetry series for the University of Georgia Press for twenty years, and edited the Denver Quarterly for seventeen.

Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature. He came to DU in 2008 after serving as Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Director of the Hebrew Program at Hofstra University (2006-08). Adam received his M.A. in comparative literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998) and his Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington (2003). His articles, essays, translations and interviews have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and general interest publications. His book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, was published by NYU Press (2014). He is quite possibly the only person ever to have had a peer-reviewed article also win a science fiction award. In 2015, he served as a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For more information, please see: www.adamrovner.com

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Meat and Spirit Plan, The Pink Institution, and most recently Slab, which was also produced as an award winning play, performed by Square Product Theatre. Her book of essays on Divinatory Poetics, Ideal Suggestions, is forthcoming from Essay Press in the fall of 2016. Widely published and anthologized, she also curates Madame Harriette Presents, an occasional performance series. She teaches and lectures across the United States and is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Eleni Sikelianos, a native of California, is the author of two hybrid memoirs (The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine) and seven books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead. As a translator, she has published Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light and Sabine Macher’s the L notebook. She has been the happy recipient of various awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Fulbright Senior Scholar fellowship, Seeger Fellowship, and a National Poetry Series selection. Books have been translated into French and Greek, and poems have been translated into over a dozen languages. She has collaborated with musicians, filmmakers and visual artists, including Philip Glass, Ed Bowes, and Mel Chin. Her work has been widely anthologized, in, for example American Hybrid and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Satellite Convulsions from Tin House, and A Best of Fence. Besides teaching for the University of Denver (where she founded and runs the Writers in the Schools program), she is on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program, and for L’Ecole de Littérature in France and Morocco. Committed to a cross-national notion of poetry, she is frequently invited to festivals and colloquia abroad. Recent activities (Fall 2014): opening for Cibo Matto and Nels Cline at the Hentry Miller Library in Big Sur, working as poet-in-residence at L’Université de Paris VIII, performing for the Hellenomania conference in Athens, reading at Warwick University, England.

Boston Review, "The Spectacle of Transformation" review (3/10)
"It is about the multiplicity of stories, and the story as mirage, as temporary placeholder."
http://bostonreview.net/poetry/marcela-sulak-hybrid-forms

The Nervous Breakdown, "Interview with Eleni Sikelianos" (12/14)
"In this magical olio of scraps, myth, dreams, and narrative, Sikelianos traces the life of her exotic dancer grandmother, and inevitably her family's complex lineage. . . . [You Animal Machine] gave me hope for the future of what I consider the most exciting genre, near limitless, shifting and transforming with every new voice."
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/nboutsikaris/2015/12/interview-with-eleni-sikelianos/

ONLINE
Huffington Post, "Cat Woman, Cat Lady: Aliases of Womanhood in 'You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)'" review (1/26)
"As feminism reaches the height of the hashtag, Sikelianos instead drums forward a woman's experience with other words . . . Here lies Sikelianos' prowess: she gives readers the power to imagine and inquire and be ridiculous as we do so."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aileen-mcgraw/cat-woman-aliases-of-woma_b_6497270.html

The Believer, review (Sept. 2014)
"Through artifacts—lists of songs, newspaper clippings, photographs, film posters, staged interviews, poems—the poet Sikelianos assembles a textual chimera that keeps sliding through her fingers."
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201409/?read=review_sikelianos

BOMB, "Soft/Not-soft Doppelgänger (12 Meditations)" excerpt (summer 2014 issue)
http://bombmagazine.org/article/10061/soft-not-soft-doppelg-nger-12-meditations?mc_cid=057c600be7&mc_eid=3862ab30db

Dr. Billy J. Stratton is originally from eastern Kentucky. He studied literature and philosophy at Miami University and then earned a PhD in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona--among the first thirty in the discipline worldwide. He has taught courses that span native American/contemporary American literature, native and indigenous studies, apocalypse, southern gothic and new west literature, postmodernism, writing, and film studies. He has published widely on captivity narratives, colonialism, war, and native critical theory, while his criticism and research interest has been focused on contemporary writers such as Laura Tohe, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, James Welch, and Nora Marks Dauenhauer, as well as Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and Thomas Pynchon. His first book, Buried in Shades of Night, was published in 2013 and garnered much positive critical attention, while his latest project, The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in November 2016. He is currently at work on a novel set in Appalachian coal country--a sample from which can be read in a recent edition of Cream City Review (39:1 2015).

Stratton has also served as a Fulbright Scholar in the American studies program at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany and has done invited lectures in Sydney, Canberra, Leiden, Berlin, Leipzig, Mainz, Heidelberg, Bonn, Vienna, London, and Chicago among other locations. Since his arrival at the University of Denver, he has been instrumental in efforts to create dialogue around the issue of Sand Creek and DU's founder, John Evans, and has edited and published several works on these themes in Salon, Denver Quarterly, Common-place, The Independent, US News & World Report, and TIME, while also providing commentary on contemporary native American issues in the national media. Additionally, for the last six years he has served as faculty advisor to the DU Native Student Alliance and was recently named Special Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost on Native American Programs and Partnerships. Beyond this, he is a lover of music, art, mountains, deserts, and oceans.

@BillyJStratton

http://www.unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000005880

http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2436.htm

http://udenver.academia.edu/BillyJStratton

For more on Dr. Stratton, please see his portfolio site.

Kristy L. Ulibarri received her Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research and teaching primarily concentrate on Latina/o/x literature and culture, im/migrant narratives, speculative fiction, and cultural studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Latina/o/x Narratives on Immigration and Labor in the Neoliberal Age, which delineates the relationship between contemporary Latina/o/x cultural production, free-market economies, and national security in the U.S. under NAFTA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, Latino Studies, Feminist Review, Art Journal, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.