MFA in Creative Writing, Faculty
Poets. Writers. Mentors.
The SMC MFA faculty are award-winning writers and committed teachers who offer decades of experience mentoring artists at all stages of their artistic journeys.
Our core faculty members teach full-time in the program and advise students on their creative thesis projects.
In addition to our core faculty, each year the MFA community invites Distinguished Visiting Writers to teach courses, deliver craft talks and readings, and serve on students' thesis committees. These groundbreaking artists add to the program's inclusive community with their diversity of experiences and aesthetic approaches.
Core Faculty
Creative Nonfiction
Marilyn Abildskov, recipient of a 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, is the author of The Men in My Country. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award for her nonfiction, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for her fiction, as well as honors from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Writing Residency, and the Utah Arts Council. Her essays and short stories have been published in Ploughshares, Story, The Sun, Colorado Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, and Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She teaches regularly at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
Chris Feliciano Arnold has written essays and journalism for The Atlantic, Harper's, Outside, Vice News, The New York Times and more. His fiction has been published in Playboy, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone and other magazines. His work has been noted in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Short Stories. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. His first book, The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon, is a hybrid work of investigative journalism, history and memoir.
Fiction
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia and now lives in California. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. It was a a winner of a California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.
Poetry
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024) and Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose (Ecco, 2017). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His writing and translations have appeared in many publications and anthologies. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2020—and he edited the 2022 edition. He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations.
2024-2025 Distinguished Visiting Writers
Creative Nonfiction
Rachel Howard is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir about her father's unsolved murder, The Lost Night. A 2024 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in literature, she has published short fiction and nonfiction in Zyzzyva, StoryQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, among other venues. She earned an MFA in fiction at the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and later served there as Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow and Interim Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing.
Poetry
Dorianne Laux is an American poet whose sixth poetry collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems, was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her latest collection, Life On Earth, was released earlier this year. Laux has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon, Pacific University, and North Carolina State University's MFA program, where she taught until her retirement in 2022; she has also led summer workshops at Esalen in Big Sur. She is the co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997) and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar.
Poetry
Rachel Richardson is the author of the poetry collection Smother, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2025, and two previous books of poetry, Hundred-Year Wave and Copperhead, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Orion, Yale Review, on The Slowdown; her nonfiction has been published in Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, at the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she is a co-founder of the literary center Left Margin LIT and serves on the advisory board of the Bay Area Book Festival.
Fiction
Shanthi Sekaran is a novelist and television writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus. Her most recent novel, Lucky Boy, was named an Indie Next Great Read, an Amazon Editor's Pick and a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Barnes & Noble, Library Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle. She made her middle grade debut in 2021 with The Samosa Rebellion (Harper Kids), an Amazon Editor's Pick for readers aged 9-13, and winner of the Northern California Book Award. Her second book for kids, Boomi's Boombox (Harper Kids, 2023), is a finalist for the California Book Award. From 2020-2023, she spent three seasons writing for the NBC medical drama, "New Amsterdam". She lives in Berkeley, California with her family and a cat named Frog.
2023–2024 Distinguished Visiting Writers
Poetry
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet whose third poetry collection, O, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry and was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. Her previous full-length collections include Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn. She’s also the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina has recently moved with her family to California.
Creative Nonfiction
Lauren Markham is the author of the 2017 award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her essays and reportage regularly appears in outlets such as the Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She has spent over fifteen years working at the intersection of education and immigration. Her next book, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, is forthcoming from Riverhead in Spring 2024.
2022–2023 Distinguished Visiting Writers
Poetry and Creative Nonfiction
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s most recent book is Children of the Land: a Memoir, (Harper Collins 2020). He is also the author of Cenzontle which was named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. His first chapbook, Dulce, was the winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize published by Northwestern University Press. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Northern California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.
Fiction
Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region, was short-listed for the DSC Prize and Man Asia Prizes, and was chosen as a Target Book Club book. Her second novel What Lies Between Us, won the Sri Lankan National Book Award and was short-listed for the Northern California Book Prize. The Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful—reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.” She lives in Oakland, California, and is working on her third novel, a psycho-sexual literary thriller.
Fiction
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, The Revisioners, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook's Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Paris Review; Zyzzyva; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times Book Review; and other publications.
Fiction
Naomi J. Williams is the author of the novel Landfalls (FSG, 2015), long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, garnering a Pushcart Prize and a Best American honorable mention. Distinctions also include a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant and residencies at Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and Willapa Bay AiR. Educated at Princeton, Stanford, and UC Davis, she has taught creative writing at UC Davis, Sacramento City College, and the low-res MFA program at Ashland University. A biracial Japanese-American, Williams was born and partly raised in Japan; she currently lives in Sacramento, California.
Professor Emerita
Brenda Hillman
Professor Emerita, Poetry
Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 collections of poetry, most recently In a Few Minutes Before Later, and Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which received the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Hillman’s awards include the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets.
Past Distinguished Visiting Writers
More than 60 visiting writers have taught in the SMC MFA program over the years, often while working on a milestone book. Through their teaching and artistic practice, they have left a lasting legacy, and many of them return to mentor alumni in our Book Manuscript Consultation post-graduate course.
2021–2022
Aria Aber
Brian Broome
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Jamil Jan Kochai
Ruchika Tomar
2020–2021
Chris Feliciano Arnold (creative nonfiction)
Ingrid Rojas Contreras (fiction)
Cyrus Cassells (poetry)
Christine Lee (creative nonfiction)
Marie Mutsuki Mockett (creative nonfiction)
2018–2019
Samina Ali (creative nonfiction)
Jane Gregory (poetry)
Christine Lee (fiction)
Tongo Eisen Martin (poetry)
Lori Ostlund (fiction)
2017–2018
Bryn Saito (poetry)
Shanthi Sekaran (fiction)
Gabrielle Selz (creative nonfiction)
2016–2017
Natalie Baszile (fiction)
Joyce Maynard (creative nonfiction)
Arisa White (poetry)
2015–2016
Rachel Howard (creative nonfiction)
Cristina Garcia (fiction)
Sarah Manguso (creative nonfiction)
Geoffrey G. O'Brien (poetry)
Porter Shreve (fiction)
2014–2015
Cristina Garcia (creative nonfiction)
Cedar Sigo (poetry)
Mary Volmer (fiction)
2013–2014
Norma Cole (poetry)
Joshua Mohr (fiction)
Kaya Oakes (creative nonfiction)
2012–2013
Kazim Ali (poetry)
Lou Berney (fiction)
Susan Griffin (creative nonfiction)
2011–2012
Samina Ali (creative nonfiction)
Shane Book (poetry)
Judith Claire Mitchell (fiction)
2010–2011
Elizabeth Stark (fiction)
Josh Braff (fiction)
Kathryn Ma (fiction)
Dora Malech (poetry)
David Lau (poetry)
Peter Trachtenburg (nonfiction)
Alex Green (nonfiction)
2009–2010
(fiction)
(poetry)
(nonfiction)
2008–2009
(poetry)
(fiction)
(fiction)
(nonfiction)
2007–2008
Sandra Lim (poetry)
Jane Miller (poetry)
Sue Miller (fiction)
(nonfiction)
2006–2007
Tom Barbash (nonfiction)
Cristina Garcia (fiction)
Michael Palmer (poetry)
2005–2006
Norma Cole (poetry)
(fiction)
(fiction)
Linda Spalding (nonfiction)
(nonfiction)
School and Department Information
Chris Feliciano Arnold
Director, MFA in Creative Writing
cfa1@stmarys-ca.edu
925-631-8556
Collin Skeen
Assistant Director of ǿմý and Recruitment
cas38@stmarys-ca.edu
925-631-4190