Highlight on Faculty

The Writing Program's faculty is made up of practicing writers and editors who excel at teaching. Some instructors are full-time professionals who have time to teach every year or two. Others teach more often to provide continuity in the curriculum and develop deeper relationships with students. The mix produces a faculty aware of current trends but focused on the art and craft of teaching. The program is directed by Chair John T. Irwin and Associate Program Chair David Everett. Faculty advisors are Mark Farrington, Ed Perlman, Mary Knudson, and Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson. Two full-time faculty members in The Writing Seminars at Hopkins also teach in the M.A. in Writing Program: Tristan Davies in fiction and Greg Williamson in poetry. For more information, see the faculty profiles below.

Program Chair
John Irwin

Senior Associate Program Chair
David Everett

Faculty Advisors / Faculty Members
Mark Farrington
Mary Knudson
Ed Perlman
Joanne Simpson

Faculty Members
William Black
Tristan Davies
Melissa Hendricks
William Loizeaux
Margaret Meyers
Richard Peabody
Tim Wendel
Greg Williamson

Other Teaching Faculty
Cathy Alter
Glenn Blake
Anne Blum
Rick Borchelt
David Brown
Ellen Dudley
Suzanne Fierston
Harvey Grossinger
Margaret Guroff
Ruth Guyer
Robert Hiles
Arthur Hirsch
Karen Houppert
Dale Keiger
Marc Lapadula
Paul Maliszewski
Susan Muaddi-Darraj
Madeleine Mysko
Leslie Pietrzyk
Nancy Shute
Nolan Walters
Laura Wexler
Eleanor Williams
Mary Kay Zuravleff

Special Lecturers
John Andrews
Shannon Brownlee

Program Chair

John Irwin - a renowned scholar and prominent poet - has been the chair of the Writing Program since 1998. The Decker Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins since 1984, Irwin was named a professor of English in 1981 and served as chairman of The Writing Seminars at Hopkins from 1977 to 1996. As chair of the Writing Program, he provides academic guidance and oversight for students, faculty, curriculum, and program development.

Dr. Irwin's many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Christian Gauss Prize from Phi Beta Kappa, The Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies, a Modern Language Association prize, and two Danforth Fellowships.

Most of his poems have been published under the pen name John Bricuth. His books include The Heisenberg Variations (University of Georgia and Johns Hopkins Press) and Just Let Me Say This About That (Overlook Press), a 124-page, 2,076-line epic that was written over 16 years. His latest book-length narrative poem, As Long As It's Big, was published by Johns Hopkins Press in 2005. Journals publishing his poetry include The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Epoch, Prarie Schooner, The Antioch Review, Boulevard, The Yale Review, and Raritan.

Irwin's books of criticism include Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Johns Hopkins Press), American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Yale University Press and Johns Hopkins Press), and The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Johns Hopkins Press). His essays have appeared in many journals, including Contemporary Literature, American Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, Raritan Review, American Literature, Boulevard, and Critica Hispanica, and in many anthologies, and he has published reviews in The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

A specialist in American and Modern Literature, Irwin received his B.A. in English and French from the University of St. Thomas in Houston and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Rice University. He also completed graduate studies at Yale University and has taught at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1963-66 and was editor of The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia from 1974-77. He was founder and editor of Strivers' Row , a journal at Hopkins, and has served as curator and president of The Tudor & Stuart Club and secretary and president of the JHU Philological Association. He is the general editor of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series at The Johns Hopkins University Press and serves at a contributing editor of Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor and on the editorial boards of Poe Studies and Arizona Quarterly.

At The Writing Seminars and in the Department of English, Irwin has taught Contemporary American Poetry, Contemporary American Novel, Survey of American Literature, Modern American Literature, Studies in Medieval Literature, Elementary Anglo-Saxon, Poe and Borges, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Crane, and Stevens, as well as various writing workshops. He is at work on a study of the poetry of Hart Crane and of the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he is preparing another work on the American detective film. Irwin lives in Baltimore with his wife.

Senior Associate Program Chair

David Everett is the academic director of the Writing Program and is responsible for the day-to-day direction of students, faculty, and the curriculum. He teaches nonfiction, science-medical writing, and the program's thesis course, and he has been involved in the design of nearly all program courses. Everett has taught writing, journalism, and editing at the university and professional level since 1986. As a journalist, Everett spent two decades traveling across the nation and around the world writing about economics, social change, the environment, politics, and other topics. His reporting and writing have won many awards, including the highest honor for Washington Correspondence from the Society of Professional Journalists; investigative awards from the University of Missouri, the Associated Press, and various other organizations, Washington reporting honors from the National Press Club; foreign correspondence awards from the Overseas Press Club, and various business and economics honors, including the John Hancock Business Writing Award. He twice earned the nation's top two awards for writing about the automotive industry. Everett has reported from 26 states and 11 foreign countries. His last full-time journalism job was as Washington economics correspondent for the Detroit Free Press and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Besides reporting, his jobs at Knight-Ridder included copy editor, assistant city editor, city editor, and acting managing editor. His news reporting, investigative work, feature articles, essays, reviews, and humor writing have appeared in many of the nation's top newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Baltimore Sun, San Jose Mercury, and Denver Post. His magazine writing has appeared in many publications, including Salon.com, Preservation, Car & Driver, Time, and Road and Track. Everett's freelance journalism continues to appear nationally and internationally, and he has published fiction and creative nonfiction in several literary journals. He has lectured, taught, and spoken on panels for various organizations, including the National Press Club, C-Span, the Knight Center for Specialized Reporting, the University of Maryland, Washington Independent Writers, Associated Writing Programs, the University of Missouri, Wayne State University, Lincoln University, Michigan State University, and the National Press Foundation. He is the contributing author of three nonfiction books. Everett earned a B.S. in Communications and Journalism from the University of Tennessee and a M.A. in Writing (fiction) from the Hopkins M.A. in Writing program. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, the writer and editor Patricia Edmonds, and their two children.

Faculty Advisors / Faculty Members

Mark Farrington is an instructor and the faculty fiction advisor for the Writing Program. He has an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from George Mason University and a B.A. from Colby College. He has published short stories in The New Virginia Review, The Louisville Review, Union Street Review, and other journals, and he has served as editor-in-chief of Phoebe: The George Mason Review. He also has published numerous articles on the teaching of writing. He taught writing at George Mason for ten years and currently also works for the Northern Virginia Writing Project, a teacher training organization at GMU. In 2003 he was a recipient of the M.A. in Writing Program's Outstanding Teaching Award, and in 2004 he received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Advanced Academic Programs. About teaching in the program, he says, "What I especially like about this program is its emphasis on the high quality of teaching, and its emphasis on craft. Maybe you can't "teach writing", but you can teach craft, and you can help students understand how to make their writing better. In workshops I ask students to be honest and constructive — always both, together." He lives in Alexandria, Virginia , with his wife Christina and their springer spaniel Sophie.
Mary Knudson is the faculty advisor for science-medical writing students, and is a medical writer and editor who is co-writing a book on heart failure that will be published in 2009. She was a medical and science writer for The Sun in Baltimore for 17 years, writing features, news stories, analytical pieces, and many front-page narrative tales and investigative series. Knudson won one of the top two national awards for science writing, a Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). Awarded the Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health, she spent an academic year at Harvard where, among other things, she cloned a frog growth gene while working in a cancer research lab and gathered material for a front-page series in The Sun on how science gets done, “Life in a Lab”. Knudson co-edited the first edition of A Field Guide for Science Writers and is co-editor with Deborah Blum and Robin Marantz Henig of the all-new second edition of the Field Guide published in 2005 by Oxford University Press and endorsed by NASW as its official guide. Other work includes a series of children's books on female scientists and a cover story for Technology Review on bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and work as a website editor of science and medical stories. Knudson served on the board of NASW for 10 years and helped create the NASW annual professional workshops. She is a former president of the D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA), was Freedom Forum Medical Journalist-in-Residence at Ithaca College in New York , and sits on the Managing Committee for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Awards. She has organized a number of science writing workshops and has been a moderator or speaker at science writing seminars at the Smithsonian, AAAS, the Freedom Forum, NASW, and DCSWA. At Hopkins, Knudson created the signature course Medicine in Action and teaches science-medical writing workshops, nonfiction workshops, The Literature of Science, and Techniques of Science-Medical Writing.
Ed Perlman began his professional teaching career in the Alexandria City Schools, where he instructed in English and humanities and was principal for the European campus of a summer school program. In 1977, he left full-time teaching to become a design and construction consultant, first for his own private firm, then for the Murdock Development Co., Baltimore and Los Angeles . He became vice president at Murdock, responsible for architecture, design, construction coordination and marketing for many projects. He also specialized in historic preservation. He returned to his own company from 1990-194 and in 1995 began teaching again in the English Department at Prince George's Community College. He writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and is now the Writing Program's faculty advisor for poetry students. His poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in various reviews and publications including Explorations, Passages Northwest, The Sewanee Theological Review, and The Living Church. He was a participant in the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 1995, and 1998. He studied with the poet Anthony Hecht during a four-week associate artist residency at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida. He is a contributing author to Alexandria, a Town in Transition 1800-1900 (Alexandria Historical Society). The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the NEA awarded him an artist fellowship grant for 2006 for his poetry. He lives in Washington, D.C. He was one of the first winners of the Writing Program's Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.
Joanne Simpson is a writer, lecturer, and the faculty advisor for Homewood/Baltimore students in the Writing Program. She is a former staff writer for The Miami Herald and Johns Hopkins Magazine, and she has written feature articles and foreign correspondence for such venues as the Baltimore Sun, USA Weekend, Style Magazine, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The American Journalism Review , including a series of articles reported from Cuba and China. Her literary essays have appeared in the journal Creative Nonfiction and the essay collection, Letters to J.D. Salinger. Cavanaugh Simpson earned her bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and her M.A. from Hopkins' Writing Seminars. Her master's thesis, on Cuba's dissident journalists, was funded by Harvard University's Goldsmith Research Award. She lives in the Baltimore area.

Faculty Members

William Black has taught fiction, poetry, and nonfiction courses at Johns Hopkins, Ohio University, Western Washington University, the University of Scranton, and the University of Alabama. He has also taught nearly two dozen online writing courses and ran his own successful private fiction workshops in the 1990s. Black's short fiction has been published in Hotel Amerika, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Agni, Crab Orchard Review, and Artful Dodge, among other publications. Nonfiction publications include Quarter After Eight, New Orleans Review, and Black Warrior Review. He has worked as a Writing Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and as a Scholar in Residence at the Pennsylvania State Archives. Following a B.A. degree at St. Lawrence University, Black earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. He lives in the Baltimore area.
Tristan Davies is a Senior Lecturer in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and teaches fiction as a regular faculty member for the M.A. in Writing Program. His story collection, Cake, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2003. Davies' work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Boulevard, The Mississippi Review, The Columbia Review, Snowflake, and Sundog. He was recipient of the 2001 Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award. He lives in the Baltimore area.
Melissa Hendricks is a freelance writer specializing in science, medicine, and other technical subjects. A former senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine, Hendricks has won the Gold Medal Award from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Journalism Award from the Maryland chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Hendricks' articles have appeared in New Scientist and USA Weekend, with excerpts appearing in Reader's Digest and The Washington Post. Her research experience includes working at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Tufts University Medical School. Hendricks holds a B.A. in Biology from Wesleyan University and a Graduate Certificate in Science Communication from the University of California. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
William Loizeaux writes and teaches literary fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction books are The Shooting of Rabbit Wells (Little Brown/Arcade) and Anna: A Daughter's Life, a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as a TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and in three anthologies. His essays, one of which was a Notable Essay of 2002, have appeared in The American Scholar. He has been a Visiting Writer at the University of Maryland and a Writer-in-Residence at Arizona State University. His children's novel Marcy is forthcoming in Fall 2006 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he is at work on an adult novel and another children's book. His awards include a Maryland State Arts Council Work in Progress Grant and an Individual Artist Award. In the Writing Program, Loizeaux teaches fiction and nonfiction workshops, Memoir and Personal Essay, Masters of Nonfiction, Masterworks (fiction and nonfiction), and Crafting a Nonfiction Voice. He is particularly interested in how writers of fiction and writers of nonfiction can learn from one another's crafts. A graduate of Colgate University (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.A.), he lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife and daughter. Loizeaux has won the Writing Program's Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.
Margaret Meyers is an experienced teacher and an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Her essay, "A Bend in Which River" was included in the Best American Essays, 1998. Her other articles and fiction have been published in Shenandoah, Sewanee Magazine, and Philosophy Today. Swimming in the Congo, a book inspired by her experiences as a missionary's child, was named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library. She has taught writing at Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia, American University, and the National Cathedral and St. Albans schools. Her B.A. is from Trinity College, her M.A. in continental philosophy from DePaul University, and her M.F.A in creative writing from the University of Virginia. She has been awarded the Writing Program's Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence. She lives in Washington.
Richard Peabody a prolific poet, fiction writer and editor, is an experienced teacher and important activist in the Washington , D.C. community of letters. He is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle magazine and editor (or co-editor) of ten anthologies including Mondo Barbie, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Alice Redux and Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women. He is the author of the novella Sugar Mountain (Argonne Hotel Press), two short story collections, and six poetry collections including Last of the Red Hot Magnetos and I'm in Love with the Morton Salt Girl (Paycock Press). He is currently working on Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women (forthcoming 2006). Peabody holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in Literature from American University. He has taught at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, The Writer's Center, and at Hopkins, where he has been presented the Faculty Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement. Peabody lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. For more information, see www.gargoylemagazine.com.
Tim Wendel is an award-winning novelist and journalist. His books include the novel, Castro's Curveball (Ballantine) and The New Face of Baseball (Rayo/HarperCollins), which was named Top History Book for 2004 in the Latino Literary Awards. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Washingtonian and GQ, and his columns appear on the USA Today op-ed page, where he is on the Board of Contributors. Wendel also co-wrote one of the 2005 finalists for the "Good Morning America" national memoir contest. One of the founders of USA Today Baseball Weekly, where he was an editor and writer, his honors include two Virginia Literary nominations, a USA Today Luminary Award and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writing Conference and Pen/Faulkner visiting writer to the Washington, D.C. Public Schools. Tim received his master's in writing from Johns Hopkins and bachelor's degree in magazine journalism from Syracuse University. He lives in northern Virginia with his wife and their two children.
Greg Williamson is a graduate of and now a Senior Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where he has taught poetry since 1992. He previously organized the Graduate Reading Series and The Writing Seminars' Reading Series, and he judged the Alpha Chi Omega Poetry Contest. His first book, The Silent Partner (Story Line Press), won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Williamson's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, The Yale Review, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, Story and Pequod, among other publications. Williamson's new collection of poetry is entitled Errors in the Script. In 1998, he won the Whiting Award, one of the nation's top prizes for young writers. He has taught in the Writing Program for a decade and previously served as its faculty advisor in poetry. He lives in Baltimore and the Atlanta area.

Other Teaching Faculty

Cathy Alter is a successful freelance writer and author whose feature articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in local and national newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Self, Prevention, Fitness, McSweeney’s, Spin, Preservation, and Might. Alter also has been a Washington< correspondent for People magazine. Her book, Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood (Three Rivers Press) was released in 2004 and her memoir, Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over (Atria) will be released July 2008. She has been a frequent lecturer in the nonfiction program at Johns Hopkins and has lectured for Washington Independent Writers, The Junior League of Washington, the Bethesda Literary Festival, and Georgetown University's Bunn Student Journalism Awards. Cathy received a M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. from Colgate University. She lives in Washington.
Glenn Blake who joined the Writing Program faculty in Spring 2007, is the managing editor of The Hopkins Review. He also teaches in The Writing Seminars at Hopkins . He previously taught graduate courses and was director of undergraduate studies in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, and he also has taught writing at Rice University. His first short story collection, Drowned Moon, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, and he has recently completed his second collection. He has received the PEN Southwest Award for fiction and The John N. Wall Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He lives in the Baltimore area.
Anne Blum poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Visions International, the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, World Order, Orpheus, Rattapallax, the North American Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her poetry also was included in two anthologies, Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller's Cabin, 1984-2001, and the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal Anthology 1980-1995. She is the recipient of the Brother Leonard Mann Poetry Award from the University of Dayton , and her play, "Café de l'Espoir" was produced by New Works Theater of Virginia. Currently she is developing a program on poetry and prayer for the Dominican Retreat in McLean, Virginia, which will run in 2006. Blum has a B.A. in Communications from the University of Dayton and an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Reston, Virginia.
Rick Borchelt is executive communications director for the Pew-funded Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. He's an award-winning (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, Society for Government Communication, Society for Technical Communication) science writer whose career has included stints as media relations director for the National Academy of Sciences, press secretary for the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee, and special assistant for public affairs in the Executive Office of The President during the Clinton Administration. Borchelt's jobs in science communications and science public policy also include director of communications for the Department of Energy's Office of Science and director of communications and public affairs at The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. He spent a year abroad in Nairobi as executive speechwriter to the United Nations Undersecretary General and Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He's a past president of the D.C. Science Writers Association and spent eight years as a member of the board of the National Association of Science Writers, receiving the board's special service award for developing a mentoring program for science writing students and novices in the field. An undergraduate biology major, Borchelt has done graduate work in both insect ecology and science communication, and he continues to lead natural history field walks and rambles in search of birds, botany, and butterflies. He has taught introductory journalism and principles of editing at the University of Maryland and science writing at the Bethesda-based Writing Center, and he is the former reports editor for the journal Science Communication. He lives in College Park, Maryland.
David Brown, a journalist and physician, has been a staff writer for The Washington Post since 1991. He has covered medical research, the AIDS epidemic, clinical practice, medical ethics, epidemiology, global health, and numerous non-medical scientific subjects. He majored in American Studies at Amherst College, graduating in 1973. He worked as a reporter at The Greenwood (Miss.) Commonwealth and The Baltimore Sun before entering the Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1987. While in medical school, he contributed occasional science stories to National Public Radio and won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, an annual contest open to American medical students. He served a three-year residency in internal medicine at the University of Maryland Hospital, interrupted by a year of free-lance journalism. He works four days a week at the Post and two-thirds of a day at a general internal medicine clinic in Baltimore supervising third-year medical students.
Ellen Dudley is the co-author of American Discoveries (Mountaineers Books, 1996; winner of the Barbara Savage Award); author of The Savvy Adventure Traveler (Ragged Mountain/McGraw Hill, 1998); and co-author of Hiking and Backpacking (HK Publishers, 1994). Her essay, "A Bright Shining Swamp", appears in Uncommon Wealth: Essays on Virginia's Wild Place. Her work has also been included in The World Book Health and Medical Annual and in sociology textbooks. Her features and op-eds have appeared in newspapers including The Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Rocky Mountain News, and Seattle Times, and magazines including American Hiker, The Futurist: A Journal of Trends and Forecasts, Portland Magazine, Fitness, and Snow Country. She received her B.A. from the University of Maryland and her M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins. For several years she was an editor and columnist for The Futurist magazine. She then entered politics, first as a legislative aide, then as the media coordinator for the 1984 presidential debates and, later, a senior staff member with the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 1990 she left for a 14-month, 4,800-mile trek as a member of the American Discovery Trail Scouting Expedition, exploring the route for the country's first ocean-to-ocean trail. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Suzanne Fierston teaches courses and workshops in biography and nonfiction writing. She is a member of the New York University Biography Seminar. Her publications include "Rose Wilder Lane : Restless Pioneer" in Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives. As a communication specialist at Abbott Laboratories in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fierston wrote nearly 100 speeches on key healthcare issues, as well as press releases and background papers for product publicity programs. She has since worked as a freelance writer, developing and writing speeches for clients such as the U.S. Department of Commerce. Fierston has won a research grant from the Hoover Presidential Library and an award for her watercolor painting from the Gaithersburg Fine Arts Association. She has a B.S. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an M.A. from Northwestern University. She lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Harvey Grossinger 's novella and story collection, The Quarry, won The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and The Edward Lewis Wallant Memorial Book Award. He also has won the Nelson Algren Award, and his short fiction publications include New England Review, Mid-American Review, Western Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, and The Chicago Tribune. Grossinger earned a B.A. in English from NYU, an M.A. (and ABD) in English from Indiana University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He has taught fiction in the Writing Program since 1999, and has taught in the Literature Department at American University since 1990. He also has taught at the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the cofounder and administrator of Moment Magazine's Annual Short Story Contest, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and reviews literary fiction for The Houston Chronicle. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area.
Margaret Guroff is a freelance writer and AARP The Magazine's features editor. She previously worked as the top editor at Baltimore magazine. Her essays and articles have appeared in Newsday and The Sun (Baltimore), among other publications. Guroff holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and is a graduate of The Writing Seminars at Hopkins, where she has taught graduate and undergraduate students for many years. She lives in Washington.
Ruth Guyer began teaching at Hopkins in 1994. Guyer is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's weekend "All Things Considered." She received her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a laboratory researcher for several years before she switched from doing science to writing about it. Guyer writes about bioethics and medicine; she writes commentaries for newspapers, articles for scientific, medical, and bioethics journals, and wrote a column for the literary magazine, The Potomac Review, for several years. She has worked as a consultant, a freelance writer, and as a writer at Science magazine, where she wrote a weekly column. She has also developed curriculum materials in bioethics, science, and medicine for high schools and colleges, and produced stories for the Web. She has written scripts for two museum shows. Her book on babies born at risk will be published by Capital Books in 2006. She also teaches courses in bioethics and infections and social justice at Haverford College and teaches an annual writing seminar at UCLA for physicians. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Robert Hiles has had his fiction appear in The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, South Carolina Review, and Alabama Literary Review, among other publications. He has written nonfiction pieces for The Chicago Tribune and Firehouse Magazine and worked as a staff reporter for four regional newspapers. In addition to teaching at Hopkins, Hiles has taught at Goucher College, the Baltimore Actors' Theater Conservatory, Towson State University, and Essex Community College. His awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maryland State Arts Council Fellowship. He holds a B.A. in journalism from Kent State University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. He lives in the Baltimore area.
Arthur Hirsch is a features section writer at the Baltimore Sun, covering topic in culture, ideas, arts, local events and people. He has previously worked at the Sun as a news feature writer and spot news reporter. Before joining the Sun staff in 1988, he worked as an editor and reporter at three regional newspapers in New England. His freelance writing has appeared in Boston Magazine, Business and Economic Review, and the Waterbury Sunday Republican. Hirsch spent three years working in broadcasting and has given presentations to writing classes at Johns Hopkins, Towson State University, Goucher College, and Loyola University. He is a graduate of Queens College and holds an M.S. in professional writing from Towson State University. He lives in Baltimore.
Karen Houppert, an author and freelance writer covering social and political issues, became a Writing Program instructor in late 2007. A staff writer for The Village Voice for nearly ten years, she has won several awards for her coverage of gender politics, including a National Women's Political Caucus Award, a Casey Journalism Fellowship, and a 2003 Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award. Houppert contributes to a wide variety of publications, from Glamour, Redbook, and Self, to Mother Jones, The Nation, and Newsday. Her work also has appeared in five anthologies, in The New York Times and, soon, in The Washington Post Magazine. She is the author of The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo, Menstruation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military - For Better or Worse (Ballantine, 2005); and the Obie-award winning play "Boys in the Basement," based on her trial coverage of a real-life rape in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, as well as several other plays. An Air Force brat who grew up on military bases across the country, Houppert and her family have lived in Brooklyn, on an island in Maine, and, now, in Baltimore. She previously taught graduate writing at New York University and drama at Towson University.
Dale Keiger is senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine. He covers science, engineering, technology, fine arts, and intercollegiate athletics. A 1976 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, Dale freelanced for 11 years. His work has appeared in many national publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Travel & Leisure, Business Week, Connoisseur, and Advertising Age. He has won several journalism awards, including a Washington Monthly journalism prize for national reporting and an H.L. Mencken Award for Investigative Reporting. He lives in Baltimore.
Marc Lapadula is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter with more than 15 years of teaching experience. His plays, including Dancer, Not by Name, Two Shakes, Last Order, The Rains Change, and In Uniform Thanksgiving, have been produced in New York (off-Broadway), England, Pennsylvania and Iowa. He has been commissioned for three screenplays: Distant Influence, Night Bloom, and an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog. He produced Angel Passing, starring Hume Cronyn and Teresa Wright, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the grand prize at WorldFest Houston. He teaches at Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania , the Columbia Film School, and Yale University, and he has led the Screenwriting Series at the Smithsonian Institution. He is a consultant for film producers and New Line Films studio. Lapadula also is co-creator of the card games MVP Sport scards Baseball and MVP Sportscards Football. He has a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, studied Irish and English Drama at Exeter College and Oxford University and received his M.A. from Malcolm Bradbury's Creative Writing Workshop at the University of East Anglia, and an M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Iowa Writer 's Workshop. He lives in the Philadelphia area.
Paul Maliszewski is an experienced writing teacher with extensive publications in fiction and nonfiction. He has recently published articles in Harper's, Smithsonian, Granta, Oxford American, BookForum, McSweeney's, and Wilson Quarterly, among many other magazines. His short stories have been published in The Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, Chicago Review, Mid-American Review, McSweeney's, and the Antioch Review, among others. His stories have been reprinted in Harper's and have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. He has edited four collections of writing, including Paper Placemats, an anthology of writing and artwork about the significance of place, an issue of McSweeney's, and two recent issues of Denver Quarterly. In addition to teaching at Hopkins, he has taught creative writing, professional writing, and composition at George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Syracuse University. He received a B.A. in English from Rice University and an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.
Susan Muaddi-Darraj is Senior Editor of The Baltimore Review, a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. She earned her M.A. in English Literature from Rutgers University, where she also taught classes in fiction. Her collection of short stories, The Inheritance of Exile, was named a finalist in the 2003 AWP Book Awards Series, judged by Joan Silber, and published in 2007 by University of Notre Dame Press. She previously edited Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing for Greenwood/Praeger Press (2004). Susan’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Stories, The Orchid Literary Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in City Paper, Full Circle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pages Magazine, Sojourner, Calyx, The Christian Science Monitor, Jouvert, and in many other publications. She has contributed book chapters to several anthologies and collections. She has spoken about fiction writing and publishing at the Rutgers Summer and Spring Writer's Conferences, The Baltimore Writer's Conference, the Saint Joseph's University Reading Series, and other forums. She is co-organizer (along with the editors of The Potomac Review and Barrelhouse) of Conversations and Connections, an annual conference aimed at helping writers improve their craft. In addition to her teaching duties in the Hopkins Writing Program, she is currently associate professor of English at Harford Community College and has taught writing at Towson University. She lives in Maryland.
Madeleine Mysko, who joined the Writing Program faculty in Spring 2007, has previously taught literature and writing at Towson University, The Baltimore Actors’ Theater Conservatory, and The Johns Hopkins University. She has been the recipient of two individual artist grants from the State of Maryland (poetry and fiction), as well as scholarships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference (both poetry and fiction) and Wesleyan Writers’ Conference (poetry). Among her honors are an Artscape Prize in Fiction from the City of Baltimore, and the Howard Nemerov Award for her sonnet “Incipient Fireworks,” chosen by Donald Justice. For years, her poems and short stories have been published in literary journals, including The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, River Styx, The Formalist, The Christian Century, and Bellevue Literary Review, among others. Her poetry collection, Crucial Blue, is due for release by Rager Media this year, and her first novel, Bringing Vincent Home, will be released in September 2007 by Plain View Press. Recently the Baltimore Sun has been running her short “Real Life” reflections on people and places. Mysko is a graduate of Rosemont College, The George Washington University (M.A., English Literature), and The Johns Hopkins University (M.A., The Writing Seminars). She lives with her husband, John Marr Sheehan, in Towson, Maryland.
Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Year and a Day (William Morrow, 2004), which was selected for the Borders Bookstores' "Original Voices" series and the Book of the Month Club; and Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon Books, 1998). Her short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has won a number of writing awards, including Shenandoah's Jean Charpiot Goodheart Prize for Fiction. In addition to teaching at Hopkins, she is an instructor at The Writer's Center and has been a visiting writer at Wichita State University (KS) and Converse College (SC). She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the KHN Center for the Arts. She has a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from Northwestern University and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Raised in Iowa, she now lives in Virginia.
Nancy Shute is an award-winning journalist who has written news, feature articles, essays, and op-eds for a wide variety of national publications, from Outside and Smithsonian magazines to the New York Times, New Republic, and National Journal. She is currently a senior writer at US News & World Report, where she covers science and medicine. Shute previously was assistant managing editor at the magazine in charge of science and technology coverage. She frequently writes for the Web and appears on radio and television in major markets, including NPR, CNN, CBS, and NBC. She is on the executive board of the National Association of Science Writers and has guest lectured in journalism and science writing at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, University of California-Santa Cruz, and University of Wisconsin. She authored a chapter in A Field Guide for Science Writers (Oxford, 2005). While serving as a Fulbright Scholar in Kamchatka, Russia, she founded the region's first independent bilingual newspaper. Shute holds an AB in English Literature from Washington University and a Master's of Studies in Law from Yale University.
Nolan Walters is a journalism teacher with over 30 years of experience as a journalist. Now program director for the National Press Foundation, Walters was a long-time member of the Knight-Ridder Newspapers Washington Bureau. His articles have appeared nationwide on the front pages of many newspapers, and he specialized in government, Southern politics, the military, and social conflict. He taught English at the college level in Georgia before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty. His B.A. and M.A., both in English Literature, are from the University of Georgia. Walters' hobbies include sculling and skeet shooting; he lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
Laura Wexler 's essays and interviews have been published in The Oxford American, Writing Creative Nonfiction, The Writer's Chronicle, Under the Sun, and The Beacon Best of 1999: Creative Writing by Women, and Men of All Colors. She is the author of Fire in a Canebreak: A Lynching (Scribner). Wexler teaches nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins, as she has at The University of Georgia, The University of Kansas, Goucher College and the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Her awards include a National Gold Medal from The Council for Advancement and Support of Education, a research grant from the Harry S. Truman Library, a nonfiction fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center , a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Writing Program's Faculty Award for Distinguished Professional Achievements. She attended The Pennsylvania State University and The University of Kansas, where she earned an M.A. in Creative Writing. She lives in Baltimore.
Eleanor Williams is the author of the novel, This Never Happened (Random House, 1998), which also was published as Crazy Think (Michael Joseph, 1998, 1997). Her story, "The Yellow Bathrobe" appeared in Of Grace and Gravity: An Anthology of Washington Women Writers (Gargoyle Press, 2004). Her nonfiction has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Ohio Today, Five Points, and Missouri Review. She has worked as a fellow and scholar at the Wesleyan University Writers Conference, the Hambridge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Georgia State College and University Creative Writing Workshops, and the West Virginia University Writers' Workshop. In addition to teaching at Johns Hopkins since 1997, she has taught the University of the South, Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, and Ohio University, where she was given an award for excellence in teaching. She spent twelve years as a public school teacher in Frederick County, Maryland. After receiving her B.A. in English from Western State College, Williams got her M.A. in Human Sciences/Psychology from Hood College, her M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins, and is now a Ph.D. candidate in English and Creative Writing at Ohio University. She is a former faculty advisor for fiction students in the Writing Program. She lives in Maryland and Ohio.
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of two novels. The Bowl Is Already Broken, ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and The Frequency of Souls (Picador), which won the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Jones First Novel Award. She has written book reviews for the Washington Post since 1997. Many small magazines, including Gargoyle and The Washington Review, have published her short fiction, and her work is included in the anthology, Of Grace and Gravity. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children. Besides Hopkins, her teaching posts include Goucher College, the University of Maryland, and George Mason University.

Special Lecturers

John Andrews (special guest lecturer) is the founder and president of The Shakespeare Guild, a global nonprofit corporation which promotes the endeavors of a broad array of cultural institutions in the arts and the humanities. As editor for the venerable Everyman Shakespeare series, he has enlisted an impressive cast of actors to write forewords; they include F. Murray Abraham, John Gielgud, Hal Holbrook, James Earl Jones, Kevin Kline, Kelly McGillis, Tony Randall, and Tim Pigott Smith. Under the auspices of the Guild, he created the Sir John Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, which has been given to actors such as Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi. Through the years, he has worked with some of the greatest actors of our age: Julie Harris, Patrick Stewart, F. Murray Abraham, Helen Hayes, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, and Sir Peter Ustinov, to name a few. He also has collaborated with PBS, BBC, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Andrews has taught at several universities: Tennessee, Florida State, Catholic, George Washington, and Georgetown, as well as appearing on numerous radio and television programs. Andrews joined the Writing Program faculty as special guest lecturer for the Shakespeare in Washington elective course in Spring 2007.

Shannon Brownlee, a nationally known essayist and writer whose work has appeared in major magazines and newspapers, is joining the faculty of the Master of Arts in Writing Program in Fall 2007. Brownlee's writing has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Her book, Overtreated; Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, will be in bookstores in September 2007. Brownlee's many awards include: the 2004 Association of Health Care Journalists Award for Excellence, the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She is a member of the Association of Health Care Journalists and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and she has served on the board of the National Association of Science Writers. She holds a Master of Science in marine sciences, with honors, from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C., Ms. Brownlee writes and speaks regularly on health care and medical topics. She has lectured at Boston College, Columbia University School of Journalism, the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing New Horizons Meeting, 4th World Congress of Science Writers, Georgetown University, University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere. Her teaching experience includes serving as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication, instructor at the Santa Fe Science Writer's Workshop, and guest lecturer at writing programs at Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, and University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives on the Chesapeake Bay with her husband and son. Her website is www.overtreated.com. You can find her most recent work at http://www.newamerica.net/people/content/404/all.