Jehanne Dubrow, Ph.D.

Distinguished Research Professor

Jehanne.Dubrow@unt.edu

Office: Auditorium 216

Jehanne Dubrow was born in Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction, including most recently Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Her tenth book of poems, Civilians, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2025. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, The New England Review, The Colorado Review, and Ploughshares, among others. 

www.jehannedubrow.com

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Tarfia Faizullah

Assistant Professor | Director of Undergraduate Studies

Tarfia.Faizullah@unt.edu

Office: Auditorium 213

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (SIU 2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018). Her work appears in Yale Review, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Guernica, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, PBS Newshour, and the like, and is reviewed by NPR, Slate Magazine, Paris Review, Boston Review, Ms. Magazine, and others. Her awards include a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, as well as awards from the Writers League of Texas and a Texas Institute of Arts and Letters. She occasionally serves as faculty at Bread Loaf Writers' Environmental Conference and Sewanee Writers' Conference, among others, when she is not busy being an introvert. In 2016, Harvard Law School recognized Tarfia as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change.

www.tfaizullah.com/tarfia

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Kimberly Grey, Ph.D.

Kimberly Grey headshot

Assistant Professor

e-mail here

Kimberly Grey is a hybrid, interdisciplinary writer whose work explores memoir and memory studies, the personal essay, and creative research. She is the author of two genre-defying books: Bewilder Meant (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2027) and the essay collection A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing (2023). She has also published two acclaimed poetry collections: Systems for the Future of Feeling (2020) and The Opposite of Light (2016), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.

Grey’s work engages the intersections of auto-theory, trauma studies, and the medical humanities. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Narrative, Tin House, PN Review (UK), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, as well as a Taft Research Grant from the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing.

She serves on the advisory board of the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford Medical Center and has taught at universities across the United States. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the graduate program at the University of North Texas.

kimberlymgrey.com

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 Corey Marks, Ph.D.

Distinguished Teaching Professor | Director of Creative Writing

940-565-2126

Corey.Marks@unt.edu

Office: Auditorium 214

Corey Marks is the author of The Radio Tree (New Issues Press, 2012), winner of the Green Rose Prize, and Renunciation (University of Illinois Press, 2000), a National Poetry Series selection. His poems have appeared in New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review.

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Daniel Peña, M.F.A.

Assistant Professor

Daniel.Pena@unt.edu

Office: Auditorium 205

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Assistant Professor. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. He's currently a regular contributor to The Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His debut novel, Bang, was published in 2018 from Arte Publico Press to critical acclaim. His debut collection of essays, How to Look Away, is forthcoming from One World/Penguin Random House. He lives in beautiful DFW.

www.danielpena.me

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Miroslav Penkov, M.F.A.

miro

Professor | Distinguished Teaching Professor

miroslav.penkov@unt.edu

Office: Auditorium 213C

Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to America in 2001 and eventually completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of the story collection, East of the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and the novel, Stork Mountain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). His stories have won the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. He was a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and the Steven Turner Award for First Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters. His work has been translated in over twenty languages. He is currently a fiction editor of American Literary Review.

www.miroslavpenkov.com

  • A grandson tries to buy Lenin's corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up this beguiling and deeply felt debut. Animated by Penkov's unmatched eye for the absurd, East of the West is a brilliant portrait of a country with its own compass.
  • In Stork Mountain, a young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly broke contact with the family three years earlier. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone’s throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains---a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where men and women, possessed by Christian saints, dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, he gets drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths. And here, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. The past will surrender its shameful secrets, as old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts blaze anew.

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John Tait, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

John.Tait@unt.edu

Office: Auditorium 206A

John Tait's short stories have appeared in Narrative, Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere and have been reprinted in New Stories from the Southwest and the Crazyhorse 50th Anniversary Anthology. He has been the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Emerging Writers and has also received the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award, the Rick DeMarinis Award, as well as first prize in the H. E. Francis Literary Competition, the Dogwood Fiction Awards, and the River City Fiction Awards. He is currently fiction co-editor of American Literary Review.

www.johntait.org