MFA Faculty

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for a decade. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Brown's second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years and was the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series for ten. She’s taught at the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA and the Hindman Settlement School. She was Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University in 2024. She’s been returning to Sewanee to teach during the summer since 2013.

Brown lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She's a fellow of the Black Earth Institute and President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is a literary writer, translator, and editor. Howell earned her MA at the University of Kentucky, her MFA at Drew University, and her PhD at Texas Tech University. Her books include two novels in verse, American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse, both of which were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. She has also worked as a translator for Patagonia poet Claudia Prado’s novel-in-verse El Interior de la Ballena, and as a translator for Amal al-Jubouri’s memoir-in-verse Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation. She also co-edited What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People with Ashley M. Jones and Emily Jalloul. Howell’s work has received critical acclaim from sources such as the Los Angeles Times, Poetry London, The Millions, Poets and Writers, and the Kenyon Review, among many others.

Howell is the recipient of a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship. Among her other honors are The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers and Musicians from the Carson McCullers Center, the Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. Howell is also the recipient of two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2010-2011, 2014-2015), where she now serves as an elected member of the Writing Committee.

From 2014-2024, Howell was the Poetry Editor for the Oxford American. Howell is an Advanced Assistant Professor of Poetry & Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program.

Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent novel, Two-Step Devil, from Grove Press, is a New York Times Editor's Choice and finalist for the Annual Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution named it a best Southern book of 2024. Grove Press will also publish her new story collection.

Quatro’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her stories are anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Ann Charters’ The Story and Its Writer (9th ed.), and the Norton Anthology Mix. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, she is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France, where she will be in residence in the fall of 2025.

Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

Meera Subramanian is an award-winning independent journalist whose work has been published in national and international publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Nature, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Orion, where she serves as a contributing editor. Her book A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka was short-listed for the 2016 Orion Book Award. Subramanian is collaborating with illustrator Danica Novgorodoff on a YA nonfiction graphic novel about youth climate activists. She has explored the disappearance of India’s vultures, questioned the “Good Anthropocene,” sought out fragile shorelines, and investigated perceptions of climate change among conservative Americans.

Her essays have been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing (2022 and 2015), Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones that Haunt Us (Algonquin 2022), The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate (Catapult 2022), and Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World (The University of Virginia Press 2023), as well as multiple editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing. A National Geographic Explorer, she has also served as an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow (2016-17), Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow (2013-14), and the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University (2019-2020). She is a co-director of the Religion & Environment Story Project at Boston University. 

Her story, “India’s Quest to Build the World’s Largest Solar Farms” (The New Yorker, 2023) won a Covering Climate Now Award in the category of Solutions in 2024. In Winter 2024-2025, Subramanian will take part in Frontiers Media's Journalism Residency Programme in Bilbao, Spain. She earned an MA in Journalism from New York University and is currently a co-director of the Religion & Environment Story Project. 

Justin Taylor is the author of four books of fiction including the 2024 novel Reboot, published by Pantheon Books. In a New York Times review, Joshua Ferris described the book as “a performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure…” In 2020, he published a memoir entitled Riding with the Ghost, which was on the best nonfiction lists for Kirkus, Electric Lit, Largehearted Boy, and Parnassus. Lauren Groff said the memoir was "gorgeously layered and deeply felt." His other fiction includes the story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (2010), Flings (2014), and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy (2011). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, the Sewanee Review, and Bookforum. Taylor and Adam Wilson co-authored the original screenplay Last Days of Basic Cable. 

Taylor received his BA from the University of Florida, and his MFA from The New School. He has taught graduate and undergraduate writing in programs across the U.S., including Columbia University, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of Montana. He is the director of the School of Letters.

Dr. Britt Threatt is a speculative fiction writer committed to penning stories that explore the capacity of Black life and expression. Threatt holds a PhD in Africana Studies from Brown University, which informs much of her creative writing around themes of Black social life and death, intimacy, belonging, and trauma. In 2021 she was part of We Need Diverse Books' inaugural Black Creatives Fund Revision Workshop where she had the opportunity to revise a novel-length manuscript under the tutelage of such acclaimed authors as Jewell Parker Rhodes, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and Karen Strong. She went on to collaborate with local school districts to create inclusive writing pedagogies for writers of color through her program Write Your Way, supported by a grant from the Conference of College Composition and Communication. Dr. Threatt joined Sewanee’s English & Creative Writing Faculty in the Fall of 2024 and continues to exercise her commitment to fantasy through her research on Black monstrosity in her developing manuscript, “Monstrous Fugitivity: Reading Slave Legacies in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction.” Across the various genres in which she writes, she seeks to mine from the speculative real strategies for Black salvation. In the classroom, Dr. Threatt prides herself on being a collaborative instructor who helps her students achieve their personal learning goals while equipping them with the necessary fundamentals of composition and critical thinking. Her commitment extends beyond the classroom through her podcast College Writing, Actually, where she discusses practical writing tips and multilingualism. Dr. Threatt ever strives to be an educator who centers the cultural diversity and multivocality emblematic of our rich world.

Emily Adrian is the author of the novels Everything Here Is Under Control and The Second Season, a novel about a former women’s college basketball star who becomes the first female NBA announcer, which Kareem Abdul-Jabaar called “riveting, insightful, and touching.” Her memoir, Daughterhood, published with Autofocus Press in 2024. She is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Like It Never Happened and The Foreseeable Future. She has published short fiction in Granta, Joyland, and Epoch. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in Alta and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a co-founder and senior editor at Great Place Books, where she also runs a popular series of seminars and workshops for writers of all ages. These range from open genre workshops to a seminar on the works of Alice Munro. A graduate of Portland State University, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels The Throwback Special, Abbott Awaits, U.S.!, Bear v. Shark, and Lessons in Virtual Photography. His most recent book is Dayswork, which he wrote collaboratively with the poet Jennifer Habel. His short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including the Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Mother Jones, the Cincinnati Review, and New Stories from the South. His novel Abbott Awaits was published in 2011, to strong reviews: “Not since John Cheever,” said novelist Brock Clark, “has an American male fiction writer written so ingeniously, so beautifully, so heartbreakingly about the pain and sweetness of domestic life.'' His acclaimed novel The Throwback Special was a finalist for the National Book Award. The book follows twenty-two men who meet each year to reenact the 1985 Joe Theismann football injury. Bachelder was awarded the prestigious Terry Southern Prize in 2016.

He received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and taught at New Mexico State, Colorado College, and the University of Massachusetts before joining the creative writing faculty of the University of Cincinnati in 2011.

Sebastian Castillo is a genre-blending writer and teacher who lives in Philadelphia. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. He is the author of 49 Venezuelan Novels (Bottlecap Press, 2017), described as “...echoing the storytelling forte of Garcia Marquez and drenched in surrealism and chimerical imagery,” by Maudlin Press, Not I (Word West LLC, 2020), described as “surprising, charming, and formally innovative,” and SALMON (Shabby Doll House, 2023). His short story collection The Zoo of Thinking (Smooth Friend, 2024) and novel Fresh, Green Life (Soft Skull, 2025) are forthcoming. His work has also appeared in Philadelphia Weekly, Peach Mag, Electric Literature, The Fanzine, and elsewhere.

Castillo says of teaching, “My creative writing pedagogy is influenced by my interest in experimental and procedural writing. My hope is that the classroom can function as a laboratory for unforeseen possibilities in the same way.”

Ryan’s most recent novel, The Audacity, published in April 2024 and received praise from Vanity Fair, BOMB, Town & Country, The Millions, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Riots I Have Known (Simon & Schuster), which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Electric Literature and The Marshall Project. NPR praised it as "one of the smartest—and best—novels of the year," and The Washington Post called it "a compact cluster bomb of satire that kills widely and indiscriminately." He's published criticism and short humor pieces at The New Yorker, The Guardian, GQ, Bookforum, BOMB, McSweeney’s, the Sewanee Review, and The Believer, and interviewed writers and visual artists for Guernica, Esquire, Frieze, and elsewhere. He's held residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the James Merrill House. A graduate of the University of Puget Sound, he currently lives in Kingston, New York.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Her next poetry collection, Scorched Earth, will be published next year (March 2025). Clark is currently working on, Begging to be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster. 

Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and son. His debut short story collection, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, which is composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem, published with Scribner in 2022. A starred review on Kirkus Reviews said of the collection: “The stories assembled in this captivating debut collection feel vividly and desperately authentic . . . A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.” His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named a fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. In 2023 he received a Whiting Award in Fiction.

Adam O’Fallon Price the author of two novels: The Grand Tour (Doubleday, 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (Tin House Books, 2019). The Hotel Neversink won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. His short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, VICE, the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review Online, LitHub, Joyland, and many others. He also writes essays and criticism, which appear in many places including Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Paris Review Daily, The Millions, where he is a staff writer, and many more. He maintains a substack on the writer William Trevor and the craft of fiction writing.

Price received his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MFA from Cornell University in 2014. He teaches at Chapel Hill in the department of English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include the novel, narrative theory, and the English language. Of teaching he says, “My decade-plus experience publishing short stories and novels has provided me a perspective on what matters in fiction that directly affects my teaching. I strive to help students connect with what is most uniquely them in their work: the most idiosyncratic aspects of a writer's style and voice are often—perhaps surprisingly—the most commercial and marketable as well.”

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Meet faculty who have recently taught in the program and remain connected by their summers in Sewanee.