MFA Faculty

Stephanie Anderson is the author of From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press, November 2024) and One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl's Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), which won a 2019 Midwest Book Award (Nature) and a 2020 Nautilus Book Award (Green Living and Sustainability). Stephanie is the 2020 winner of the Margolis Award for social justice journalism and serves as co-editor for the University of Nebraska Press “Our Regenerative Future” book series.

Stephanie’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Hotel Amerika, Terrain.org, The Conversation, The Chronicle Review, Sweet and others. Her essay “Disturbance” won the 2022 Regeneration Literary Award from Ninth Letter and I-Regen at the University of Illinois, and her essay “Greyhound” won the 2016 Payton James Freeman Essay Prize from The Rumpus, Drake University, and the Freeman family. Her work has been included on the notable lists in Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses (2023 and 2022), The Best American Essays 2020 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020. She also contributed to the essay collection Permanent Vacation: Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks, Vol. 2 from Bona Fide Books. 

Stephanie holds an MFA in creative nonfiction (2015) from Florida Atlantic University and a bachelor’s degree in English (2009) from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD. Prior to her current role as Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction, she served for six years as Instructor of English at FAU. She has also taught workshops in fiction, poetry, and memoir at FAU's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Jupiter, FL. Stephanie works primarily in literary journalism, narrative nonfiction, and literary fiction.

Ayşe Papatya Bucak is the author of The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, which was awarded The Story Prize’s Spotlight Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for a Debut Story Collection.

She has published prose and poetry in a variety of magazines, including "One Story," "Creative Nonfiction," "Prairie Schooner," "Witness" and "The Fairy Tale Review." Her short fiction has been awarded the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, and she has held residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Hedgebrook Farm, Willapa Bay AIR, Brush Creek, the Betsy Hotel, and the Studios of Key West. She is a contributing editor for the journal Copper Nickel.

More information and links to her stories and essays can be found at her website: https://www.aysebucak.com/

Andrew Furman is the author of Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida , the memoir, My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White (Syracuse UP 2010), the novel, Alligators May Be Present (Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press 2005), and two works of literary criticism, Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination (SUNY Press 1997) and Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (Syracuse UP 2000).

His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in such publications as Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Ecotone, Agni Online, JewishFiction.Net, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, Image, Tikkun, and the Miami Herald. He has also been a frequent judge for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction.

Becka Mara McKay earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where she also received a PhD in comparative literature. Her first book of poems, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. She has published three translations of fiction from the Hebrew: Laundry (Autumn Hill Books, 2008), Blue Has No South (Clockroot, 2010), and Lunar Savings Time (Clockroot, 2011). She has received awards and grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the American Literary Translators Association, and a Witter Byner Poetry Translation Residency. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, ACM, Third Coast, The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Rhino, Natural Bridge, Rattapallax, and elsewhere. 

Romeo Oriogun is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the author of Sacrament of Bodies (2020), Nomad (2021), and The Gathering of Bastards (2023). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has been recognized with several awards, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, The Julie Suk Award, and The Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

In addition to his literary achievements, Oriogun was an Innovation Fellow at Iowa State University and has received fellowships from the University of Iowa, Harvard University's Department of English, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and the IIE-Artist Protection Fund. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and other journals. He has also served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Jason Schwartz is the author of A German Picturesque (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) and John the Posthumous (OR Books, 2013).

His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The American Reader, The Antioch Review, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant, Salt Hill, StoryQuarterly, Unsaid, and other publications.