MFA Faculty
A. Papatya Bucak
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.aysepapatyabucak.com/
Andrew Furman
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 McKay
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.
Susan Mitchell
Susan Mitchell has won many awards for her poetry, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the author of three books of poems—The Water Inside The Water, Erotikon, and Rapture, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award Finalist.
Mitchell is also recognized as an essayist and translator. She holds the Mary Blossom Lee Chair at Florida Atlantic University.
Jason Schwartz
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.
Kate Schmitt
A writer and visual artist, Kate Schmitt has an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, including Earth Shattering Poems (Holt, 1998), Light Gathering Poems (Holt, 2000), I Just Hope It's Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), as well as the literary journals Paradigm, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature. She was a nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast and served on the journal's Board of Directors in 2008-2009. She has also edited and written for the companion website to a pilot television series created by Shelley Duvall, a wind energy company, and most recently for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her courses include nonfiction and poetry workshops, 20th-century literature, young adult literature, and Chinese literature in translation.