Tickner Writing Fellow

The Fellows

• Teddy Macker

  
  Teddy Macker (2007-2008) is the current Tickner Fellow in Creative Writing and was raised in Pacific Palisades, California. He played Division 1 soccer, received an Academy of American Poets Prize, earned his M.F.A. from UC Irvine, and has taught at UC Santa Barbara. New work is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Margie, River Teeth, and elsewhere. During his residency at Gilman Teddy will be working on poetry. Read More

• Shara Lessley

  
  Shara Lessley (2006-2007) A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Shara’s most recent awards include the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University and the 2006 Discovery/“The Nation” prize. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize as well as Best New Poets, Shara’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Threepenny, Third Coast, The Southeast Review, The Nation and Blackbird, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and Bread Loaf, Shara holds bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA from University of Maryland. She is currently completing Two-Headed Nightingale, her first book of poems. Read More

• John Rowell

  
  John Rowell (2004–2006) is the current Tickner writing fellow at Gilman. He is the author of the short story collection The Music of Your Life, which was named as a spring 2003 Dazzling Debut/Breakout Book at amazon.com, as well as a finalist for the 2004 Ferro-Grumley Prize for Best Fiction Book of the Year. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Sewanee Writers Conference. His fiction, essays, and reviews have been featured in such publications as Tin House, Bloom and Show Business Weekly, among others. He is now working on a novel. Read More

• Adam Chiles

  
  Adam Chiles (2003–2004) teaches at Northern Virginia Community College. His poems have appeared in Antigonish Review, New Delta Review, Washington Square, Indiana Review, Perihelion, Sycamore Review and Barrow Street and other publications in the United States, Canada and England. He has received two full scholarships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers conference in 1998 and 1999 and was a finalist for the 2000 Pablo Neruda Award and the 2002 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He was also a semi-finalist for the Discovery/“The Nation” Award, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Adam's first book will be released in summer 2008 (published by a UK press) and will be launched in the UK at the Chester Writers Festival in October 2008. Read More

• Maud Casey

  
  Maud Casey lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches at the University of Maryland, where she is the Associate Director of the Program in Creative Writing. She is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy, a New York Times Editor’s Choice.
  Casey is also the author of a collection of stories, Drastic.
  Twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, her stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review; The Gettysburg Review; Prairie Schooner; Forklift, Ohio; American Short Fiction; Bellevue Literary Journal; The Salt Hill Journal and elsewhere. She has received residency fellowships from the Ledig International Writers House, Fundacion Valparaiso, Vermont Studio Center, and the UCross Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2008 Calvino Prize and 2008-2009 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship. Read More

• David Roderick

  
  
  David Roderick (2001–2002) and his wife for 2008 are traveling Florence and Dublin on the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. He is also a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University, and he has also been awarded fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 50 magazines and journals, including The Hudson Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Triquarterly and The Virginia Quarterly. Last year his poetry manuscript, titled Blue Colonial, was runner-up in for the Yale Younger Poets Prize and recently won the American Poetry Review’s book prize and will be published by Copper Canyon Press in September 2006. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University. Read More

• Mark Trainer

  
  Mark Trainer (1999–2001) is an editor at PBS Interactive. His fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The Mississippi Review, The Greensboro Review and other journals. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia and has taught at Rhodes College, the Corcoran School of Art & Design and the Portsmouth Abbey School in addition to Gilman. He currently teaches fiction at Goucher College and lives in Washington, D.C Read More

• Christopher Sindt

  
  Christopher Sindt (1998–1999), is an assistant professor of English and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. He is the author of the chapbook The Land of Give and Take, and his poetry has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nebraska Review, Nocturnes, Swerve and several other literary journals. He serves on the Board of the Directors of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Advisory Board of San Francisco WritersCorps. He has received several awards, including the James D. Phelan Award and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. From 1992–1999, he was the Program Director of the Art of the Wild Writing Conference. Read More

• Rachel Newcomb

  
  Rachel Newcomb (1997–1998) took a different path from her Tickner Fellow colleagues and was awarded a Ph.D in anthropology in 2004. Now an assistant professor of anthropology at Rollins College, she continues to pursue a writing life in fiction and poetry, and has won her first award in the 2004 Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Fiction Contest. She has enetered a novel to the Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Contest and as of recent earned semifinalist status. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the Baltimore City Paper, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Crucible, Interim, Poem, New Delta Review, International Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Kennesaw Review and others. Read More

• Michael Knight

  
  Michael Knight (1996–1997) assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, is the author of a novel, Diving Rod, and two collections of short fiction, "Goodnight, Nobody" and "Dogfight & Other Stories". He lives in Knoxville and directs the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee. Read More

• Mary Azrael

  
  Mary Azrael (1995–1996), poet, teacher, and editor is the author of Victorians, Riddles for a Naked Sailor, and Black Windows, a hand-made book created for the Smith College Rare Book Collection. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Chelsea, Harpers, Chattahoochee Review, Kansas Quarterly, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. During the past few years, she has been working on the libretto for "Lost Childhood", an opera based on the life of Holocaust survivor Yehuda Nir. American Opera Projects and the New York City Opera have presented unstaged readings of the opera. A full reading took place in New York on May 16–19, 2005. Azrael lives in Baltimore, where she teaches poetry writing at Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Studies, and co-edits Passager Magazine, a national literary journal featuring the work of older writers. Read More