2022 faculty

Cyrus
Cassells

Poetry

Cyrus Cassells’s latest book of poetry is The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry. Earlier volumes include The Mud Actor (1982), winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting (1994), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (1994) and winner of the William Carlos William Award; Beautiful Signor (1997), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; More Than Peace and Cypresses (2004) and The Crossed-Out Swastika (2012). He’s a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University
Press in March 2019. Raised in California, he teaches at Texas State University and lives in
Austin and Hawaii.

Alberto
Chimal

Narrativa

Mexico’s Alberto Chimal is a prolific novelist, short story writer and essayist known as one of his country’s pioneers of experimental and online narrative. A frequent anthologist and cultural columnist, he also maintains a literary YouTube channel with writer Raquel Castro and contributes to Mexican literary journals Literal Magazine and Armas y Letras. His novels include Los esclavos (2009), La torre y el jardín (2012) and Cartas para Lluvia (2017), which have alternated with collections of short fiction such as Gente del mundo (1998), El país de los hablistas (2001), Éstos son los días (2004), Grey (2006), La ciudad imaginada (2009), El viajero del tiempo (2011), Los atacantes (2015) and Manos de lumbre (2018). Recent honors include the Premio Bellas Artes de Narrativa Colima (2014 ) and the Premio de la Fundación Cuatrogatos (2018). He has taught widely, both privately and in writing programs in Mexico and abroad. His work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Hungarian and Esperanto, as well as into several indigenous Mexican languages. Alberto Chimal lives in Mexico City.

Alfredo Corchado

Journalism

Alfredo Corchado is the Mexico Border correspondent for the Dallas Morning News and author of Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey Through a Country’s Descent into Darkness, and HOMELANDS: Four Friends, Two Countries and the fate of the Great Mexican Migration. Born in Durango, Mexico, he was raised in California and Texas. He worked the fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley alongside his parents, who were members of the United Farm Workers union led by César Chavez. Corchado began his career in journalism at the El Paso Herald-Post, before working for the Wall Street Journal in 1987. He was a 2009 Nieman fellow at Harvard, and has been a Woodrow Wilson, Rockefeller, Lannan, USMEX and IOP fellow, as well as a winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize and the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism. He has reported on the reach of Mexican drug cartels into the United States, the plight of Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States, government corruption on both sides of the border and the debate about immigration. He was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2018. He is also a former director of the Borderlands Program at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. He was named Texas Star Reporter of the Year in 2020. Corchado lives between El Paso and Mexico City but calls the border home.

Elisa Díaz Castelo

Poesía

Nacida en la Ciudad de México en 1986, Elisa Díaz Castelo es autora de Proyecto Manhattan (Antílope, 2021), ganadora del Premio Bellas Artes de Poesía Aguascalientes 2020 por El reino de lo no lineal, del Premio Nacional de Poesía Alonso Vidal 2017 por Principia y del Premio Bellas Artes de Traducción Literaria 2019 por Cielo nocturno con heridas de fuego, de Ocean Vuong. Con el apoyo de las becas Fulbright-COMEXUS y Goldwater, cursó una maestría en Creative Writing (Poetry) en la Universidad de Nueva York (2013-2015). Ganó primer lugar en el premio Poetry International del 2016, el segundo lugar del premio Literal Latté 2015 y quedó entre los semifinalistas del premio Tupelo Quarterly 2016. Poemas suyos aparecen en Letras Libres, Nexos, Hispamérica, La Revista de la Universidad, Tierra Adentro, Este País, y Periódico de Poesía, entre otras, han sido incluidos en la antología de poetas jóvenes españoles y mexicanos Fuego de dos fraguas, en la antología Voces Nuevas 2017 de la Editorial Torremozas y en la antología Liberoamérica (España). Ha sido becaria del programa Jóvenes Creadores del FONCA en los periodos 2015-2016, 2018-2019 y de la Fundación Para las Letras Mexicanas (2016-2017, 2017-2018). En 2018 fue seleccionada como una de las dos poetas jóvenes de América Latina invitadas al Festival Internacional de Poesía que se celebra en Trois Rivières.

Angela Kocherga

Journalism

Angela Kocherga is news director and a correspondent for public radio station KTEP and contributor for NPR. She has dedicated her career to covering the southwest border and Mexico for public media, leading television stations and digital news sources. She has reported on major stories ranging from the plight of child migrants to the impact of drug violence on families. She has extensive experience reporting on security issues on the border, such as militias, gun running, human smuggling and the border wall. She has earned several awards, including the 2019 Maria Moors Cabot prize from Columbia University for courageous reporting in Latin America , an Edward R. Murrow award for best radio documentary in 2020, and several regional Emmys for her television work. She previously served as Director of the Borderlands Program at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University and currently co-teaches the multimedia journalism lab with students reporting for “Borderzine” at the University of Texas at El Paso. Angela was born in Mexico City, raised in Guadalajara and grew up on the border in south Texas. She now lives on the edge of West Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua.

Sandra
Lorenzano

Escritura y Testimonio

Sandra Lorenzano, nacida en Buenos Aires, se considera así misma “argen-mex”, pues ha vivido en México desde su llegada en 1975, producto del exilio. Novelista, poeta y colaboradora frecuente de diversos medios periodísticos, incluyendo radio y televisión, posee un PhD en literatura por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y ha sido miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores y del Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Arte. Actualmente, Lorenzano es Directora de Cultura y Comunicación Social de la Coordinación Universitaria para la Igualdad de Género, y coordinadora de “Cultura y Migración”, un proyecto internacional de la UNAM, la UNESCO y la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Ha sido investigadora invitada, profesora y conferencista en varias universidades de Europa, Estados Unidos y Latinoamérica y escribe una columna semanal para la plataforma digital Sin Embargo. Su trabajo ha sido traducido al inglés y al italiano.

Sus publicaciones incluyen Escrituras de sobrevivencia, Narrativa argentina y dictadura (Premio Nacional de Ensayo Literario José Revueltas), las colecciones de poemas Vestigios (Pre-Textos) y Herencia (Vaso Roto Ediciones), y las novelas Saudades (Fondo de Cultura Económica), Fuga en mí menor (Tusquets), La estirpe del silencio (Seix Barral), y El día que no fue (Alfaguara, 2019).

Tim
MacGabhann

Literary Launchpad & Manuscript Seminar

TIM MACGABHANN was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and began his writing career as a music
journalist while studying English Literature and French at Trinity College, Dublin. Since 2013, he has reported from all over Latin America for outlets including Esquire, Thomson Reuters, Al
Jazeera, and the Washington Post. His fiction, non-fiction and poetry has appeared in Gorse,
The Stinging Fly and Washington Square, and his first novel, Call Him Mine (Nicholson & Weidenfeld) debuts in summer 2019. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University
of East Anglia and lives in Mexico City.

Verónica
Murguía

Manuscript Seminar (Spanish)

Nacida en la ciudad de México, donde vive hasta la fecha, Verónica Murguía es escritora, traductora y columnista. Ha sido una reconocida tutora de narradores y ensayistas en el Fondo Nacional de Cultura FONCA durante varios años; y ha escrito numerosas obras que abordan el mito, la fantasía y la historia, además de ser una de las autoras más importantes de la literatura para niños y jóvenes de Iberoamérica. Su novela El fuego verde fue traducida al alemán y fue seleccionada como uno de los mejores libros del 2001 por el Banco del libro de Venezuela. Su novela Auliya, publicada en portugués y alemán, fue finalista del premio Rattenfänger de literatura juvenil y también fue el libro del año 2005 por el Banco del libro de Venezuela. Loba, una novela que ha sido descrita como una épica en contra de la violencia, recibió el Premio Iberoamericano Gran Angular en el 2013. Su colección de cuentos El Ángel de Nicolás, traducido al italiano como La lingua del Paradiso, recibió el premio Albo d’Oro a la excelencia literaria en el 2014.

Elizabeth
Rosner

Writing of Witness

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her first book of non-fiction, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, published in September 2017, was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and in the New York Times and was named one of the best books of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novels have won several literary prizes in both the US and Europe, including the Prix France Bleu Gironde, the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Fiction and Hadassah Magazine‘s Ribalow Prize, judged by Elie Wiesel. Rosner’s essays and poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, The Forward, and numerous anthologies. Her book reviews appear frequently in the San Francisco Chronicle. This is Rosner’s third year on the faculty of Under the Volcano.

Sheree Reneé Thomas

Writing with a Sense Of Wonder

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. The author of three collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011), she serves as the dditor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and as the associate editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975. She edited the groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Hachette, 2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, that introduced W. E. B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction and garnered two World Fantasy Awards. Her work is widely anthologized, appearing most recently in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945-2010), Marvel’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, Transition, and The New York Times. Her work has been supported with fellowships and residencies from Smith College as the Lucille Geier-Lakes Writer-in-Residence, the Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of Arts, VCCA, the Wallace Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, ArtsMemphis, and others. Sheree was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre and will serve as a Special Guest and a co-host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony with Malka Older at Discon III in Washington, DC. She lives in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.