Creative Writing Faculty

Kyle Dargan   Distinguished Adjunct-in-Residence Office: Battelle T01-B4 Phone: 202-885-8956 E-mail: kd6017a@american.edu

Kyle Dargan is the Managing Editor of Callaloo. His debut collection of poems, The Listening, was awarded the 2003 Cave Canem Prize, and his poems and non-fiction have appeared in such publications as Denver Quarterly, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah. He is a graduate of Indiana University's MFA in Creative Writing program, where he was a Yusef Komunyakaa Fellow and Poetry Editor at Indiana Review. Dargan has received scholarships to The Fine Arts Work Center and a fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Andrew Holleran
Distinguished Adjunct-in-Residence
Office: Battelle T01-I2
Phone: (202)885-8949
E-mail: egarber@msn.com

Andrew Holleran is the author, most recently, Grief, a novel; a collection of stories, In September, the Light Changes; and of three highly-acclaimed novels: The Beauty of Men, Nights in Aruba, and the now classic Dancer from the Dance, which is widely regarded as one of the most important gay novels of the twentieth century. Edmund White describes Dancer from the Dance as having "accomplished for the 1970s what The Great Gatsby achieved for the 1920s...the glamorization of a decade and a culture." Of Holleran, Michael Dirda writes, "This man possesses the hypnotic voice of the Ancient Mariner—like the Wedding Guest, one cannot choose but hear. [He's] a master storyteller."

David Keplinger
Associate Professor
Office: Battelle 233
Phone: 202-885-2748
E-mail: keplinge@american.edu

David Keplinger is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Prayers of Others (2006) and The Clearing (2005), which was shortlisted for the Colorado Book Award and the Akhmatova Award for Excellence in Writing. His first collection, The Rose Inside, won the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. David has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the SOROS Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Katey Lehman Foundation. From 1995 until 1997 he taught at Gymnazium Petra Bezruc in Frydek-Mistek (Czech Republic) and creative writing at the University of Ostrava. His essays on creative writing pedagogy, now a book-in-progress, have appeared in The American Voice, Teacher & Writers, AGNI, Radical Pedagogy, Theory and Science, and in various anthologies. Poems from a new collection come out this year in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Florida Review, AGNI, Nimrod, Salt Hill, Zone 3 (their featured writer for 2007), Minnesota Review, and other journals. His co-translations with Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen, World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors, will be published in 2007 by New Issues Press. Trained first in the theater, David has written and produced a one-act and a children's musical, traveled Europe as a street performer, and played his guitar and harmonica in pubs and restaurants since 1987.

Richard McCann
Professor
Office: Battelle 229
Phone: 202-885-2978
E-mail: drmccann@aol.com

Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows (Pantheon Books, April 2005), which Michael Cunningham describes as "a book so intricately felt, so mangificently written, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the mystery of life itself." He is also the author of Ghost Letters (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1993 Capricorn Poetry Award, 1995 Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry appear in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms. Magazine, Esquire, and Tin House, and in numerous anthologies, including Best American Essays 2000, The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, and Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis. He earned his MA in creative writing from Hollins College; and an MA and PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Please visit Richard McCann's website: http://www.richardmccann.net.

Professors Emeriti

Kermit Moyer
Professor Emeritus
Office: Battelle 231
Phone: 202-885-2999
E-mail: kmoyer@american.edu

Kermit Moyer is the author of Tumbling, a collection of short stories, which was described by the New York Times Book Review as "impeccable. . .a work of ringing authenticity" and by Publishers Weekly as "a work of ringing authenticity," and Publishers Weekly called it "a graceful debut that transcends most first collections . . . The writing throughout these tales is controlled and powerful, and distinguished by a rare poetic ability." His short stories have appeared in such literary journals as The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Crescent Review, and The Hudson Review. He is a frequent guest on the monthly Readers Review feature of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Diane Rehm Show. In addition to creative writing, his principal teaching interests are are modern and contemporary American fiction. He earned his PhD in American literature from Northwestern University and is a past recipient of the University's Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award.

Myra Sklarew
Professor Emerita
Office: Battelle 233
Phone: 202-885-2811
E-mail: msklarew@american.edu

Myra Sklarew, former president of the artist community Yaddo and currently professor of literature at American University, is the author of three chapbooks and six collections of poetry, most recently Lithuania: New & Selected Poems and The Witness Trees, a collection of short fictions, Like a Field Riddled by Ants, and a collection of essays, Over the Rooftops of Time. Her poetry has been recorded for the Contemporary Poets' Archives of the Library of Congress. A nonfiction work entitled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory is scheduled for publication by SUNY Press. She was educated at Tufts University where she studied biology, at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory where she worked with Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck, studying bacterial genetics and bacterial viruses, and in the Writing Seminars with Elliott Coleman at the Johns Hopkins University. She has worked in the Department of Neurophysiology at Yale University School of Medicine where she studied frontal lobe function and delayed response memory in Rhesus monkeys. Myra Sklarew's claim to fame was working in a dance band on Long Island in the late 1940s as a pianist where she earned seven dollars a night. She began her work at American University in 1970. Her first students included those returning from the Vietnam War.

Henry Taylor
Professor Emeritus

Henry Taylor is a Pulitzer-prize winning poet, author of The Flying Change as well as The Horse Show, at Midnight and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards, which have been reissued in one volume. His translations from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies; he has also published translations from Greek and Roman classical drama. His most recent collection of poems, Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986- 1996, appeared in 1996. He has received Fellowships in Creative Writing for the National Endowment for the Arts (1978 and 1986), a Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980-81), the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1984), and the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association (1989).