Faculty in Creative Writing

Director of Creative Writing:
Sharon Oard Warner
Professor

Sharon Oard Warner is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico. She is also Founding Director of UNM’s Taos Summer Writers' Conference, which each July attracts writers from across the U.S. and around the world for a week of workshops and community. The Taos Conference was recently recognized by USA Today as one of the ten great writers conferences in the nation. Professor Warner was a contributor to the proposal that recently put the D. H. Lawrence Ranch on the National Register of Historic Places. She was also instrumental in the development of the MFA degree proposal, recently approved by Governor Richardson. The MFA in Creative Writing is the first new degree for the English Department in fifty years.

Joseph M. Russo Professor in Creative Writing
Joy Harjo
MFA, University of Iowa
Poetry & Nonfiction

Joy Harjo is a multi-talented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is an internationally known poet, performer, writer and musician. She has published seven books of acclaimed poetry. They include: She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and her most recent How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems from W.W. Norton. Her poetry awards include the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, Oklahoma Book Awards, 200; The American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library; the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the 1997 New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women's writing: Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Native Women's Writing of North America. It was pronounced one of the London Observer's Best Books of 1997; and wrote the award-winning children's book from Harcourt, The Good Luck Cat. She also contributed poetic prose to photographs by Stephen Strom in Secrets from the Center of the World. Forthcoming is a book of stories from W.W. Norton.

Harjo's first music CD, Letter from the End of the 20th Century was released by Silver Wave Records in 1997. Harjo co-produced the album and is featured as poet and saxophone player. The album was honored by the First Americans in the Arts for Outstanding Musical Achievement and called by Pulse Magazine the 'best dub poetry album recorded in North America'. Her recently released second CD or original songs, Native Joy for Real crosses over many genres and has been praised for its daring brilliance. Harjo has performed internationally, from the Arctic Circle in Norway at the Riddu Riddu Festival, to Madras, India, to the Ford Theater in Los Angeles. She has been featured on Bill Moyers, The Power of the Word series, and will be featured this spring on a new Garrison Keillor show. Harjo was also the narrator for the Turner The Native Americans series and the narrator for the Emmy award-winning show, Navajo Codetalkers for National Geographic.

Harjo's other accomplishments include co-producer and talent of the music video "Eagle Song", nominated for best music video at the American Indian Film Festival 2002. The American Indian Film Festival awarded her the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award that year. She has served on the National Council on the Arts. She is the Joseph M. Russo Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, and when not teaching and performing she lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she is a member of the Hui Nalu Canoe Club.

Associate Professors

Lisa D. Chávez
MFA, Arizona State University
Poetry and Nonficton

Lisa D. Chávez was born in Los Angeles and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published two books of poetry: Destruction Bay and In an Angry Season, and has been included in such anthologies as Floricanto Si! A Collection of Latina Poetry , The Floating Borderlands: 25 Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature, and American Poetry: The Next Generation . Her creative nonfiction has been published in Fourth Genre, The Clackamas Literary Review and other places. Before coming to UNM, she taught at the University of Alaska, in Poland with the Peace Corps, in Japan and in Rochester, NY. In addition to creative writing, she is interested in multicultural American literature. She lives in the mountains with her dogs, a German Shepherd and a Shiba Inu, and has just finished a third book of poetry called An Atlas of Desire.

Julie Shigekuni
MFA, Sarah Lawrence University
Fiction

Julie Shigekuni, who joined the English Department in 1998, is the author of A Bridge Between Us (Doubleday/Anchor 1995) and Invisible Gardens (St. Martin's 2003). Her short fiction has been anthologized and published in various literary journals, including On A Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast. She has received a Henfield Award and an American Japanese National Literary Award. Julie has taught creative writing at Hunter College, Sarah Lawrence College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Mills College. She serves as editor of the literary annual, Blue Mesa Review, published by the Creative Writing Center.

Diane Thiel
MFA, Brown University
Poetry and Nonfiction

Diane Thiel is the author of six books of poetry, nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy: Echolocations (2000), which received the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press; Writing Your Rhythm: Using Nature, Culture, Form and Myth (Story Line Press, 2001); The White Horse: A Colombian Journey (Etruscan Press, 2004); and Resistance Fantasies (Story Line Press, 2004). Her two new textbooks from Longman: Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres, and Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry appeared in 2005. Thiel received her BA and MFA from Brown University. Her work appears in numerous publications including Poetry, The Hudson Review, Best American Poetry 1999, Beacon Best of 2000, and is re-printed in over twenty major anthologies from Longman, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Harper Collins, Scribner, Beacon, Henry Holt and McGraw Hill, including Twentieth Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill, 2004). Thiel’s work has been reviewed and discussed in such venues as Poetry, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Robert Frost Award and the Robinson Jeffers Award. Thiel has taught creative writing and literature for over twelve years, is fluent in several languages and has traveled and lived in various countries in Europe and South America. She was a Fulbright Scholar for 2001-2002, in Odessa, on the Black Sea. For more information (to read poems, hear poems, read reviews, note conferences at which Thiel will be teaching, etc.) you can visit her web page.

Daniel Mueller
MFA, University of Iowa
Fiction

Daniel Mueller's collection of stories, How Animals Mate, received the Sewanee Fiction Prize and was selected by Esquire Magazine as one of five best collections of short fiction of 1999. Winner of the 1990 Playboy College Fiction Contest, he is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Henfield Foundation, and Universities of Virginia and Iowa. A graduate of Hollins University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has taught as a visiting writer on the Creative Writing faculties of Dartmouth College and Western Michigan University. He joined UNM’s English Department in 2001 and is at work on a novel.

Assistant Professors

Gregory Martin
MFA, University of Arizona
Nonfiction and Fiction

Gregory Martin is the author of Mountain City, a memoir of the life of a town of thirty-three in remote northeastern Nevada, which received a Washington State Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Martin's work has appeared in such magazines as Image, Storyquarterly, Orion, and Creative Nonfiction. He received an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1997. He joined the English Department Creative Writing faculty in 2001, where he teaches creative nonfiction and fiction and directs the Poets & Writers Reading Series. Martin is currently at work on a novel, The House of Bedlam.

Lecturers

Jack Trujillo
MFA, University of Michigan
Fiction

Marisa P. Clark
Ph.D., Georgia State University
Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry

Marisa P. Clark was born in Biloxi MS, reared in Ocean Springs MS, and came to fruition in Atlanta GA, where she earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Georgia State University. She has had fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in a variety of literary journals. Winner of the Agnes Scott College Prize in both fiction and nonfiction, Marisa has also served as assistant fiction editor of Five Points and an editorial board member for Blue Mesa Review and Amethyst. She is currently re-completing her novel Hermosa and cobbling together the first draft of a nonfiction work tentatively titled "Nobody Knows About My Man": Memoir of an Alter Ego. In addition to teaching creative writing, she directs UNM's ESL Writing Program. Her academic interests include queer studies and multicultural literature. Nonacademic interests include but are in no way limited to travel, dogs, good food, sharks, tattoos, and hurricanes and other disasters both natural and humanmade. When she's not commenting on student writing or preparing for her classes, Marisa keeps busy at home with her golden retriever Jasper, German shepherd Gideon, and African gray parrot Ruby.