Creative Writing Artists In Residence

It received excellent notices from Publishers Weekly and The New York Time Book Review. The Los Angeles Times called it "remarkable."

His second novel, Toby's Lie, was published by Simon & Schuster and republished soon after by Bloomsbury of London. The Washington Post called it "unique, powerful, a significant contribution  to the generation that came of age after the advent of AIDS."  

Author Armistead Maupin described himself as being "completely in the thrall of its generous and exuberant vision." And in a full page review, The New York Times called it "superb."

Furthermore, Mr. Vilmure has a background as a produced playwright. He earned a degree in Drama from Essex University.  

He brings his talents to the University of Central Oklahoma searching for an energetic and conscientious community to teach and write with for the school year.

Wright is working on an investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, "The Road to Isla Negra," which has received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from "International Quarterly." She spent four years in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress. These translations, for which Wright has received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and a NEA Grant in Translation, include "The Game in Reverse: Poems of Taslima Nasrin" (George Braziller), the dissident Bangladeshi writer living in exile with a price on her head. Another volume of translations from Chilean Spanish, "In Order to Talk with the Dead: Selected Poems of Jorge Teillier" (University of Texas Press), received the American Literary Translators' Association Award. In 1999, she returned to Chile for the first time since the Allende years.

 Wright has received awards for her writing from the Poetry Society of America and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe, Emory University, the University of Wyoming, Sweet Briar College, Ashland University, the University of Miami, and Oklahoma State University. For 2000-2001, she is Writer in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. 

Message to César Vallejo

Caught in the cross-wind
of my desires, I'm here
to stay: New Orleans,
Crescent City along the river
that still moves underground
to take the dead in its arms.
Where moss creeps down
ropes on the hanging trees,
and the children of mixed blood
carefully whiten the faces
in the photo albums. I hear
the blues through a grillework door:
I can't go on this way.

Vallejo, you would understand
how a lover's memory of home
opens the shuttered windows,
and know why he still paces off
outlines of the auction block.
How we don't owe any explanation
for where we don't belong.

I read your exile's life again.
Those months in the Chicama Valley
you watched Indians come back at dusk
from the sugarfields for the day's
handful of rice, the sweat of alcohol
on credit, your first poems
burning the plantation storehouse
to the ground. Trujillo's jail
and España falling on its thorns.
Even then you knew
how border towns are everywhere
and the passport that opens them
a switchblade through melons.

No more excuses, you would say.
No listening for the lover's key
in the lock, breath like mosquito netting
I've wrapped myself in.
Suitcases are too easy,
the army blanket from Da Nang
at the foot of the bed
another reason not to stay.

You never went home to Huamachuco.
What you knew Good Friday,
1938, crying those last words
from your bed: "I want to go
to Spain!" as Franco's troops
swept down the Ebro Valley to the sea.

César, I'm staying.
I, whose people starved
during the York enclosures
and burned at the stake
in Zürich, know how often my name
was written in the logbooks
of slaveships. I cancel
the exit visas I thought
my life depended on.


(Celia Wagner Award, Poetry Society of America. Originally published in the "Black Warrior Review")

 KZ

"Arbeit Macht Frei"
--Motto over the entrance
of every Nazi concentration camp

We walk in under the empty tower, snow
falling on barbed-wire nets where the bodies
of suicides hung for days. We follow signs
to the treeless square, where the scythe blade, hunger,
had its orders, and some lasted hours in the cold
when all-night roll calls were as long as winter.

We've come here deliberately in winter,
field stubble black against the glare of snow.
Our faces go colorless in wind, cold
the final sentence of their bodies
whose only identity by then was hunger.
The old gate with its hated grillework sign

walled off, we take snapshots to sign
and send home, to show we've done right by winter.
We've eaten nothing, to stand inside their hunger.
We count, recount crimes committed in snow--
those who sheltered their dying fellows' bodies
from the work details, the transport trains, the cold.

Before the afternoon is gone, the cold
goes deep, troops into surrendered land. Signs
direct us to one final site, where bodies
slid into brick-kiln furnaces all winter
or piled on iron stretchers in the snow
like a plague year's random harvest. What hunger

can we claim? Those who had no rest from hunger
stepped into the ovens, knowing already the cold
at the heart of the flame. They made no peace with snow.
For them no quiet midnight sign
from on high--what pilgrims seek at the bottom of winter--
only the ebbing measure of their lives. Their bodies

are shadows now, ashing the footprints of everybody
who walks here, ciphers carrying the place of hunger
for us, who journey so easily in winter.
Who is made free by the merciless work of cold?
What we repeat when we can't read the signs--
the story of our own tracks breaking off in snow.

Snow has covered the final account of their bodies
but we must learn the signs: they hungered,
they were cold, and in Dachau it was always winter.

(Gustav Davidson Award, Poetry Society of America. Originally published in "Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust," Texas Tech UP)*

Listening to Mozart is a collection of linked stories dealing with the life of a classical musician.  Falling Stones is a fictional historical memoir deeply involved in the folklore of the supernatural. Charles Wyatt has taught creative writing and literature at Binghamton University and Denison University, but before this incarnation, he spent more than twenty-five years as an orchestral musician, principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony. 

For fun, he writes poetry and plays chamber music with his wife Cindy, a harpist who really did play on Elvis' last album. 

His latest novel is Talking Heads: 77.

At UCO this semester, he is teaching Writing the Novel and Writing Non-Fiction classes, both geared toward upper-level and graduate students.

Interspersed with his academic career, Nathan also worked as a professional musician and songwriter for years. He lived in Nashville for a while, working in the studio and touring with artists like Tom Wopat (the "dark-haired" Duke of Hazzard), Michael Johnson, Cynthia Clawson, and the fabulous guitarist/songwriter Billy Crockett, from Dallas, Texas.

Dr. Brown recently published his first book of poetry, Hobson's Choice, with Greystone Press and has already completed a second that is pending publication. He has published articles and individual poems in Christian Ethics Today, Oklahoma Gazette, The Oklahoma Observer, Baptists Today, WLT2--a student publication of World Literature Today, and Windmill. He also currently writes the poetry reviews for the Special Features page of The Sunday Oklahoman.

Ms. Abel is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and her first book of poems, Woman with Drawers, was recently named a finalist for both the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Four Way Books Intro Prize. She is currently at work on a new manuscript and on a series of postcard collaborations with her husband, the visual artist Tim Abel.

Rabb is a working poet who pays close attention to the transformative possibilities of form when cast in a contemporary voice, and enjoys working with writers who are interested in learning how they can have at their disposal such techniques as meter and traditional sound patterns, ready to resist or integrate into their own voices.

Her own intellectual interests lie in the relationship between etymology, metaphor and imaginative vision. She has pursued her fascination with the earliest texts in English, studying Old English, translating Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and integrating them into her poetry. In addition, she is currently developing a multi-genre project about Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century mystic who wrote the oldest text in English by a woman that has survived to our time.

In 2006 Coleman Barks chose Margaret Rabb's poems for the initial Rumi Prize from Arts & Letters journal. Her first book of poems, Granite Dives (published by New Issues Press at Western Michigan University in 2000), was a National Poetry Series finalist and received North Carolina's Roanoke Chowan Award. Fred Chappell wrote about her new chapbook of Carolina poems, set for publication this fall by New American Press, "Old Home mingles wry humor, dark wit, and deep sorrow in almost equal measures to produce a poetry that is strong and taut as a bowstring drawn to the archer's ear."

Doug's books of poetry include Nobody's Hell (Hanging Loose Press, 1999), The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State, 2004), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition, and four prize-winning chapbooks. He is the recipient of awards from Prairie Schooner, MARGIE, Slipstream, The Chautauqua Literary Journal, two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, many Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Donald Murray Prize for writing on the teaching of writing. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The New England Review, online at PoetryDaily and Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, on the air at NPR, and in numerous anthologies.

Doug's poems have been cited for their grittiness, craft, and "wicked good humor." Mark Halliday calls them "free of baloney," and Billy Collins wrote, "It's hard to imagine a reader who could resist Goetsch's seductive opening lines." Of his most recent collection, Your Whole Life (Slipstream Press, 2007), Jeffrey Harrison wrote, "Goetsch can't keep himself from going right to [the] edges, whether he is writing about the entanglements of adult life, the cluelessness of childhood, or, as he so deftly does in several poems, both at once."

Doug received a bachelor's from Wesleyan University and a master's in American Civilization from New York University. Since 2002 he has been the editor of Jane Street Press, a not-for-profit press dedicated to publishing undiscovered masters of contemporary American poetry.

ALONG THE WATCHTOWER, her debut novel, will be published next year by by Riverhead Books.Short stories from Dr. Squires's dissertation, American Thighs and Other Stories: A Collection of Short Stories With a Critical Introduction are forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly and have appeared in The Gingko Tree Review, Bayou, The Briar Cliff Review, The Arkansas Review, Eclectica, and the Chiron Review, and have been nominated for Best New American Voices 2005, the O. Henry Prize Series 2003, and twice for the Pushcart Prize (2003, 2005). Other stories in the collection were awarded the Bob Shacochis Award for the Short Story (2004), The Briar Cliff Review 2004 Fiction Award, Honorable Mention in the Atlantic Monthly 2003 Fiction Contest, third place in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly fiction contest, Honorable Mention from the AWP's Intro Journals Project and named among storySouth's Million Writer's Award Notable Stories of 2005. A novel, Contact High, was a finalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship in 2004. Dr. Squire's article, "A Just and Loving Gaze: Iris Murdoch's Theory of the Novel," appears in the Fall 2005 issue (vol 3) of the Philological Review; she won the 2005 Leonard J. Leff Film Studies Award at Oklahoma State University for the essay "Is it Late or Early?: Time and Narrative in Nicholas Roeg's Insignificance."

She is a native Oklahoman and lives in Edmond with her husband, professor and novelist Dr. Steve Garrison. This spring she is teaching an upper level/graduate course in writing the short story and a course in the fundamentals of creative writing at UCO.

Allison Hedge Coke is a multi-genre writer, poet, activist and artist and an invitational-featured performer in international poetry festivals in Medellin, Colombia; Venezuela; Argentina; Canada; Ireland and Jordan.  She has also been a foreign professional in poetry and writing for Shandong University in Wei Hai, China. 

A 2010 Split This Rock Festival featured poet and 2011 Lannan Writing Resident Fellow (Marfa), Hedge Coke is a MacDowell Colony for Artists, Black Earth Institute Think Tank, Hawthornden Castle, Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow and is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Appointment Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hartwick College and Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Chair at the University of Nebraska, Kearney.  She was a recent Paul Hanly Furfey Endowed Lecturer in Boston and has served as visiting writer at several universities including the State University of New York at Oneonta and the University of California.  She is a core faculty member in the University of Nebraska's M.F.A. Program, a regular visiting faculty member in the writing-intensive summer M.F.A./B.F.A. program at Naropa University, and the 2012-2013 Artist in Residence in the University of Central Oklahoma's M.F.A. Program.

Hedge Coke's books include Dog Road Woman (American Book Award, Coffee House Press), The Year of the Rat (chapbook, Grimes Press), Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer (memoir, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press), Off-Season City Pipe (Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press), Blood Run (Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK/US), To Topos Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry (editor, Journal Issue of the Year Award, Oregon State University), Effigies and Effigies II (editor, Salt Publications), and Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas (University of Arizona Press).  She has edited five other volumes.

Hedge Coke's long poem "The Year of the Rat" is currently being made into a ballet in collaboration with composer Brent Michael Davids.  Some of her recent literary publications have appeared in Anti- Poetry, Terrain, Gargoyle, Sou' Wester, Kenyon Review, Florida Review, Connecticut Review, Sentence Magazine, Prometeo Memories, Akashic Books, and Black Renaissance Noire.  Her recent photography publications have appeared in Connecticut Review, Future Earth Magazine, and Digital Poetics.  She has also authored the full-length play Icicles and numerous monologues and has worked in theater, television and film.

Hedge Coke has been awarded several state and regional artistic and literary grants, fellowships and tours and has received multiple excellence-in-teaching awards including the King Chavez Parks Award, a Sioux Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence, a National Mentor of the Year Award and a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award.  She has served/serves on several state, community and national boards in the arts, including a housing board, and has served as a Delegate to the United Nations Women in Peacemaking Conference and to the Joan B. Kroc Center for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego.  Hedge Coke has been a United Nations Presenting Speaker (with James Thomas Stevens, Mohawk Poet) and was Facilitator and Speaker Nominator for the only Indigenous Literature panel of the Indigenous Peoples Human Rights Forum.  She has also directed the American Indian Registry for Performing Arts, a Y Writer's Voice program, the Sweetgrass Cinema Film Festival, the Reynolds Series and the Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Retreat and Festival.

Hedge Coke has taught various creative writing, literature, cultural philosophy, Native American Studies, education and other courses for pre-school, K-12, college, university and professional institutions.  She has consistently worked with incarcerated and underserved Indigenous youth and youth of color mentorship programs, and she has served as a court official in Indian youth advocacy and CASA.  Her bestselling book Blood Run led to the creation of the first new state park in fifty years in the State of South Dakota, which will protect remains from a mound city.  The groundbreaking Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, recently released, was noted by Critical Mass of the National Book Critics Circle as a "Best of 2011" book.  Off-Season City Pipe is the only labor poetry volume that explores a rarely tapped ethos, and Effigies/Effigies II, which Hedge Coke edits, is the only four-chapbook collection series for emerging Native writers with global release.

Hedge Coke is currently editing two new book series of emerging Indigenous writing and is completing a new volume of poetry, a novel and novella.  She came of age working fields, waters, and working in factories.  Recent keynotes include Groningen University, the University of Hawaii, Marquette University, Augustana College and the Mayborn Institute in Nonfiction Conference.