Dr. Constance Squires

Dr. Constance Squires teaches undergraduate and graduate workshops in the short story and the novel for the M.F.A., M.A., and undergraduate programs at UCO. Along the Watchtower, her debut novel, will be published next year by by Riverhead Books. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Dublin Quarterly, New Delta Review, The Gingko Tree Review, Bayou, The Briar Cliff Review, The Arkansas Review, The Chiron Review and Eclectica and has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize (2003, 2004, 2005), named among storySouth's Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2005 and nominated for Best New American Voices 2004 and the O. Henry Prize Series 2004. She was awarded the 2007 Matt Clark Prize for Fiction by the New Delta Review, the 2004 Bob Shacochis Award for the Short Story and The Briar Cliff Review 2004 Fiction Award, among others.

Currently, she is at work on a short story collection and a novel. Her scholarly work has appeared in The Philological Review, and she has also edited a textbook for English Composition and Research. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University, an M.A. from UCO, and a B.A. in English from the University of Oklahoma.

Dr. Steve Garrison

Steve Garrison received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English at Baylor University and his Ph.D. in English at the University of South Carolina. He has taught at the University of Central Oklahoma since 1982 and was chair of its English Department from 1995 to 2003. For the 1989-1990 academic year he was senior Fulbright lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Garrison's publications include a series of seven co-authored textbooks promoting writing in different disciplines and a descriptive bibliography of the writings of the American novelist Edith Wharton. His novel Shoveling Smoke, published under the name "Austin Davis," was brought out by Chronicle Books in 2003.

For the M.F.A. program Dr. Garrison teaches the novel writing courses and reading courses on various subjects, including modern American poetry, post-WW II American fiction, and nineteenth-century American fiction. He is director the director of the M.F.A. program at UCO.

Dr. Kit Givan

Christopher F Givan has been a professor in the UCO Department of English since 1986. He earned a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Stanford. Before joining the UCO faculty, Givan taught at UC Santa Barbara, Bucharest, Romania (Fulbright in American Lit), University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez and Rio Piedras, and UCLA. He then became Dean of Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland, and then Academic Dean at The American College of Switzerland in Leysin, Switzerland. He then taught at Eastern New Mexico State University in Portales, NM, before becoming Dean of Morse College at Yale.

While at UCO, Givan has been awarded two Fulbrights to teach American literature, one at the University of Hong Kong and most recently at the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar. He has published an interview with Nabokov, two chapbooks of poetry, essays on Shakespeare, Salinger, Updike and several short stories, two of which appeared in EPOCH. Givan is currently working on a collection of short stories called "The Cobra Under the Piano" most of which are set in Madagascar. At UCO he teaches poetry, short story, writing comedy and satire, and courses in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Recently, he introduced a course in Homer and Joyce.

Givan lives in Edmond with two cats and two dogs.

Dr. Matt Hollrah

Dr. Matt Hollrah Matt Hollrah received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (poetry) from Western Michigan University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Kansas in 2005.

He directs the Composition Program and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition and creative writing. He was a first place winner of the William H. Carruth poetry prize from the University of Kansas and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Award in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal. He writes in both free verse and traditional forms. While his poetic interests are eclectic, he has a particular interest in the American Modernists.

He lives in Edmond with his wife, Julie, and their two children, Sadie and Simon.

James Daro

James Daro is a lecturer in Playwriting, Screenwriting, and Fundamentals of Creative Writing. James studied theatre at Northeastern Oklahoma State University (BA, 1986), political science at California State University San Bernardino (MA, 1989), Russian at Monterey California's Defense Language Institute (too much time in the military), creative writing at UCO (MA, 2002), and drama at the University of Oklahoma (MA, 2007). He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art (2010) from Vermont's Goddard College. He taught First-year Composition in the UCO English Department from 2002-2009.

An award-winning dramaturg, James has been twice honored by the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival and has served as the KCACTF Region VI Initiatives Coordinator. He was the 2009 workshop leader for the National Critics Institute at Texas State University. James has worked as an actor, director, and dramaturg in with the UCO theatre department, the University of Oklahoma School of Drama, Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park, and a number of other companies in Oklahoma.

James' essay, "Behind the Queens' Veils: Power Versus Powerlessness in C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces and Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters" appears in the 2009 anthology Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, the first truly academic, peer-reviewed book available about the Fight Club author's work.

James loves George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Gregory Corso, Stanley Kubrick, Marjane Satrapi, Jack Kirby, Albrect Dürer, Alex Jones' Infowars.com, ABC-TV's Lost, G.I. Joe, Mego and Big Jim action figures from the 1970s, and mowing grass. He likes Brett Easton Ellis, stage musicals, Michael Mann, myspace, American Idol, and high gas prices far less.

Rilla Askew

Rilla Askew is the author of three novels and a collection of stories. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and has been selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Her first novel The Mercy Seat was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and received the Western Heritage Award and the Oklahoma Book Award in 1998. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award, the Myers Book Award, and was Oklahoma's One Book One State selection for 2007. Her most recent novel Harpsong was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and received the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West, and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas.

The recipient of a 2009 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Askew received her M.F.A. in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She has taught in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between New York and Oklahoma.

Allison Hedge Coke

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.