Faculty

Joseph Celizic received his MFA from Bowling Green State University. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Indiana Review, North American Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Inkwell, and CutBank, and his fiction has been shortlisted in Best American Mystery Stories. He is represented by Writer's House.

Abigail Cloud, a native of Bath, Michigan, holds a BA in English from Michigan State University and an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her first collection, Sylph, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize and was published by Pleiades Press in early 2014. Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and other literary journals. With a background in dance, Abigail is interested in combining choreography with poetry, and the effect that forms of the body have on the written word. A longtime faculty advisor for the Graduate Writers Club, she now also advises Prairie Margins, the undergraduate literary journal published by this student organization. She is Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review.

Lawrence Coates has published five books, most recently a novella, Camp Olvido.  His work has been recognized with the Western States Book Award in Fiction, the Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami University Press Novella Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction.   His first book, The Blossom Festival, was selected for the Barnes & Noble “Discover” series.  He has taught at BGSU for more than twenty years.

For additional information please visit Dr. Coates's website at lawrencecoates.com.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including most recently Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). He also is co-founder with Han VanderHart of the poetry press River River Books, as well as co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.

Amanda McGuire’s creative work appears in This Quarantine Life: A COVID-19 Era Comics Anthology, Hotel Amerika, NOON: journal of the short poem, Cream City Review, the Toledo Museum of Art, and other literary spaces. She teaches first-year writing, Picture Book Workshop, and Graphic Novel workshop here at BGSU. She lives in Bowling Green with her spouse and 90-lb black lab Hulk, and every weekend she bakes something gluten-free and delicious. She believes in yoga and youth literature, and is a lover of f-bombs, comics, and cake. 

Sharona Muir, Professor of Creative Writing and Literature, holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Boston University, and an A.B. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. She is the author of five books and a poetry chapbook.  Her most recently published book, Animal Truth and Other Stories, won Publishing Lab prize in innovative fiction from the University of New Orleans Press.  Her other works include Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals that Go Unseen Among Us, Bellevue Literary Press, as well as The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives, Random House/Schocken Books; The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction And American Reality, in the "Studies in Literature and Science" series from University of Michigan Press; Heredity and Other Inventions, winner of the Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook contest from C&R Press; and During Ceasefire, a collection of poetry from Harper & Row. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; three Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in fiction, nonfiction and poetry; the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship, the Bernard Connors Prize, and others. Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous journals including The New York Times, Orion, Granta, Nautilus, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Magazine, Parnassus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Partisan Review, and The Jerusalem Report. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem.

Reema Rajbanshi grew up in the Bronx, New York but was born in Miami to parents from Assam, India. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California - San Diego, an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California - Davis, and a B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from Harvard University. Her debut book Sugar, Smoke, Song, a linked story collection about Asian/American girls and women and immigrant life in New York and California, won the Red Hen Women’s Prose Prize (2018). Her fiction has been published in Confrontation, Southwest Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, among others, and she is currently working on an experimental travel memoir. Her scholarship focuses on representations and practices of caste, indigeneity, and labor from 19th-21st South Asia and Brazil, and she has a film essay forthcoming in Routledge (2022). She has previously taught at Haverford College and Trinity College, across Creative Writing, Literature, and Visual Studies. Other genres and activities she loves include dance, hiking, and travel, and she is an aspiring meditator.

Frank "Dan" Rzicznek's books of poetry are Settlers (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press), Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press), and Neck of the World, winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award from Utah State University Press. He is coeditor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press). The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, his poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Orion, and elsewhere.

Michael Schulz grew up in Sparta, Michigan. He’s earned a BS from Central Michigan University and an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, OH, where he lives as a dad, husband, son, brother, friend, teacher, and writer.  His work has appeared in Sycamore Review, DIAGRAM, Barrow Street, and Masque & Spectacle.

Larissa Szporluk, Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature, is author of five books of poetry, most recently, Traffic with Macbeth (Tupelo Press 2011). Her other books include Embryos and Idiots (Tupelo 2007), The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind, (Alice James Books, 2003), Isolato (University of Iowa Press, 2000: winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize) and Dark Sky Question (Beacon Press, 1998: winner of the Barnard Poetry Prize). Her individual poems have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Poetry and Ploughshares. Her work has also been widely anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry 1999, 2001, 2012; Best of Beacon 1999, New American Voices, Young American Poets, and 20th Century American Poetry. She is a recipient of an NEA in Poetry for 2003-2004, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Award for Poetry, 2003-2004, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.

Jessica Zinz-Cheresnick is a Teaching Professor in the English Department and has been teaching at BGSU since 2009. She has a Creative Writing MFA—Poetry from BGSU. Jessica often teaches Poetry Workshops and Graphic Novel Workshop. Her poetry, artwork, and visual poems have been published in literary journals. Most recently, her collage poems and poetry comics have appeared in ctrl+v journal, RHINO Poetry, and Harpy Hybrid Review. She has word+image work forthcoming in Tab Journal. Jessica is currently working on visual poetry, collage, and other hybrid writing and art related to motherhood.