Faculty

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 grew up in El Cerrito, California. Before beginning college, Dr. Coates served in the Coast Guard and in the Merchant Marine, sailing aboard buoy tenders, oil tankers, and oceanographic research vessels. He holds a B.A. from The University of California at Santa Cruz, an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. He has published five books, most recently The Goodbye House, a novel set amid the housing tracts of San Jose in the aftermath of the first dot com bust and the attacks of 9/11, and Camp Olvido, a novella set in a labor camp in California’s Great Central Valley.  His work has been recognized with the Western States Book Award in Fiction, the Donald 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.

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

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 four books, most recently, Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals that Go Unseen Among Us, Bellevue Literary Press, 2014, 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; and During Ceasefire, a collection of poetry from Harper & Row. For her creative work, she has received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship, and others. Her poetry and prose has been published in numerous journals including The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Magazine, Parnassus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Partisan Review, and The Jerusalem Report. Awards that she has received for her scholarly work include the Whiting Foundation Fellowship for doctoral studies and the Walter Rathenau Fellowship in Science and Culture Studies at the Technische Universitat Berlin. She has taught previously at Stanford University and at Tel-Aviv University. 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.

Frank Daniel (Dan) Rzicznek is the author of three poetry collections: Settlers, Divination Machine and Neck of the World, as well four chapbooks of poetry: Live Feeds, Nag Champa in the Rain, Vine River Hermitage, and Cloud Tablets. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Volt, Bombay Gin, Massachusetts Review and many other venues. He is also the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice, and his nonfiction has appeared in Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide and Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs. The recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, Rzicznek teaches writing and English at BGSU and lives, writes, and walks his dogs in Bowling Green, Ohio. 

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.

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.