Creative Writing Program

Faculty and Staff

Regina Barreca is most recently the author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Visible Pantylines and Conquered the World (St. Martin's, 2009). Her earlier works include They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted (Penguin); Perfect Husbands (and Other Fairy Tales) (Crown); Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even (Crown); Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League (UPNE); Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature (Wayne State U.P.); Too Much of a Good Thing is Wonderful (UPNE); The ABC of Vice: An Insatiable Women’s Guide (with cartoonist Nicole Hollander)(UPNE); and I’m With Stupid: One Man, One Woman, and 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up (co-authored with Gene Weingarten)(Simon and Schuster). Her works have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, German, Spanish, and Japanese.
Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and AETNA Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of numerous books, including the recent memoir, The Seven Deadly Virtues. She has also co-authored American Autobiography 1945-1980: A Bibliography, and edited two diaries of American women civilian prisoners in the Philippines in World War II: Natalie Crouter’s Forbidden Diary and Margaret Sams’s Forbidden Family. Her many books in the field of composition studies and pedagogy include The St. Martin’s Custom Reader, The Essay Connection, Composition Studies as a Creative Art, The Essay Canon, and the co-edited Composition Studies in the 21st Century: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future.
Sharon Bryan, Visiting Professor of Poetry, will publish her fourth collection of poems, Stardust, with BOA Editions in 2009. She is the author of three earlier books: Salt Air, Objects of Affection, and Flying Blind. Bryan is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, and the co-editor, with William Olsen, of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life. Her poems have been honored with awards including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Praising Bryan’s writing, one reviewer noted that the poet “won’t let any ordinary phrase off the hook as she dangles it, circling in brilliant focus.”
Tom Dulack’s many plays include Incommunicado (1989), which won the Kennedy Center/American Express Grant for New America Plays; Breaking Legs (1990), which ran for over a year at the Promenade Theatre in New York; and Friends Like These (2003), which won the Kaufman and Hart Prize for New American Comedy when it received its world premiere at the Arkansas Rep in Little Rock. Directed at the Old Globe Theatre by Jack O’Brien and then by Alan Ayckbourn at his theatre in Scarborough, England, Breaking Legs has become a comic staple of stock and regional theatre companies. Other plays by Dulack include Solomon’s Child (1979), Bright Wings (1986), Just Desserts (1991), York Beach/The End of the Century (1993), and Diminished Capacity (1995). Many of his plays have been translated into other languages and performed abroad. Across the United States, his plays have been staged in many venues including the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre, as well as on and off-Broadway. Since 2005, he has written and staged twelve scripts for the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts series, and a thirteenth for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He will begin his fourth season at Lincoln Center in the fall of 2008. Dulack has also published three novels, co-authored a book of non-fiction, and is the author of a theatre memoir, In Love With Shakespeare (2003).
Ellen Litman, Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program, is the author of The Last Chicken in America (Norton 2007), a finalist for the 2007 LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has appeared in Best New American Voices 2007, Best of Tin House, and elsewhere. In 2006, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. A native of Moscow, she immigrated to the US in 1992. She holds an M.F.A. from Syracuse University.
V. Penelope Pelizzon is the Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program and the author of Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), which was selected for the Hollis Summers Prize and subsequently received the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. New poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Field, and The New England Review. Her creative nonfiction and scholarly essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, The Yale Journal of Criticism, American Studies, and Narrative. Her writing has received awards including a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, a John N. Wall Fellowship in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, and The Florida Review Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her new book, Tabloid, Inc: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives (co-authored with Nancy M. West, forthcoming January 2010) is a study of the relationship between newspaper culture and American crime films between 1927-1958.
Sam Pickering has written fifteen books; twelve of them are collections of personal essays. The most recent is The Last Book, published by the University Tennessee Press in 2001. He is now writing his second book on Australia, this one an account of the twelve months he recently spent in the western part of the continent. The book is tentatively titled Waltzing the Magpies. And the book is terrible. It will never be published. Only miraculous rewriting will save it.
Sydney Landon Plum is the author of Solitary Goose, a collection of nature essays, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2007 and forthcoming in paperback. Solitary Goose was nominated for an Orion Reader's Choice Book Award in 2008. Plum has been an adjunct in the English Department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs for the past decade, and in 2009 received an award for outstanding teaching. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, Organization and Environment, ISLE, and elsewhere. She edited Coming Through the Swamp: The Nature Writings of Gene Stratton Porter
Davyne Verstandig has written two books of poetry: Pieces of the Whole (which was also performed as a play at Sherman Playhouse and Theatreworks, New Milford), and Provisions. She is a performance poet who “composes on the tongue” and paints large canvases simultaneously. She has performed throughout New England as well as at The Knitting Factory and Housing Works in New York City. Currently, she is working on two novellas: Lovers Are Islands and The Poignant Sorrows of the Blue Distance. She is Director of the Litchfield County Writers Project at the UConn Torrington campus.