OUR FACULTY
JANINE JOSEPH
I am a poet, librettist, and essayist who endeavors to build a meaningful life and career informed by the insights I have gained as a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from the Philippines born under the Marcos dictatorship, and as a naturalized U.S. citizen who lived undocumented in this country for nearly two decades.
I am the author of Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Prize, and Decade of the Brain, which is forthcoming in January 2023. My practice is largely guided by linked poems, composite novels, and concept albums I grew up listening to—projects whose individual parts work toward a much larger, unified whole.
As a librettist, my commissions for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco and Washington Master Chorale include The Art of Our Healers, What Wings They Were, “On This Muddy Water”: Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother’s Mother. My poems have also been adapted by the acclaimed composers Melissa Dunphy (“American DREAMers: Stories of Immigration”) and Reinaldo Moya (“DREAM Song”).
I am also co-editing an anthology of poetry and poetics under contract with HarperCollins/Harper Perennial. I also co-lead Undocupoets, a national nonprofit organization that advocate for poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented and raise awareness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community. In 2021, Undocupoets was featured in the Scholastic children’s book, In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color.
I teach with a student-centered approach, one deeply informed by my early experiences as an academic advisor who got to know students outside of the context of the classroom, and as someone who taught creative writing in the community through organizations like Writers in the Schools and Community-Word Project. I aim to cultivate environments of dialogue, exchange, collaboration, creativity, and innovation and carry with me the following credo from Toni Morrison: “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’”
KHADIJAH QUEEN
photograph by Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation
Khadijah Queen is the author of six innovative books of poetry, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her fifth book is I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.”
With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), a multi-genre anthology of speculative works by writers from the global majority. In 2015, Queen’s verse play Non-Sequitur won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. The award included a full production at Theaterlab in New York City, directed by Fiona Templeton, and publication by Litmus Press. A hybrid essay about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine and was selected as a Notable Essay by Best American in 2020.
Her poems appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. In 2022, United States Artists recognized her work with a $50,000 Disability Futures Fellowship in support of her writing about disability and mental health.
Her book of criticism, Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture, is forthcoming in January 2025 from the Poets on Poetry Series at University of Michigan Press. Never Again Volunteer Yourself (Legacy Lit/Hachette), a memoir about her time in the U.S. Navy and the history of women at sea, is due out in summer 2025. Queen is a Cave Canem alum, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. She holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver.
MATTHEW VOLLMER
I am the author of two story collections, Future Missionaries of America and Gateway to Paradise, as well as Inscriptions for Headstones, a collection of essays (each of which is crafted as an epitaph unfolding in a single sentence), Permanent Exhibit, a collection of lyric essays, This World Is Not Your Home: Stories, Reports, & Essays, and All of Us Together in the End, a book-length essay about family, spirituality, grief, and the unexplained.
With David Shields, I am co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. As a teacher and writer, I seek to cultivate—in myself and my students—an appetite for the countless ways that human consciousness can be represented, and thus the different forms that language—and story—can take.
I’ve become increasingly interested in genre: how genre dictates the shape, sound and appearance of our information; how genre defines boundaries and sets limitations.
It seems to me that if we acknowledge that the rules of the game are often dictated by our genres—categories in which particular types of communication-events take place, according to whatever prescripted patterns the genre in question demands—then the experience of inhabiting a particular genre, of understanding its conventions in order to discover ways to expand it, to break it apart and make something new, can be an incredibly liberating—if not essential—exercise for writers to engage in. It is, therefore, an activity I am committed to exploring further, both in the classroom and in my own writing.
MATTHEW SALESSES
Matthew Salesses is the author of eight books, most recently The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023), the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others), and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Forthcoming is a memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time(Little, Brown).
Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, Time, VICE.com, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, Witness, and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from, among others, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Dublin Literary Award, Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and [PANK] Books.
Matthew is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.
SOPHIA TERAZAWA
I work with ancestors, historical reckoning, and the limits of language through poetry. Books include collections with Deep Vellum, Winter Phoenix and Anon, and a debut novel, Tetra Nova. A third collection of poetry, Oracular Maladies, is forthcoming with Noemi Press.
As a performance artist, I tend to resist documentation of live events, but here is one: in Ljubljana, the audience circled my body in interlocking rings. They sang, at my request, a song by Elvis Presley. After some time, the AV technician flashed pink and red lights on the floor. I’ve been told pairs of men tend to walk out first, usually when the screaming begins.
Conversely, in the classroom, my persona as a teacher is tightly contained. I make space for silence, empathetic conversations that fold into justice, a decolonized heart, and the somatic knowledge writers can bring to the page. I want to live and love. I want freedom for the artist against all death machines. This is the core of my pedagogical practice alongside a lineage of poetry in exile. What is this war? What blood is on our hands? We have so much to do.
EVAN LAVENDER-SMITH
As founding editor of Noemi Press and former editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, Lavender-Smith has published and edited writing by Sherman Alexie, Frédéric Boyer, Éric Chevillard, Helen DeWitt, Rikki Ducornet, Michael Martone, Rick Moody, Antoine Volodine, and many others.
With Carmen Giménez Smith, he performed the first complete English translation of “Canto del macho anciano” [“The Old Man’s Song”], a 6,500-word poem by Pablo de Rokha, recipient of Chile’s National Literature Prize. Lavender-Smith has served as a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Heinz Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and he was recently elected to the Creative Writing Studies Organization’s Board of Directors.
At Virginia Tech, he serves as a member of the advisory board to the Studio 72 Living–Learning Community, as a member of the University Faculty Senate, and as President of Phi Beta Kappa’s Mu of Virginia Chapter.
Evan Lavender-Smith’s first book, From Old Notebooks, a cross-genre work combining elements of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and philosophy, was listed on “Readers’ Favorite Books from Independent Presses” at Huffington Post, “Your Favorite Poets’ Favorite Books of Poetry” at Flavorwire, and several best-of-the-year lists. His second book, Avatar, an unpunctuated monologue delivered by a character floating in outer space, was a Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Lavender-Smith’s stories and essays have been noted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Essays, adapted for stage and radio, and translated into several languages. His writing has been praised in national and international media outlets, including Bookforum, The Guardian, Harper’s, The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and Vice.