Faculty
Alan Davis
Alan Davis, Professor of English and Senior Editor of New Rivers Press, has published two collections of stories, Rumors from the Lost World and Alone with the Owl. He served for ten years as co-editor of American Fiction, an annual anthology chosen in 1998 by Writers' Digest as one of the top 15 short story publications in the U.S. His work appears in The New York Times Book Review, Hudson Review, and many other journals and newspapers. He has received two Fulbright awards, a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Creative Prose, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship. For more information, click on his photo above.
"People used to say that the blessed would see heaven; my wish would be to see the earth forever." ~ Peter Handke
Kevin Carollo
Kevin Carollo received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois. He writes both poetry and fiction, and has recent publications in Court Green, Cranky, Lungfull!, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and elsewhere. A regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books, he is the translator of two novels from the French: Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s La maestra and Patrice Nganang’s The Invention of Renown. In addition to creative writing, he teaches a variety of upper-level world literature courses, including “Modern Animals,” “Crime and Punishment,” “Time and Literature,” and “Literary Deserts.” He plays guitar and sings with the Fargo-based band The New Instructions, and has just finished writing a crime novel entitled Pull Tabs.
John Early
John Early received an MA from Western Illinois University and a PhD from the University of North Dakota. He has published short fiction and poetry in several literary journals. His novel, Flesh and Metal, was published in 1998 by Caroll & Graf. He is currently at work on another novel.
Lin Enger
Lin Enger, Professor and current program director, received an MFA from the University of Iowa. In 2008, Little, Brown and Company will publish his novel, Undiscovered Country. He has received a James Michener Award, a Jerome travel grant, and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Lake Region Arts Council. His short stories have been published in a number of journals, including Glimmer Train Stories, Great River Review, American Fiction, South Dakota Review, Wolf Head Quarterly, and Ascent. During the 1990s, he published five mystery novels (Pocket Books), writing in collaboration with his brother, the novelist Leif Enger.
Elizabeth Severn
Elizabeth Severn is a native of Maryland who has also lived in Minnesota and North Dakota. An award-winning writer, she has worked in many fields: reporter, columnist, assistant editor, public relations writer, copywriter, and freelance writer and editor. She is Assistant Professor and teaches various writing courses. She is also Assistant Editor at New Rivers Press where she manages the fiction manuscripts screening process for the New Voices Competition. Her short fiction appears in American Fiction '97, Carve Magazine and Storyglossia, and has received honorable mention in The New Millennium. She has completed work on a memoir for which she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant: creative non-fiction. She is at work on a novel and a short story collection.
Thom Tammaro 
Thom Tammaro was born and raised in the heart of the steel valley of western Pennsylvania. Since 1983, he has taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he is Professor of English and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program. His poems, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, among them American Poetry Review, The Bloomsbury Review, Chicago Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, College Composition and Communication, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Great River Review, Midwest Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, Spoon River Quarterly; The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, University of Windsor Review, and VIA: Voices in Italian Americana.
He is the recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. He is the recipient of three Minnesota Book Awards for anthologies he has edited. In 2001, he was named the Roland and Beth Dille Distinguished faculty Lecturer. He is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Holding on for Dear Life and When the Italians Came to My Home Town, a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and a chapbook, Minnesota Suite. Most recently he co-edited To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press, 2006), recipient of the 2007 Midwest Booksellers’ Honor Award for Poetry, and the 2007 WILLA Award for Poetry from the Women Writing the West Association.
He also co-edited Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost (2005), Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award (2003), and Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson (2000), winner of a Minnesota Book Award, all published by the University of Iowa Press.
He also co-edited Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest and Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest, both published by the University of Minnesota Press, and both winners of Minnesota Book Awards. He has also edited Remembering James Wright by Robert Bly (1991) and Roving Across Fields: A Conversation with William Stafford and Uncollected Poems 1942-1982 (1983).
Listen to Garrison Keillor read one of Thom’s poems on March 4, 2007, on The Writer’s Almanac: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
Richard Zinober
Richard Zinober, Professor, received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and an MS in film from Boston University. He is a prize-winning playwright. Seekers of the Light, chosen from among 500 submissions, won First Prize in the Ann White New Playwrights contest and was produced in 1990 by the Ann White Theatre in Ft. Lauderdale. The House at the Edge of the World took First Prize in the Southeastern Theatre Conference New Play Project and received a staged reading at the SETC convention in Orlando in 1992.
Published by Playscripts, Inc., Seekers of the Light has also been produced by AmeriStage in Arlington, Texas, TASCUS in Leeds, England, and Pepperdine University in California. Scenes from Seekers of the Light and The House at the Edge of the World were awarded First Prize (Playwriting) in the Oakland Review Literary Competition and appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of the journal, and a monologue from House appeared in the 2005 Audition Arsenal for Men in Their Twenties, published by Smith and Kraus. Adventures in Space was produced by the Red Octopus Theatre Company at the Newport Performing Arts Center in Oregon in 1993. A one-act play, “Once Loved,” won First Prize (Playwriting) in the 2004 Porter Fleming Literary Competition. It was given a reading at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival in August 2004 and a staged reading at the Muddy Creek Players Festival of New Plays in Monroe, NY, in October 2004. His fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Sundog, New Voices and Intro 11.