BA/MA Graduate Program in Creative Writing

Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Director of Creative Writing and Liberal Arts Professor of English

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published five collections of poetry, most recently As Is, with the Pitt Poetry Series. In collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin, she published Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, documenting human and environmental impacts of natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania (Penn State Press, 2018). Three previous collections in the Pitt Poetry Series include Poetry in America (2011), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Sleeping Preacher (1992). She is currently working with Rubin on a documentary poetry and photography project about agricultural activity within 30 miles of her home in Bellefonte, PA.

Her awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College's Association Award for New Writing, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry as well as the 2024 Outstanding Contribution Award from the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia and the 2023 John H. Zeigler Historic Preservation Award for History and Heritage from the Centre County Historical Society.

Kasdorf thinks about the relationships people have with the communities and places they come from and the places they inhabit, and the ways global and local concerns pressure those relationships. Her writing often focuses on social and environmental justice and identity. Past projects include a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life and the biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. With Joshua R. Brown, she edited new editions of Yoder's regional classic, Rosanna of the Amish, and Fred Lewis Pattee's local color romance, The House of the Black Ring. With Michael Tyrell, she co-edited the anthology, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. In collaboration with Chris Reed, she created two art exhibitions and edited a book about two neglected twentieth-century Pennsylvania artists, Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer. With Racine Amos, she co-directs a community-university collaboration to uncover and amplify the stories of historic Black communities in Centre County.

Ali Araghi

Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing

Ali Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator and the winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing. His writing and translation have appeared in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Asymptote, among other places. His debut novel, The Immortals of Tehran, was published in 2020 and has since been translated into Dutch and Arabic.

Among Araghi’s translations of contemporary Iranian poetry is Allahverdi’s ConQuest and I Am a Face Sympathizing with Your Grief. Araghi earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in Comparative Literature, International Writers Track, at Washington University in St. Louis.

As a part of his PhD dissertation, Araghi created Persian, Translated, a database of Persian literature in English. This online resource collects granular metadata of literature translated into English with a focus on modern Iranian literature. He teaches fiction at Penn State.

Elizabeth Kadetsky

Professor of English

Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of The Memory Eaters, a lyric memoir published with U Mass Press in April 2020 and the winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of a novella, On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella, 2015); a story collection, The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014); and a memoir, First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004).

Her short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review and elsewhere.

She has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta, and many other creative writing residencies. A two-time Fulbright scholar to India and a 30-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, she published her first book after researching and studying with the yogi BKS Iyengar in Pune, India.

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African Studies

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of a new, critically acclaimed novel, The Road to the Salt Sea. His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and other literary publications.

He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, and the UK's The First Novel Prize. He won an Editor-Writer Mentorship Program Award for Diverse Writers.

He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and holds a Master of Arts degree in creative writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is a graduate of the MFA in writing and publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and creative writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden, and the United States and was visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Creative Writing.

He currently teaches fiction writing as an assistant professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is also a faculty member in the low residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Shara McCallum

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica, to a Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother. She is the author of seven books published in the US and UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026; No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry; and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry.

McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, a bilingual Spanish-English anthology of her work, was published in 2021 in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, McCallum’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch. Her poems have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz, turned into short films, and integrated into public art installations.

Awards for her work include a Guggenehim Fellowship, a Musgrave Medal from the Jamaican government, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, among others. McCallum has taught at various universities and delivers readings, talks, and workshops in the US and internationally. At Penn State, she is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor and, from 2021-22, served as the Penn State Laureate.

Toby Thompson

Associate Professor of Creative Writing

Toby Thompson is the author of six books, including Fired On: Targeting Western American Art; Metroliner, Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan’s Minnesota; Saloon; and The ’60s Report.

He has written for publications as diverse as Vanity Fair, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Gray’s Sporting Journal, GQ, Men’s Journal, Sports Afield, Playboy, Outside, Big Sky Journal, Western Art & Architecture, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

He teaches creative nonfiction at Penn State University and lives in Livingston, Montana, and Cabin John, Maryland.