University of North Texas 
Jehanne Dubrow Ph.D.
Professor | Distinguished Research Professor
Jehanne Dubrow was born in Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium,
Austria, and the United States. She is the author of three books of creative nonfiction
and ten collections of poetry, including most recently Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). She is also the author of the craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, and she serves as the Editor of "Writing From Trauma," an interdisciplinary series
of craft books published by University of New Mexico Press. Her poems and essays have
appeared in The Southern Review, The New England Review, The Colorado Review, and Ploughshares, among others.
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Tarfia Faizullah
Assistant Professor | Director of Undergraduate Studies
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (SIU 2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018). Her work appears in Yale Review, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Guernica, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, PBS Newshour, and the like, and is reviewed by NPR, Slate Magazine, Paris Review, Boston Review, Ms. Magazine, and others. Her awards include a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, as
well as awards from the Writers League of Texas and a Texas Institute of Arts and
Letters. She occasionally serves as faculty at Bread Loaf Writers' Environmental Conference
and Sewanee Writers' Conference, among others, when she is not busy being an introvert.
In 2016, Harvard Law School recognized Tarfia as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change.
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Kimberly Grey, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Kimberly Grey is a hybrid, interdisciplinary writer whose work explores memoir and
memory studies, the personal essay, and creative research. She is the author of two
genre-defying books: Bewilder Meant (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2027) and the essay collection A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing (2023). She has also published two acclaimed poetry collections: Systems for the Future of Feeling (2020) and The Opposite of Light (2016), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.
Grey’s work engages the intersections of auto-theory, trauma studies, and the medical humanities. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Narrative, Tin House, PN Review (UK), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, as well as a Taft Research Grant from the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing.
She serves on the advisory board of the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford Medical Center and has taught at universities across the United States. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the graduate program at the University of North Texas.
Grey’s work engages the intersections of auto-theory, trauma studies, and the medical humanities. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Narrative, Tin House, PN Review (UK), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, as well as a Taft Research Grant from the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing.
She serves on the advisory board of the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford Medical Center and has taught at universities across the United States. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the graduate program at the University of North Texas.
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Corey Marks, Ph.D.
Distinguished Research Professor | Professor | Director of Creative Writing
Corey Marks is the author of The Radio Tree (New Issues Press, 2012), winner of the Green Rose Prize, and Renunciation (University of Illinois Press, 2000), a National Poetry Series selection. His poems
have appeared in New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie
Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize
from The Paris Review.
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Daniel Peña, M.F.A.
Assistant Professor
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Assistant Professor. Formerly,
he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles
Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in
Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. He's currently a regular contributor to The Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His debut novel, Bang, was published in 2018 from Arte Publico Press to critical acclaim. His debut collection
of essays, How to Look Away, is forthcoming from One World/Penguin Random House. He lives in beautiful DFW.
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Miroslav Penkov, M.F.A.
Distinguished Teaching Professor | Professor
Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to America in 2001 and eventually
completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He is the author
of the story collection, East of the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and the novel, Stork Mountain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). His stories have won the BBC International Short
Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. He was a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and
the Steven Turner Award for First Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters. His work
has been translated in over twenty languages. He is currently a fiction editor of American Literary Review.
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John Tait, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
John Tait's short stories have appeared in Narrative, Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere and have been reprinted in New Stories from the Southwest and the Crazyhorse 50th Anniversary Anthology. He has been the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Emerging Writers
and has also received the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Tobias Wolff Fiction
Award, the Rick DeMarinis Award, as well as first prize in the H. E. Francis Literary
Competition, the Dogwood Fiction Awards, and the River City Fiction Awards. He is currently fiction co-editor of American Literary Review.
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