Department of English
Creative Writing
Jay Hopler
Green Squall
Welcome to the creative writing program at the University of South Florida. Our program offers small classes,
engaging fellow students, dedicated faculty, and a supportive atmosphere.
This past year we welcomed visiting writer Suzanne Strempek Shea to campus. Shea is the author of four novels
(including the best-selling Selling the Lite of Heaven) and three memoirs (Notes from a Lead-Lined Room,
Shelf Life, and Sundays in America). Comic novelist Ad Hudler will join us this spring to teach a special
undergraduate workshop. And in fall of 2008,we will welcome another permanent writer to our faculty; this new hire will
specialize in creative nonfiction and fiction.
Our Faculty
Rita Ciresi (MFA, The Pennsylvania State University) is the author of the short-story collections
Mother Rocket and Sometimes I Dream in Italian, and the novels Pink Slip, Blue Italian,
and Remind Me Again Why I Married You. Her awards include the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
and the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel. She has won support for her work from the Ragdale Foundation,
the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, the American Academy in Rome, and the state art councils of
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. From 2003-2005 she wrote a weekly newspaper column, "America Today," for the
Rome daily newspaper Europa. Visit her website at www.ritaciresi.com.
John Henry Fleming (Ph.D., University of Louisiana-Lafayette) is the author of The Legend of the Barefoot
Mailman, a novel of Florida. He has published more than 20 short stories in magazines including McSweeney’s,
The North American Review, Mississippi Review, Santa Monica Review, and Georgetown Review,
and was a contributor to The Future Dictionary of America. He has taught creative writing at the University
of South Florida since 2001; prior to that, he taught for four years in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of
California.
Hunt Hawkins, (Ph.D., Stanford University), English Department Chair, specializes in 20th-century British literature,
post-colonial literature, and poetry writing. His collection of poems, The Domestic Life, won the Agnes Lynch
Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His poems have appeared in Georgia
Review, Harvard Magazine, Poetry, and many other magazines. He is president of the Joseph Conrad Society and edits
Joseph Conrad Today.
Jay Hopler (MFA, University of Iowa) is the author of Green Squall, which was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner
of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire (Overlook
Press). His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and encyclopedias,
including Boulevard, Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural and Economic History,
Colorado Review, Columbia, Confrontation, The Journal of Social History, The Kenyon Review,
The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, New Voices: 1989—1998 (Academy of American Poets), The New Yorker,
Ploughshares, Poet Lore, POOL, Puerto Del Sol, Sonora Review, Under the Rock Umbrella: Modern
American Poets from 1951—1976 (Mercer University Press), The Wallace Stevens Journal and Xantippe.
Creative Writing Awards
It's that time of year for the Department of English Creative Writing Awards! For
details on the awards and contest entry, click
here.
USF Creative Writing in the News
Links to Catalogues, Courses, and Department Publications
Related Department Publications
http://sawpalm.usf.edu
Saw Palm is published annually by the creative writing program. We publish work by Florida writers and artists and
those outside the state whose work concerns itself with Florida. We're interested
in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, art, photography, interviews, reviews of
books and films, as well as pieces for our two series, Places to
Stand in Florida and Insane Anecdotes from Florida History.
http://english.usf.edu/thread/
Thread is an online journal edited annually by English majors, where some of the best current
USF undergraduate writing (literary criticism and research; creative writing; and
in the future, technical writing) can glow on the screen instead of festering on
the hard drives of its creators.