Faculty Biographies

V. JOSHUA ADAMS is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar of comparative literature. His research and teaching encompass poetry and poetics, literature and philosophy, literary theory, ideas of the self, American literature since 1865, and fairy tales. Work of his has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Bennington Review, Posit, Chicago Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Imagination, and elsewhere. His first book of poems, Past Lives, is forthcoming in 2024 from JackLeg Press, and he is finishing a critical book, Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems, for Bloomsbury.

PAUL GRINER is the author of five books.  The short story collections Hurry Please I Want to Know (Sarabande Press) and Follow Me (Random House), which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and the novels Second Life (Counterpoint), The German Woman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Collectors (Random House). 

Hurry Please I Want to Know was nominated for the 2016 Kirkus Prize, a finalist for the 2016 Indiefab Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the 2016 Kentucky Literary Award.   He was selected to be the July 2016 Writer-in-Residence at Aspen Words.

His work has been published in Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares, Story, Playboy, Zoetrope, The North American Review, The Telegraph of India, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies, and has been translated into a half dozen languages.  
 
He is a Distinguished University Scholar; the recipient of UofL’s Outstanding Teaching Awards at both the college and university levels, and of UofL’s Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creativity Activity Award for Humanities at both the college and university levels, and the Graduate School’s Outstanding Mentor Award.  A former Fulbright Scholar, he has a BA in History from the University of New Hampshire, an MA in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard, and an MA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.

DR. KRISTI MAXWELL (Director of Creative Writing) is the author of nine books of poetry: Wide Ass of Night (Saturnalia Books, 2025), Goners (Green Linden Press, 2023), My My (Saturnalia, 2020), Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, 2018), Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta, 2008), Hush Sessions (Saturnalia Books, 2009), Re- (Ahsahta, 2011), That Our Eyes Be Rigged (Saturnalia, 2014), and PLAN/K (Horse Less Press, 2015).

Prof. Maxwell's scholarly publications include articles on experimental writing practices and the hybrid writing of Jenny Boully and Anne Carson, and her research interests involve theories of representation and difference, textual performance, and the body.

In 2022, she received the Presidential Excellence Distinguished Faculty Award in Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity (Creative and Performing Arts) and the College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Faculty Award in Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity (Creative and Performing Arts).

A former Elliston Poetry Fellow, she received a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature, along with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, where she served as editor-in-chief of Sonora Review.

ROBIN LEE MOZER  When she’s not in the writing classroom, Prof. Mozer serves as English Undergraduate Advisor. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Pennsylvania State University and a BA in English and Music (Vocal Performance) from Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. Her short nonfiction and lyric essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, [PANK], Booth, 300 Reviews, a few edited collections you’ve never heard of, and a very much neglected blog. Mozer’s professional career includes teaching, tutoring, production editing, copy editing, table waiting, gym managing, choir directing, opera singing, costume making, program directing, and general hustle. She has been teaching and living with her husband and daughter in Louisville since 2011.

JAMESON REID Jameson Reid (Assistant Director of Creative Writing) is a graduate teaching assistant pursuing his Master’s in English at UofL. His writing tends towards experimental fiction and digital stories that explore fiction’s ability to construct the self. Jameson also studies storytelling as an academic genre with interest in creative writing pedagogy and storytelling methodologies. His research makes further intersections with digital media and Indigenous rhetoric.

IAN STANSEL is the author of the short story collection Glossary for the End of Days (Acre Books, 2020) and the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017), named a best book of the year by Amazon, as well as another book of stories, Everybody's Irish (FiveChapters 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Bingham prize for debut fiction. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Joyland, Ecotone, Cincinnati Review, and Antioch Review, among others. His nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers, CutBank, Salon and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where he was the editor of Gulf Coast. 

SARAH ANNE STRICKLEY is the author of three books of prose: the short story collection Incendiary Devices: Stories (forthcoming from Tolsun Books in 2023), the novella Sister (Summer Camp Publishing, 2021), and the short story collection, Fall Together (Gold Wake Press, 2018). She’s a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship, an Ohio Arts grant, a Glenn Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters, the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize for Prose and other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Oxford American, A Public Space, Witness, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, The Southeast Review, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, storySouth and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati. She’s a term Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville and serves as faculty editor of Miracle Monocle, UofL’s award-winning literary journal.

BRIAN WEINBERG  teaches creative writing and literature electives, and he is the author of Cardinal Creative Writer, an online textbook for U of L students taking English 202: Intro to Creative Writing.  His short fiction has appeared in New Letters, Bellevue Review, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, and Meridian, among others; his nonfiction in n+1, Salon, Men’s Vogue, Forbes Life, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and elsewhere.  He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where he was a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University.  The recipient of a post-graduate writing and teaching residency at St. Albans School in the nation’s capital, he has found rewarding teaching experiences in a variety of settings, including the Jefferson County Public Schools’ adult education program and the Louisville Story Program, a nonprofit that helps historically underrepresented residents write and publish books about their lives and neighborhoods.

Emeritus faculty:

JEFFREY SKINNER's poetry has earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other fellowships and awards from such agencies as the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  His prose book, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets: A Self-help Memoir, was published in 2012 by Sarabande Books. He has published seven collections of poetry, the latest of which, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Georgia, Iowa, and Paris reviews. Three of his plays have been finalists in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Conference competition, He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, McDowell and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. Skinner has been Poet-in-Residence at the Robert Frost House, the Arts Festival of Ireland, and the James Merrill House.