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Britt Haraway
Interim Director for Creative Writing
Creative Writing Department
ELABS 125
Email: britt.haraway@utrgv.edu
Phone: (956) 665-3252

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Emmy Perez

Professor
Phone: (956) 665-3435
Email: emmy.perez@utrgv.edu
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Emmy Perez

Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press). A collection of her new and selected poetry is forthcoming from TCU Press.

Pérez is the recipient of a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship with the Academy of American Poets and previous poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also received the Modesta Avila Award, the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, and the James D. Phelan Award.

Her work appears in anthologies such as Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press), Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press), and many others.

Pérez is a graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA). For the past 20 years, she has taught in Texas borderlands institutions, and since 2008 has been a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop for socially engaged writers. Over the years, she has also led community-based creative writing projects and taught poetry writing in juvenile and adult detention centers.

Currently, she is full Professor of Creative Writing at UTRGV and teaches MFA and undergraduate creative writing courses. In 2016, she was awarded a Faculty Excellence Award in Student Mentoring, and in 2012, a UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award. She also serves as Associate Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies and is an affiliate faculty member in Mexican American Studies.

Curriculum Vitae

Professor
Creative Writing
Email: emmy.perez@utrgv.edu
ELABS 206
Phone: (956) 665-3435

Steven P. Schnieder

Professor
Phone: (956) 665-8775
Email: steven.schneider@utrgv.edu
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Steven P. Schnieder

Steven P. Schneider is professor of Creative Writing and Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is also director of new programs and special projects for the College of Fine Arts at UTRGV. Steven is co-creator with his artist wife Reefka of the traveling exhibit and book Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives (Fronteras: dibujando las vidas fronterizas). As department Chair of English from 2001 to 2007 at the University of Texas Pan-American, Professor Schneider led the creation of a new MFA program in Creative Writing and pioneered the teaching of culturally relevant literature in the core curriculum. He is invited frequently to speak to school districts throughout Texas.

Steven is the author of several collections of poetry, including Prairie Air Show and Unexpected Guests. His poems have been featured in numerous anthologies and published in such journals as Critical Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, and in the syndicated column and web site American Life in Poetry. He is the author A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope and the editor of Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A.R. Ammons’s Long Poems and The Contemporary Narrative Poem:Critical Crosscurrents. His awards include a Wurlitzer Foundation residency in Taos, New Mexico, a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship and three Big Read grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Curriculum Vitae

Professor
Creative Writing
Email: steven.schneider@utrgv.edu
ELABS 326
Phone: (956) 665-8775

Eric Miles Williamson

Professor
Phone: (956) 665-3400
Email: eric.williamson@utrgv.edu
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Eric Miles Williamson

Eric Miles Williamson is author of four books of fiction and 3 books of criticism/nonfiction. He edits American Book Review, Texas Review, and Boulevard. He teaches literature and fiction at UTRGV.

Curriculum Vitae

Professor
Creative Writing
Email: eric.williamson@utrgv.edu
ETROX W208
Phone: (956) 665-3400

Jean Braithwaite

Associate Professor
Phone: (956) 665-3252
Email: jean.braithwaite@utrgv.edu
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Jean Braithwaite

Jean Braithwaite is a specialist in nonfiction writing, with particular interests in memoir, essays, science writing, and documentaries. Every subject is fascinating if you go into it deeply enough! Other important interests include graphic literature (aka comics) and science fiction (which really ought to be called philosophy fiction).

Curriculum Vitae

Associate Professor
Creative Writing
Email: jean.braithwaite@utrgv.edu
ELABS 217
Phone: (956) 665-3252

Britt Haraway, Interim Director

Assistant Professor
Phone: (956) 665-3335
Email: britt.haraway@utrgv.edu
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Britt Haraway, Interim Director

Britt Haraway is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His stories have appeared in the South Dakota Review, Natural Bridge, 971, Product, New Madrid, Great Weather for Media, Moon City Review, and BorderSenses. His poetry has also appeared in BorderSenses. His collection of stories has been accepted by Lamar University Literary Press.

He is the fiction editor for riverSedge magazine and is the faculty adviser for Gallery, UTRGV’s student literary arts magazine. He received a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and was raised in the Memphis area.

Curriculum Vitae

Assistant Professor
Creative Writing
Email: britt.haraway@utrgv.edu
ELABS 273
Phone: (956) 665-3335

Jose A. Rodriquez

Associate Professor
Phone: (956) 665-3335
Email: jose.rodriguez@utrgv.edu
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Jose A. Rodriquez

José Antonio Rodríguez’s books include The Shallow End of Sleep, winner of the Bob Bush Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; Backlit Hour, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize; and Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives, a collaborative project with visual art by Reefka Schneider, poems by Steven Schneider, and his Spanish translations. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Texas Observer, Green Mountains Review, Memorious, RHINO, Huizache, the Poetry Society of America online, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

Curriculum Vitae

Associate Professor
Creative Writing
Email: jose.rodriguez@utrgv.edu
ELABS 272
Phone: (956) 665-3335

Robert P. Moreira

Lecturer II
Phone: (956) 665-8771
Email: robert.moreira@utrgv.edu
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Robert P. Moreira

Robert Paul Moreira, Lecturer II at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Texas Pan American, and his Ph.D. in English from The University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the recipient of the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award (2011) and two awards for short fiction from the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers (2009, 2010). His books include ¡Arriba Baseball!: A Collection of Latin@ Baseball Fiction (2013) and Scores (2015), winner of the 2016 NACCS Tejas FOCO Fiction Award. His creative and scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Azahares, Southwest American Literature, Aethlon, Soccer and Society, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the anthologies SOL: English Writing From Mexico (2012), Along the River 2 (2012), New Border Voices (2013), and Open Field: Gender, Sexuality and the Black Athlete (forthcoming).

As a dramatist, Robert is the book writer, composer, and lyricist for the upcoming musical Malinalli. His latest play, Roses From Castile, was selected by Milagro Theater as part of their inaugural INGENIO Play Reading Series in Portland, Oregon in February of 2018.

Robert’s creative and research interests include contemporary fiction, playwriting, musical theater, Latinx and Multiethnic Literatures, and Sports Studies.

Curriculum Vitae

Lecturer II
Creative Writing
Email: robert.moreira@utrgv.edu
ELABS 205
Phone: (956) 665-8771

Ivelisse Rodriguez

Part Time Lecturer
Phone: (956) 665-3252
Email: ivelisse.rodriguez@utrgv.edu
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Ivelisse Rodriguez

Ivelisse Rodriguez’s (she/her) debut short story collection is Love War Stories (Feminist Press, 2018), a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. Ivelisse was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and raised in Holyoke, MA (which has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico).

In Love War Stories, love is a battleground, littered with cautionary tales of characters on the cusp of romance who covet, wrestle with, and fight to subvert their familial and cultural legacies of suffering from, and for, love. Ivelisse has published fiction in the Boston Review, Obsidian, Kweli, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications.

She was the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. The series was published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She has served as a contest/fellowship/grant judge for several institutions, including the National Endowment of the Arts, the Boston Review, and Kore Press, among others. She has been a guest editor for Pleiades and the Boston Review.

She has taught creative writing to graduate, undergraduate, and independent students at the University of Arizona, University of Missouri-St. Louis, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and numerous writing centers across the country. She is currently working on the novel The Last Salsa Singer about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She currently lives in North Carolina, with two formerly stray cats, The Gemellis, only because her beloved Lhasa Apso, Chocolatte, went on to doggie heaven.

To learn more about Ivelisse, visit: www.ivelisserodriguez.com.

Curriculum Vitae

Part Time Lecturer
Creative Writing Program
Email: ivelisse.rodriguez@utrgv.edu
ELABS 125
Phone: (956) 665-3252

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