Our Faculty
We offer two tracks, fiction and poetry. The faculty in the fiction track is receptive to work that does not fit the traditional definition of fiction.
Our fiction faculty is Uwem Akpan and David Leavitt. Our poetry faculty is Michael Hofmann, William Logan, and Ange Mlinko. Uwem’s first book was an Oprah Book Club selection. David and Ange are recipients of Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. Hofmann is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. William is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Uwem Akpan
Uwem Akpan teaches graduate and upper-level fiction workshops. His fiction and autobiographical pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, the Nigerian Guardian, O, the Oprah magazine, and elsewhere. His story collection, Say You’re One of Them, was published by Little, Brown in 2008 and has been translated into twelve languages. It won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region), the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was the 2009 Oprah Book Club selection.
Uwem has been a fellow at the Loyola University Chicago’s Catholic Center, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the University of Michigan’s Humanities Center, and the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute. He is in the process of writing his second book.
Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann writes, reviews, translates, and teaches. He has translated the work of Bertolt Brecht, Elias Canetti, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Joseph Roth, among many others. He has translated the poetry of Gottfried Benn, Günter Eich, and Durs Grünbein. His translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in 2018 in the NYRB Classics series; his translation of Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? is due out next year, as is a new book of his poems (the fifth), One Lark, One Horse (with FSG) He is giving the 2019 Clarendon Lectures in Oxford.
Hofmann publishes reviews and essays in the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and Poetry. His pieces have been collected in two volumes, Behind the Lines and Where Have You Been? He teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops and an undergraduate course in Creative Non-Fiction.
David Leavitt
David Leavitt’s most recent books are the novels The Indian Clerk and The Two Hotel Francforts. He is also the author of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. At UF he co-directs MFA@FLA, the English department’s program in Creative Writing, and is the editor of the literary journal Subtropics. His teaching comprises graduate and upper-level undergraduate fiction workshops and forms courses on such topics as “The Writer as Critic,” “Research and Imaginative Writing,” and “Fiction in Drag: Novels and Stories That Pretend to be Things Other Than Novels and Stories.” He is at work on a series of short novels set during the years of the Trump administration, the first of which will be published next year.
William Logan
William Logan writes poetry and a little criticism. He has published eleven books of poetry and seven books of criticism, most recently Rift of Light (poems, Penguin) and Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods (essays, Columbia University Press).
His reviews, when there are reviews, appear in the New York Times Book Review, the New Criterion, Poetry, Hudson Review, Hopkins Review, and other journals. He teaches poetry workshops and the occasional graduate course in the craft of poetry.
Logan has received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, and the Allen Tate Prize.
Ange Mlinko
Ange Mlinko is the author of five collections of poetry: Matinees (1999), Starred Wire (2005), Shoulder Season (2010), Marvelous Things Overheard (2013), and Distant Mandate: Poems (2017). Marvelous Things Overheard was selected by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe as one of the best books of 2013. She received Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock prize for her poem “Cantata for Lynette Roberts.”
Professor Mlinko’s poems and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, London Review of Books, and other literary magazines. A winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism in 2009, Mlinko was a Guggenheim Fellow for 2014–15. She is currently the Poetry Editor of Subtropics. Mlinko teaches poetry workshops and seminars on poetics.
Emeritus Faculty
Jill Ciment
Jill Ciment is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; the novels The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures (a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Act of God; and Half a Life, a memoir. She is also the co-author (with Amy Hempel) of the thriller The Hand That Feeds You. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts, an NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 5 Flights Up, a film adaptation of Heroic Measures starring Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton, was released in 2015.
Debora Greger
Debora Greger has published ten books of poetry, most recently By Herself (2012) and In Darwin’s Room (2017). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Among her awards are the Grolier Prize, the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry. In 2012 she was appointed the first Poet-in-Residence at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, Florida.
Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell received his M.A. in English from the University of Houston and joined the UF Creative Writing faculty in 1984. He is the author of the novels Edisto, A Woman Named Drown, Edisto Revisited, Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, You & Me, The Interrogative Mood, and Hologram and the story collections Typical, Aliens of Affection, and Cries for Help, Various. In addition, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Sports Writing. Powell’s awards include the Prix de Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Writers Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Mary Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of South Carolina and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Sidney Wade
Sidney Wade’s seventh collection of poems, Bird Book, was published by Atelier26 Books in September 2017. She taught workshops in Poetry and Translation at the University of Florida’s MFA@FLA program for 23 years, and she has served as President of AWP and Secretary/Treasurer of ALTA. Her translation with Efe Murad of selected poems of Melih Cevdet Anday won the Meral Divitci Prize and was published by Talisman House in April 2017. She served as poetry editor for the literary journal Subtropics for many years, and her poems and translations have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, Grand Street, The Paris Review, as well as many other literary publications.