Cleveland State University
Department of English
Imagination
2121 Euclid Avenue
RT 1832
Cleveland, OH 44115-2214
Campus Location
Rhodes Tower, Rm. 1832
1860 East 22nd Street
Phone: 216.687.2532
E-mail Contact
Betsy Amster is president of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises, a literary agency in Los Angeles. Before opening her agency in 1992, she spent ten years as an editor at Pantheon and Vintage, two divisions of Random House. A frequent instructor at Mediabistro and The Loft, the acclaimed literary center in Minneapolis, Amster has also run workshops at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program and at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She has been described in the L.A. Times as “a dogged prospector of …literary talent” and celebrated in a profile in the American Society of Journalists and Authors newsletter for her “no-nonsense style and whimsical sense of humor.” Her clients include bestselling writers María Amparo Escandón, Joy Nicholson, Dr. Wendy Mogel, and Dr. Elaine Aron.
Nin Andrews is the genre bending author most recently of Sleeping with Houdini and Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane. Among her other collections are the prize winning Spontaneous Breasts and Why They Grow Wings. Her The Book of Orgasms, originially published as fiction by Asylum Press, was reissued as prose poetry under the imagination imprint of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It has since appeared in a British edition and is currently being translated into Turkish. Ms. Andrews is also the editor of Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet Henri Michaux, also under the imagination imprint. She lives with her physicist husband in Poland, Ohio.
Eric Coble is a member of the Cleveland Play House Playwrights Unit, as well as a writer for several nationally broadcast radio programs, and currently has three screenplays in the labyrinth of Hollywood. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and bred on the Navajo and Ute reservations in New Mexico and Colorado. His plays include “Bright Ideas”, “The Dead Guy”, and “Natural Selection” and have been produced Off-Broadway, throughout the U.S., and on several continents, including productions at Manhattan Class Company, The Kennedy Center, Playwrights Horizons, Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, Alliance Theatre, The Cleveland Play House, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Laguna Playhouse, Stages Repertory, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival. Awards include the AT&T Onstage Award, National Theatre Conference Playwriting Award, an NEA Playwright in Residence Grant, a TCG Extended Collaboration Grant, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants.
Lisa D’Amour is a playwright, performer, and former Carnival Queen from New Orleans who now resides in Brooklyn, NY. She writers for the theater, but has also created site-specific performances, often with her closest collaborator, Katie Pearl. Together, they have built performances into crumbling vaudeville houses, corporate atriums, groves of trees, and more. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and also trained at Eugenio Barba’s ISTA Conference and the Portland International Performance Institute. She has received a Jerome Fellowship and two McKnight Advancement Grants from the Playwrights’ Center, a Jerome Performance Art Commission, and project funding from the Minnesota and Louisiana State Arts Boards. In 2005-06, Ms. D’Amour was playwright in residence at Infernal Bridgegroom Productions working on a new play, Hide Town, thanks to an NEA/TCG Playwrights' Residency grant.
Donna Hemans is the 2007-2008 Black Mountain Institute (University of Nevada , Las Vegas ) International Women’s Forum Fellow. Her first novel, River Woman, was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2003 and co-winner of the 2003-2004 Towson University Prize for Literature. She has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Prince George’s County Arts Council, as well as residential fellowships from Millay Colony for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Ms. Heman’s short fiction has appeared in Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, MaComere: The Journal of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, THEMA, and the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.
A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise, published by Tia Chucha Press, 2001, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and selected for the Book of the Month Club from the Academy of American Poets. His second book, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, published by W.W. Norton & Co, 2004, was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times (TLS). Jordan was also awarded a Whiting Writers Award in 2005 and a Pushcart Prize in 2006, 30th Edition. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem Workshop. Quantum Lyrics was published July 2007 by W.W. Norton & Co. He is a recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2007.
Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of two acclaimed works of narrative nonfiction, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie (Ballantine, October 2000), and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, recently out in paperback). A long time activist and writer who, in the 90's, focused his efforts on cross-cultural coalition-building to reduce violence in Boston, he co-founded Boston's successful Gun Buyback program, which took 2,900 working firearms off the streets. He currently lives in Brooklyn, and devotes much of his time to writing and public speaking on topics ranging from race and class in America to trauma, healing, and social change. He just completed the screenplay adaptation of All Souls for director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump).
Paula McLain is the author of two collections of poems, and a memoir, Like Family, about growing up in foster care (Little, Brown 2003). Her debut novel, A Ticket to Ride, was released by Ecco/HarperCollins in January of 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Gettysburg Review, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies. Ms. McLain received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ohio Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches in the MFA program for poetry at New England College, and at John Carroll University.
Honor Moore is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and co-editor of At the Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 for The Bishop’s Daughter, a memoir, to be published in 2008, by W.W. Norton. Her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and Colombia. She has taught nonfiction in the graduate programs at the University of Iowa and Columbia University School of the Arts and poetry at Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.
Josip Novakovich is a Croatian-American writer. At the age of 20 he left Yugoslavia, continuing his education at Vassar College (B.A.), Yale University (M.Div.), and the University of Texas, Austin (M.A.). He has published a novel (April Fool's Day), three short story collections (Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust), two collections of narrative essays (Apricots from Chernobyl, Plum Brandy: Croatian Journey) and a textbook (Fiction Writer's Workshop). He has taught at Nebraska Indian Community College, Bard College, Moorhead State University, Antioch University in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and is now a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Mr. Novakovich is the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He teaches in the Master's of Fine Arts program at Pennsylvania State University.
Imad Rahman's widely praised first book, I Dream Of Microwaves, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2004. His short stories have appeared in One Story, Chelsea, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, The Sonora Review, and The Madison Review. He is currently working on a novel. Mr Rahman has taught creative writing at the University of Florida, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as James C McCreight Fellow in Fiction, and over the past four years he has taught fiction and creative nonfiction writing at Kansas State University. This summer he will be moving from Manhattan, KS, to Cleveland, OH, where he will teach at Cleveland State University and help direct this year’s Imagination Writers’ Workshop and Conference.