Resident Artists and Scholars
ELENA PASSARELLO
Elena Passarello's essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been translated into six languages. She is the author of two collections, the most recent of which, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. It made the Best Books of 2017 lists from several publications including The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and the New York Times Book Review, and it received the Oregon Book Award for nonfiction. In 2019, LitHub listed Animals Strike Curious Poses as one of the best essay collections of the decade.
Nathan Rees
Nathan Rees is an art historian whose research focuses on the intersections of art, colonization, and religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century West. He has published, presented, and curated exhibitions on monuments to Western settlement, representations of Native Peoples, and the theology of visuality. His monograph Mormon Visual Culture and the American West was published by Routledge in 2021.
Dionne Irving Bremyer
Dionne Irving Bremyer teaches creative writing at the University of Notre Dame. Her novel Quint was released in August 2021 from 7.13 Books, and her short-story collection Islands was published by Catapult Books in 2022. Her work has appeared in Boulevard Magazine, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among others. Her essay “Treading Water” was a notable essay in Best American Essays 2017, and she recently co-edited the collection Breastfeeding & Culture: Discourses and Representations. She has also received fellowships from the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Steven Broome
Steven Broome is the owner of Jastesa Photographic Resources, a company specializing in high-end photography and videography. He possesses over three decades of experience as a trained photographer, and has taught photography classes at multiple levels for much of that time. His current work is based on the "rediscovery“of traditional, analogue film methods.
Craig Schroer
Craig Schroer has worked in higher education for nearly three decades, including twenty years at UT Austin, where he was the Electronic Services and Assistant Head of Reference Services at the world-renowned Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. His prior education is in music, with emphasis on choral education and classical guitar performance. Craig won first place at the state and regional level in the Music Teachers National Association Wurlitzer Collegiate Artist Competition.
Visiting Artists and Scholars
Aaron Bremyer
Aaron Bremyer is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches classes on writing and rhetoric. In addition to directing writing centers and teaching academic writing and literature courses at several universities and colleges across the United States, Aaron has taught creative-writing workshops for inmates at a maximum-security prison and for grade-school students with special needs. Since 1999, Aaron has been making art of all kinds–paintings, collage, sculpture– often employing aspects of each to create a hybrid medium.
ALISON CHAPMAN
Alison Chapman is Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she also serves as department chair. She has published widely on early modern English literature, with a particular focus on the works of John Milton. Her monograph The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Earl Modern Law (Chicago, 2017) is the first book-length study of Milton’s relationship to law, and it was named an Outstanding Academic Title by the Association of College and Research Libraries
Jeffrey Thomson
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of multiple books including: Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, from Alice James Books (2019), the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Audrey Goodman
Audrey Goodman received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is a Professor of English and Department Chair at Georgia State University. Recent publications include essays on the California landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Anne Brigman, the revolutionary modernism of Tina Modotti, and the creative correspondence between Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo. Her latest book, A Planetary Lens: The Photo-poetics of Western Women’s Writing (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), shows how photography books articulate complex and evolving relations to western places through arrangements of image and text. In spring 2023, she was a visiting professor at Università degli Studi in Bergamo.
CHAD DAVIDSON
Chad Davidson holds an M.A. from the University of North Texas and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Unearth (2020) and From the Fire Hills (2014), both on Southern Illinois University Press. His collection of travel essays, Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2022.
GREGORY FRASER
Gregory Fraser holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. He is the author of Strange Pietà (Texas Tech University Press, 2003), Answering the Ruins (2009), and Designed for Flight (2014), and Little Armageddon (2021), all from Northwestern University Press. He is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Together, Chad and Greg have also published two textbooks: Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) and Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing (Continuum-Bloomsbury, 2012).
