October 4th 2007

CSUF MFA Faculty Reading

Steven Church

Steven Church was born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. He was briefly switched at birth and then subsequently returned to his mother. Steven attended public schools in Lawrence and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1995 with a BA in Philosophy.

In 2002, he earned his MFA in Fiction from Colorado State University. His work has been published in several literary magazines and has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first book, The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record was published in April 2005.

He has worked as a fry cook, Bobcat operator, tour guide (twice), housepainter, maintenance man, conflict mediator, academic advisor and teacher.

He currently serves as a Contributing Editor for the Colorado Review. Steven was awarded the 2003 Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and named the Alan Collins Scholar in Nonfiction for the 2003 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. In the Fall of 2006 he will join the faculty of the MFA program in Creative Writing at CSUF.

David Anthony Durham

David Anthony Durham was born in New York City in 1969. The child of parents of Caribbean ancestry, he grew up in Maryland. He began writing seriously while an undergraduate on a Creative Arts Scholarship at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. While there his short story, “August Fury,” won the 1990 Malcolm C. Braly Award for Fiction. Another story, “The Boy-Fish,” won the 1992 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award and was published in Catalyst.

In 1994 David received a Full Fellowship to the MFA Program at the University of Maryland College Park. He wrote his first two novels during the program, Cicada and August Fury, both of which deal with contemporary issues within African-American families. (These two novels are unpublished.) He graduated in 1996. Shortly after that he moved to the United Kingdom, where he published two short stories, “One Room Like a Cave” in Staple: New Writing, 1998, and “The She-Ape and the Occasional Idealist” in QWF, June/July 2000. He received the equivalent of about fifteen dollars each for these gems.

In 1999, while living in France, David embarked on a new project, an historical novel set in the American West, featuring black homesteaders and cowboys. This novel, Gabriel’s Story, was published by Doubleday in 2001 and was an Anchor Books paperback in 2002. Gabriel’s Story was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best of 2001 pick, and a Booklist Editor’s Choice. It won the 2001 First Novel Award from the American Library Association’s Black Caucus, the 2002 Alex Award and the 2002 Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction Category.

David followed Gabriel’s Story with Walk Through Darkness in 2002 (Anchor Books 2003). This novel tells the tale of a runaway slave and the Scottish immigrant hired to track him. It was a Summer Reading Pick from the Washington Post, an Editor’s Choice for Summer Reading from the Wall Street Journal, a New York Times Notable Book and one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2002. Both Gabriel’s Story and Walk Through Darkness are available in audio versions from Recorded Books.

In July of 2003 he taught the Advanced Novel Workshop at the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s Writer’s Week, and in the fall of 2003 he was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at California State University, Fresno.

He published his third novel, Pride of Carthage, in January of 2005 (Anchor Books 2006). It’s a fictional exploration of the Second Punic War between Carthage and the early Roman Republic. Pride of Carthage was a Book Sense 76 pick and a finalist for the Legacy Award for Fiction. It was published in the British Commonwealth by Transworld and in Italian by Piemme, in Polish by Rebis, in Portuguese by Editora Bertrand, in Russian by Eskmo, in Spanish by Ediciones B, in Swedish by Norstedts.

Beginning in 2005 he taught at the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program, and during the 2006/2007 academic year he was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Writer at The Colorado College. He recently accepted a position as an Associate Professor in the MFA program of California State University, Fresno.

David’s fourth novel, Acacia, appeared this June from Doubleday.

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in the city of La Puente, a suburb of Los Angeles. He received his BA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside in 2000 and went on to earn his MFA in Writing from the University of California, Irvine in 2004. He served as editor of UCI’s literary journal, Faultline, and was the recipient of two research grants from the International Center for Writing and Translation. He has worked as a used appliance salesman, a cashier and egg candler on a chicken ranch, and a retail manager. His first novel, Still Water Saints (Random House, 2007) which was released simultaneously in Spanish, has been named a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writer” selection for spring, 2007. His essays have appeared in Salon and the New York Times. In the fall of 2007, Alex will join the English faculty at California State University, Fresno, as an Assistant Professor of English, and he is also at work on his next novel.

Corrinne Clegg Hales

Corrinne Clegg Hales was born in Tooele, Utah and grew up there and in Salt Lake City. She earned her BA and MA at the University of Utah, and her PhD at SUNY-Binghamton in New York State. She has been a fast food worker, a motel clerk and housekeeper, a political pollster, a Polaroid camera demonstrator, and has taught at the University of Utah, SUNY-Binghamton, Ithaca College, and the University of Oregon. She is the author of Separate Escapes, winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002), Out of This Place (March Street Press, 2001), Underground (Ahsahta Press, 1986), and January Fire (Devil’s Millhopper Press). Awards include two NEA Fellowship Grants and the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, The North American Review, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, River Styx, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere, and she currently lives in Fresno, CA, where she teaches creative writing and American literature and coordinates the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.

John Hales

John Hales was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, earned his undergraduate and MA degrees at the University of Utah, and his PhD in American literature and culture at the State University of New York at Binghamton. After working as a high school teacher, university instructor, and land surveyor in Utah, his east-coast employment included directing the Basic Writing Program at SUNY-Binghamton and teaching literature at Vassar College. He currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno.

His essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Ascent, and in the anthology On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors. His work has been cited numerous times in Best American Essays and in Best American Science and Nature Writing, and has twice been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors Prize. “Line,” an essay that first appeared in The Georgia Review, was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize. His first book, Shooting Polaris: A Personal Survey in the American West, was published in November 2005 by the University of Missouri Press.

Tim Skeen

Tim Skeen’s poems have appeared in many magazines and journals including the Antioch Review, Mid-American Review, and Prairie Schooner. His book, Kentucky Swami, won the 2001 John Ciardi Prize from Bk Mk Press at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He recently moved to California with his wife, Pam, and daughter, Iris, to teach in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.

Steve Yarbrough

Steve Yarbrough is the author of seven books. His most recent novel, The End of California will be published by Knopf in early June 2006. His other novels are Prisoners of War (Knopf, 2004), Visible Spirits (Knopf, 2002), and The Oxygen Man (Scribner, 2000); story collections are Veneer and Mississippi History (both from the University of Missouri Press) and Family Men (LSU Press). He has won the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors’ Award, as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated, or is being translated, into Japanese, Dutch, and Polish and has appeared in such anthologies as Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.