Our Alumni & Their Accomplishments

Chelsea Rathburn

(BA 1997, Creative Writing) is the author of Unused Lines (Aralia Press, 2002). Her first collection of poetry, The Shifting Line, received the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award and was published by the University of Evansville Press.

Kim Garcia

(MA 1996, Poetry) is the author of The Brighter House, winner of The White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2015; DRONE, winner of the 2015 Backwaters Prize; Tales of the Sisters, winner of the 2015 Sow's Ear Chapbook Contest; and Madonna Magdalene, released by Turning Point Books in 2006.

Heather Sellers

(PhD 1992, Fiction) is the author of the memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead 2010), three volumes of poetry, a story collection, and several other books.

Pamela Ball

(MA 1988, Fiction) is the author of the novels Lava and The Floating City. She is the winner of numerous writing awards, including the Hemingway Short Fiction Award.

John Bensko

(PhD 1985, Poetry) is the author of the poetry collection Green Soldiers, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award. His other books include Visitations (University of Tampa Press, 2014), Sea Dog Stories (Graywolf Press, 2004), The Iron City (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and The Waterman’s Children (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

Jesse Lee Kercheval

(BA 1983, Creative Writing) is s a poet, memoirist, translator, and fiction writer. She is the author of numerous books, notably Building Fiction, The Museum of Happiness, Space, and Underground Women.

David Bottoms

(PhD 1982, Poetry) is the author of the poetry collections Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch (2018), We Almost Disappear (2011), Waltzing through the Endtime (2004), Vagrant Grace (1999), Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (1995), In a U-Haul North of Damascus (1982), as well as Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump (1979) which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He was the poet laureate of Georgia from 2000-2012 and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His other honors include a Levinson Prize, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and an Ingram-Merrill Award.

Gwyn Hyman Rubio

(BA 1971, Creative Writing) is a New York Times bestselling author of several novels.