Creative Writing: Creative Writing Department

Albert Abonado received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and he has taught at SUNY Geneseo since 2014. He teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, and composition. In 2014, he received a fellowship for poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and his book JAW is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Pleiades, The Colorado Review, The Margins, Redivider, Zone 3 and others. He is the co-host of the New Ground Poetry Night, a poetry open mic held at Equal=Grounds Coffee shop on the first Tuesday of the month. Every Thursday from 2-3PM, Albert hosts Flour City Yawp on WAYO 104.3 FM-LP, a radio show featuring interviews with poets, panel discussions on poetry, and more. On poetry, Albert defers to the words of WH Auden, who wrote that "poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings."

Caroline Beltz-Hosek received her M.A. in Poetry from SUNY Brockport. A former assistant editor at Penguin Putnam, she has taught creative writing and literature at SUNY Geneseo since 2006. Additionally, she was awarded a 2018 Incentive Grant from the Geneseo Foundation for The Long Diminishing Parade, a poetry collection based in part on her maternal ancestors, which explores topics of motherhood, mental illness, alienation, and the immigrant experience, and the role that place--real or imagined, personal and historical--plays in shaping identity in creative expression.

Jessica Fenn received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and became a member of the SUNY Geneseo faculty in 2014. She teaches courses in English literature as well as creative writing. She frequently teaches Foundations of Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Nonfiction Workshop, Medieval Literature, and Literary Theory. She publishes fiction and experimental memoir. Her work can be found here. In addition, Fenn works with the Geneseo Study Abroad office to create opportunities for students returning from travel to reflect on their experiences through writing. Fenn writes, reads, and teaches cross-genre work: "I love fiction that reads like nonfiction, and nonfiction that reads like fiction--I can't get enough of any and all writing that crosses genre boundaries in its effort to communicate the most urgent and intimate realities of our time."

Kristen Gentry received her M.F.A. from Indiana University and has been a member of the Geneseo faculty since 2007. She often teaches the courses Advanced Fiction Workshop, Creative Nonfiction Workshop, Reading as a Writer, Foundations of Creative Writing, and Hip Hop and Contemporary American Literature. She received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015. Gentry is the director of the Creative Writing program at SUNY Geneseo and is currently working on her manuscript, Mama Said.

Rachel Hall is the author of Heirlooms (BkMk Press) which was selected by Marge Piercy for
the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize. Winner of the Phillip McMath Post Publication Award,
Heirlooms was also the runner-up for the Edward Wallant award, and finalist for the Balcones
Prize for Fiction, the Montaigne Medal, and the Eric Hoffer Award. Rachel’s short stories and
essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies including Black Warrior Review,
Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Fifth Wednesday, Guernica, and New Letters, which
awarded her the Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction. She has received other honors and awards
from Lilith, Glimmer Train, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, Ragdale, the Ox-
Bow School of the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Hall is a
Professor of English in the creative writing program at the State University of New York at Geneseo. 

Lytton Smith: Associate professor of Engilsh and Creative Writing. Professor Smith often teaches the Advanced Poetry Workshop, as well as several 20th-Century Black Poetry Books, NeuWrite: Creative Science Writing, Art Talks, and Writing and Knowing the Land: Abroad in Iceland (co-taught with Dr. Nick Warner from the geology department), among others. He serves on the Red Hook Advisory Board and teaches a summer course in Brooklyn called Writing in Place. He is the author of three published poetry collections. His most recent, My Radar Data Knows Its Thing (Foundlings Press) was published in the spring of 2018. He also published While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It (Nightboat Books) and The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books). In addition to publishing his own work, he has also translated several novels from the Icelandic. He is a 2019 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. He is Director of the Center of Integrative Learning at SUNY Geneseo. When asked about the subject of poetry, Professor Smith said, "poetry's defined by a kind of alchemy in which two things placed together produce a third without reducing themselves to nothing."

The deadline for the Creative Writing Track is due March 14 at 4 p.m. You can turn in the application online through a Google form (sent by email from Lytton Smith) OR by paper copy; turn in paper copies at Welles 226. Turn in only one application. You will be notified of acceptance or rejection by March 31. 

To qualify for the advanced workshops, you must be enrolled in or have completed ENGL 201, Foundations of Creative Writing.