M.F.A. in Creative & Professional Writing
The creative and professional writing program’s faculty is dedicated to nurturing students' expertise with a broad range of methodologies relevant to the art of creative writing and to the competitive marketplace standards of professional prose. The faculty in the Department of English consists of poets, novelists, literary biographers, editors, screenwriters, memoirists, and literary scholars active in the fields of linguistics, film criticism, literary and cultural theory, and women’s studies. Departmental faculty have published widely in both scholarly and creative genres and won numerous awards, including guest appointments at major universities, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright fellowships. They participate regularly in national and international literary and scholarly conferences.
Core Creative & Professional Writing Faculty
David Borkowski is Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University. He completed his Ph.D. at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Professor Borkowski’s work has appeared in Rhetoric Review and College Composition and Communication. His first book was entitled The Emergence of a New Rhetoric: A History of the Linguistic Reformation of American Culture. The paperback edition of his last book, A Shot Story: From Juvie to Ph.D., was recently issued in paperback by Gotham Press, an imprint of Fordham University Press. He is currently writing an historical novel, The Dynamite Express. It takes place in the American West in the 1890’s, and deals with a labor dispute among silver miners and mine owners. Professor Borkowski teaches a range of writing and literature courses, at both the graduate and undergraduate level—The Victorian Novel, Global Literature, The Romantic Movement, Films & Literature, the Writing Capstone, Critical Writing, Biography & Autobiography, to name a few.
John Parras received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, John Parras is the author of Fire on Mount Maggiore (University of Tennessee Press, 2005), which won the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel. His creative work has appeared in Salmagundi, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, Oasisand other literary journals, and his chapbook Dangerous Limbs: Prose Poems and Flash Fictions (2013) is published by Kattywompus Press. He is a Professor at William Paterson University, and Editor of Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art. His newest story is forthcoming in Conjunctions in the spring of 2014.
Christopher Salerno is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, ATM, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2013 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. His second book, Minimum Heroic, was selected by Dara Wier for the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize in 2010. Other publishing honors include the 2013 Midwest/Laurel Review Prize for a chapbook of poems, Automatic Teller. His first book of poems, Whirligig, was published by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing House (NY, NY) in 2006.
A 2014 New Jersey Council for the Arts fellow, Salerno’s poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines including Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, jubilat, The Journal, American Letters and Commentary, Coconut, Octopus, and others. His work has also been featured in anthologies and other venues, such as Verse Daily, Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Academy of American Poets.
Born in Somerville, NJ, he received his MA from East Carolina University and his MFA from Bennington College in Vermont. He currently resides in Caldwell, NJ where he teaches in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University.
A 2014 New Jersey Council for the Arts fellow, Salerno’s poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines including Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, jubilat, The Journal, American Letters and Commentary, Coconut, Octopus, and others. His work has also been featured in anthologies and other venues, such as Verse Daily, Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Academy of American Poets.
Born in Somerville, NJ, he received his MA from East Carolina University and his MFA from Bennington College in Vermont. He currently resides in Caldwell, NJ where he teaches in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University.
Martha Witt grew up in Hillsborough North Carolina, the setting of her first novel, Broken As Things Are (Henry Holt, 2000). She has received grants from the New York Times Foundation as well as the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and has held residencies at both the Yaddo and Ragdale artist colonies. Her translations and short stories have appeared in several anthologies--such as Random House's This Is Not Chick Lit--and literary journals such One Story Magazine, the Chatahoochee Review, Boulevard, Harpur's Palate, and the Portland Review. She lives in New York City with her husband, daughter, and son.