The Low Residency MFA
in Creative Writing Alumni Page
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The Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Alumni Page |
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Meet Our Low-Residency MFA Alumni Want to see what the current students are up to? Click here to meet them! Are you an alum who's not featured on this page? Please contact Jennifer Stewart! Intersted in our Post-Graduate Program? Click here.
Erica Johnson Debeljak Wins Glimmer Train Contest and Publishes Memoir
Post-Graduate Forum and Conference
More Alumni (in alphabetical order)
Request written information on the Low Residency program and/or study-abroad. Click Here to go to the Application Form The Low Residency MFA Program and all Study Abroad Programs in Writing are administered by the |
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After finishing his MFA at UNO in 2003, Peter went on to pursue a PhD at Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. HIs first novel, Safe from the Sea, releases in September 2010. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three kids and is at work on another novel.
Lynda Rutledge (Stephenson), UNO low-res MFA 2005, has sold a novel to Amy Einhorn Books at Putnam, tentatively entitled Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale written under Lynda Rutledge. It got its jumpstart as Provenance during Amanda Boyden's MFA fiction workshop, Spring 2004. Pub date to be set. Lynda is a longtime freelance journalist for major national and international publications such as the Chicago Tribune and Poets & Writers as well as a collaborator and/or author of a dozen books working with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and the San Diego Zoo. Her UNO-inspired work has appeared in 
After graduating from the UNO low-res program in 2008, Will went back to teaching at a charter high school in Indianapolis. He is the assistant dean of the Early College program at the Tindley Accelerated School where he teaches college writing courses in composition, rhetoric, research, and creative writing. He has had stories and essays picked up recently by the SNReview and Not Just Air. 
Sonja Livingston’s nonfiction has been honored with the 
Jesse Loren grew up in East Los Angeles and now resides in Northern California. Her poetry can be found in 
Erica Johnson Debeljak is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and a literary translator. She graduated with distinction from the University of New Orleans Low Residency MFA program in May 2006 with a concentration in fiction. Her work has most recently appeared in Missouri Review and Glimmer Train (winner of 2008 Family Matter contest) and is forthcoming in The Pinch. Her memoir Forbidden Bread was published by North Atlantic Books in 2009. Currently, she lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia with her husband and three children. She has had three books published in her adopted country of Slovenia, the most recent being a collection of short stories entitled Tako si moj (You Are So Mine) in the fall of 2007.
Merridith Allen lives in New York City where she writes, and 
Anny Ballardini lives in Bolzano, Italy. She grew up in New York, lived in New Orleans, Buenos Aires, and Florence. A poet, translator and interpreter (simultaneous interpreter for English, French, Italian), she teaches high school; edits 
Kim lives in St. Augustine, FL, is married to Craig Barzso, and mom to Isaac, 11, and Phoebe Xiaoyue, nine months old. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2004. Kim is currently at work on a novel as well as a collection of short stories. Kim teaches poetry to kindergarten through fifth grade at the OUR Community Center in Hastings, Fla. She also edited a collection of poetry from the children of Hastings called "Juice up the True Say," which will be out in October. 
Boston (Boston Theater Marathon and BTW), New York (Summer Play Festival NYC) and Chicago (Stage Left Theatre). He is a 2009 Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant recipient in playwriting. His newest play, Pigcat, recently won the The Holland New Voices Award at the Great Plains Theater Conference. He is cofounder of Rouged Ape, a paratheatri- cal theater company working around the Boston area. He teaches drama and directs at Lexington High School, and also teaches play- writing for the University of New Orleans Low Residency Creative Writing Program. Last year, he collaborated with Amanda Palmer and the Lexington High School Drama students on a new play, With the Needle That Sings in Her Heart. The production received an overwhelm- ing positive response from audiences, and was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Bogart’s visual art has been exhibited internationally, and most recently was part of the Decordova Museum’s exhibition, Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century.
After a couple of years living in L.A. as a struggling actor, I returned home to Baton Rouge and completed a B.A. degree in English Literature with a theater minor at L.S.U. I worked for a year on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and then moved to New Orleans and took low-pay acting jobs in theater and did freelance writing assignments for LOUISIANA SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE. Later I moved back to Baton Rouge to co-produce and act in an independent film. After the film I wrote my first screenplay and upon finishing it promptly moved back to L.A. to shop it to producers. Getting nowhere with the script and running out of money, I entered the business world and moved to Houston, where I met a professional screenwriter who has helped improve my writing tremendously. Since then I have written 2 more scripts as a low-residency MFA student at UNO. Occasionally, I still do acting jobs and contribute articles to LOUISIANA SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE. 
Sean Conway is a 2008 graduate of the UNO low-res program in fiction. As a student, he studied writing and literature in Montpellier, France and Madrid, Spain, while visiting many European cities along the way. In 2007, he even ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Most recently, he attended the post-graduate workshops in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Philippe Custeau is a writer, Chiropractor, and musician from Québec, Canada. He holds a BSc in Biochemistry, a Doctorate degree in Chiropractic, and he graduated from the MFA program at UNO in 2006. Philippe has since found representation with the prestigious literary agency of Ann McDermid and Associates in Toronto. He completed A Faint, Blue Idea of Order, his first novel, and is now actively at work on his second. His poetry has been published in Taproot, an anthology of English-language Quebec writers. In parallel with this, Philippe also recorded and released an album of original songs in 2006, and toured extensively with his band, 
Jeff Grieneisen is an assistant professor of English at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, Florida. He earned his B.A. from Penn State, DuBois in 1994, his M.A. in English literature from Clarion University in 2001, and his MFA from The University of New Orleans in 2007. He has published work as contributing editor for the Edgar Allan Poe book in Harold Bloom’s BioCritiques series, and his poetry has appeared in Pennsylvania English, Sylvan Review, and Red Raven Review, the limited edition chapbook Don Guillermo’s Good Book and has been translated into Portuguese and published in the Brazilian journal Revisto Espaço Académico. In addition to writing poetry, Jeff is a founding editor of the literary journal 
A resident of Saint Paul, Minnesota, Chris has been an active part of the Twin Cities theatre scene for the last ten years. For many of those years he has been the Artistic Director of Commedia Beauregard, an independent professional theatre company that produces works that have been translated from other languages into English. Chris is a translator himself. He specializes in Spanish dramatic literature. Chris received an MFA from the University of New Orleans in Playwriting in 2007.
When Eva won Style Weekly's annual fiction contest in Richmond, Virginia, she decided to quit her job as a math teacher and focus on writing. Currently living in New Orleans and getting her MFA in Fiction Writing at UNO, she also works as an orthodontic assistant and SAT tutor. She is the guest editor of UNO's new online magazine, Compass, and does freelance writing for nileguide.com. Check out her writing website at 
Stephen Leonard earned his MFA in May 2010. His short stories have garnered awards from The Washington Post Magazine and descant.
Dawn Leslie Lenz is a 2008 Master of Fine Arts graduate of the Low Residency Creative Writing Program at the University of New Orleans, traveling to Brunnenburg in Italy and Madrid, Spain to study writing as well as many other destinations on her own. Her work has appeared in journals, books, online, and elsewhere, including The Rambler, Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on the Way We Look (Midmarch Arts Press 2004), and Springfield Magazine, among others. Currently, she is shopping around her novel, Winged Victory. She lives in San Francisco, California with her husband, Jason.
Paper Writing Awards in both fiction and poetry. He is a frequent panelist at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans each May and has served as a juror for the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. His work has been staged by the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Writing Aloud, and he currently co-coordinates the Spring Poets & Writers Festival at Community College of Philadelphia where he works as an Associate Professor of English and creative writing. 
Assistant Professor and Director of Studios Allan Moyé has taught communication courses at Mary Baldwin College for nine years, including video production classes, film studies, screenwriting, and broadcasting. He received his undergraduate degree from East Carolina University. He studied screenwriting at Georgetown University and UCLA, filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, and has had extensive training in audio production. He earned his MFA in Drama/Communications from the University of New Orleans, in which program he studied under filmmaker Miroslav Mandic in Prague, Czech Republic.
John is currently a mentor to doctoral students at Walden University where every dissertation must contribute to positive social change. His MFA in non-fiction writing added a valuable dimension to his professional writing that can now be enjoyed beyond his circle of family and friends. Look for him in the first issue of Compass, and for a new edition of his classic, The Living Organization: Transforming Teams Into Workplace Communities, an effort he believes will help people build psychologically healthy organizations.
G. M. Palmer is the editor of Strong Verse , a poetry magazine. His family has lived in Florida since before it was a state, and he continues this tradition by residing in Jacksonville. Apart from writing and editing poetry, Michael teaches, tutors, sings, cooks, and plays the blues. Michael and his wife Heather live in an old, wood-frame house with their daughters Cordelia and Josephine, four chickens (Morrison, Walker, Brooks, and Angelou), two bunnies (Hawthorne and Browning), and one dog (Millay).
Conrad Reeder
previously a columnist for Central Penn Business Journal, and has written op-eds and essays for numerous Pennsylvania newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has had short stories published in Philadelphia Stories, where is currently on the editorial board and board of directors, The Big Toe Review and Phase. His short story "Bando", was in the anthology The Best of Philadelphia Stories Volume 2. He currently writes for ipinion.me, and co-edits, along with fellow UNO alum Jesse Loren, Tatanacho Press (whose name was literally inspired from a street in San Miguel de Allende). He will be on the faculty of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute's 15th Annual Bankruptcy Institute. He is a member of the Lancaster Dramatists' Platform, a playwriting group, where a staged reading of his one-act play "Eruv" was staged in December 2009. He is currently working on a novel set in colonial Pennsylvania.
Lisa has worked in film production on over twenty feature films including, MUNICH, THE GOOD SHEPHERD, THE NOTEBOOK, and most recently, VALKYRIE starring Tom Cruise which filmed in Berlin, Germany. 
Friends and faculty had hoped that after a few years in the MFA program, Tawni might figure out what her last name is. She still hasn't. She is also unclear on other basic aspects of day to day life, such as where she lives and what she wants to be when she grows up. (She ain't no lover, but she ain't no dancer.) She thinks she will be a writer someday, though she likes the idea of being an actor too. In April, she got to come to San Miguel to perform the role of Kitty in Camino Real Production's "Kitty and Lena." She has published in Bridal Guide Magazine, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Albuquerque Journal, Albuquerque Arts Magazine, Albion Review, and Conceptions Southwest. Out of all the magnificence this world has to offer, she is still most astounded by the beauty of her children, who are both taller than her and have mostly forgiven her for condemning them to eighteen years of off-key show tunes and abysmal cooking.
Stan West received his MFA in Creative Writiing in May, 2007 from the University of New Orleans. His thesis was on American expatriate writers in Paris and Madrid. West holds a Masters in the Teaching of Writng from DePaul University. A former foreign correspondent for the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, West remains a working journalist, reporting for WNUA 95.5 FM Chicago, a Clear Channel Broadcast, Inc. radio station. A documenatarian who co-coordinates the Oak Park International Film Festival and the Columbia College Film Series on Poverty and Privilege, West has authored and co-authored several nonfiction books. He also teaches writing, television and first-year seminar at Columbia College Chicago.
Alexis Wiggins's work has appeared in 
Loss and Hope, which was her Literary Nonfiction thesis that she defended via phone conference a few days before her third child was born. She participated in the Low-Res programs in Prague, France, and Spain--the latter two with baby and patient husband in tow. Her book is nationally available from 
Jim Wyatt is an American writer living in Poland. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans in 2006, and his short fiction has appeared in a number of journals, including Cimarron Review, River Styx, News from the Republic of Letters and The Greensboro Review. He is the winner of The Greensboro Review’s 
Julian Zabalbeascoa is a 2007 graduate of the University of New Orleans’ Low-Residency MFA program. He is an adjunct professor at Merced College and about to embark on some trip somewhere. Where to? Who knows? During the composition of this bio he was planning a trip to the Middle East, but by the time you, the reader, scan over this he can easily be running from the law in Saigon, doubling over a toilet in Lima, tripping over his feet on a soccer field in Capetown, or at home trying to figure out the remote control to his TV. He is also the lead singer of the bands The Debbietaunts and Thank God for Jesus. Check out Julian's latest publication