MFA Faculty and Staff

Mitch Wieland is the author of the novels Willy Slater’s Lane and God’s Dogs. Willy Slater’s Lane received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, and was optioned for a film. Named Idaho Book of the Year, God’s Dogs was featured in the annual Best of the West prize anthology, and was a top finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Award. Wieland’s short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, among other publications. Wieland is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and two Literature Fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. He is currently finishing a novel set in Japan in the aftermath of Fukushima.

A co-founder of the MFA program at Boise State University, Wieland was its director for ten years. Currently in his twenty-fifth year at Boise State, he serves as the founding editor of the award-winning Idaho Review, and teaches MFA and BFA classes in fiction writing and publishing/editing.

Sara Nicholson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently “April” (The Song Cave, 2023). Her other works include “What the Lyric Is” and “The Living Method,” both from The Song Cave. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Harper’s, Poetry, the New York Times, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was the Holloway Poet-in-Residence at the University of California, Berkeley. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas.

Anna Caritj is the author of Leda and the Swan (Riverhead, 2021). She holds a BA from the University of Virginia, where she studied English and Spanish literature, and an MFA from Hollins University. She was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where much of her work takes place, though she has lived, most recently, in Florida, California, New Mexico, and Texas. She is currently at work on a second novel.

Taryn Birdsall is the author of The Anatomist (YesYes Books, 2015). She received a PhD from the University of Denver and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant and has lived and taught in Cambodia and Iraq.

Martin Corless-Smith was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. His degrees include a BA and an MFA in painting and printmaking, an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah. His seventh collection of poetry, The Fool & The Bee was a best-seller at SPD. Odious Horizons: Some versions of Horace came out in September 2019.  A collection of essays, The Poet’s Tomb is forthcoming 2020 from Parlor Press. He edits the Free Poetry chapbook series.

Clyde Moneyhun received an MFA and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.  He translates from French, Italian, and Spanish, but primarily from Catalan, with an emphasis on contemporary Catalan poetry.  His books include El salobre/Salt by Ponç Pons (2017, Haikús del camioner/Truck Driver Haikus by Dolors Miquel (2019; nominated for the Warwick Women in Translation Award), El volcá/The Volcano by Anna Dodas (2022), and Bruixa de dol/Witch in Mourning by Maria-Mercé Marçal (2023).  He has received grants from the Alexa Rose Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Institute, the Institut d’Estudis Baleárics, and the Catalan Delegation to the United Kingdom.  He teaches workshops in creative nonfiction, travel writing, and literary translation at Boise State and the Universitat d’Alacant (Spain).