Faculty

Carrie Brown is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. She has won many awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and, twice, the Library of Virginia Award. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, and The Oxford American, and she regularly reviews fiction for major newspapers including The Washington Post. She is the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, where she lives with her husband, the writer John Gregory Brown, and their three children, and she is also international programs coordinator for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In August 2012, she will begin as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Hollins University. Her new novel, The Material World, will be published by Pantheon in the spring of 2013.

Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994), The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996), and Audubon’s Watch (2001). His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the 1994 Lillian Smith Award, the 1996 Steinbeck Award, and the 2002 Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award. He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College and lives in Virginia. He and his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown, have three children.

John Casteen is the author of For the Mountain Laurel (2011) and Free Union (2009), part of the VQR Poetry Series from The University of Georgia Press. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry. He has contributed prose on gun policy, professional ethics, and environmental policy to Slate.com, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other magazines and newspapers. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he was self-employed for ten years as a designer and builder of custom furniture. Casteen teaches at Sweet Briar College, where he founded and directs the Sweet Briar Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference. He has also taught on Semester at Sea, at the University of Virginia, and as Visiting Artist Faculty in Residence at New York University. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia.

Sierra Bellows worked as a documentary filmmaker and independent producer in Toronto before she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. Bellows is associate editor at Virginia Magazine and teaches writing at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia. Her work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Brevity and The New York Times, among other publications.

Dave Lucas is the author of Weather, a book of poems. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia and a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. He has also received Hopwood Awards in poetry and nonfiction from the University of Michigan, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in English language and literature. He lives in Ann Arbor and Cleveland, where he was born and raised.

Dave Griffith teaches the personal essay, memoir, journalism, writing for new media, and writing about human rights and social justice issues. He is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull, 2006). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Utne Reader, Image, The Normal School and Killing the Buddha, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to IMAGE's "Good Letters" blog, and is director of Sweet Briar College's Bachelors of Fine Arts program in Interdisciplinary Arts, the minor in Journalism, New Media and Communications, and the Blue Ridge Summer Institute for Young Artists.

Leah Naomi Green teaches Writing and Environmental Studies at Washington and Lee University. She received her M.F.A. from the Poetry Workshop at The University of California, Irvine. Her poems have appeared In The Squaw Valley Review, Dirtcakes Literary Journal and Creature Music, among other publications. She is the recipient of the Dirtcakes Poetry Award for exploring diverse concepts of poverty, hunger, education, family, gender and work as suggested by the UN Millennium Development Goals to end extreme poverty by 2015; the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize, the Thomas Walters Award for Literary Excellence, the UC Regents Fellowship and the UC Humanities Center International Travel Grant.