Creative Writing faculty
Elizabeth Cox jointly holds the John C. Cobb Endowed Chair in the Humanities with her husband, Atlantic Monthly senior editor C. Michael Curtis. Cox is an award-winning poet, short story writer, essayist and novelist. Her fourth novel, The Slow Moon, was released by Random House in August 2006. Curtis, himself a published essayist and poet, edits virtually all Atlantic fiction, letters to the editor and other pieces. Both are renowned for their teaching – Curtis has taught creative writing, ethics, grammar and other subjects for more than 30 years at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington and elsewhere; Cox has taught short story and novel writing at Bennington and MIT, and also has taught at Duke, Tufts, Boston University, Michigan and elsewhere.
John Lane, prolific poet, essayist, playwright, and fiction writer, has taught creative writing, literature and film at Wofford since 1988. He is also the editor of Holocene Publishing and co-founder of the Hub City Writers Project, two of the South’s most respected independent publishing endeavors. A Wofford alumnus with an MFA in poetry from Bennington College, Lane was the recipient of the Henry Hoyns Fellowship at the University of Virginia, an NEA Apprenticeship grant at Copper Canyon Press, and the South Carolina Fellow in Poetry in 1984. In 1995 his book of poems, Against Information & Other Poems, was widely reviewed and prompted an appearance on Canadian and National Public Radio and a front page review in Small Press Review. In 2000 he was awarded the Phillip H. Reed Memorial Award for Writing on the Southern Environment from the Southern Environmental Law Center. Lane is the editor, with Gerald Thurmond, of The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Southern Nature Writing from the University of Georgia Press, which also published his collection of personal essays, Waist Deep in Black Water (2002) and, in spring 2004, published his book-length personal narrative Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River.
Deno Trakas is professor of English and chair of the English department at Wofford. He has published fiction and poetry in magazines such as The Denver Quarterly and The Oxford American and two chapbooks, The Shuffle of Wings and Human & Puny. Three of his stories appeared in New Southern Harmonies (with stories of Rosa Shand, George Singleton and Scott Gould), which won the Independent Publishers’ Award for Best Fiction Collection. His novel After Paris was a finalist for the James Jones Award for a First Novel, and his play “The Old Man and the Tree” won the Harvey Jeffreys Original One-Act Play Contest at Lander University. He has also won several South Carolina Fiction Project Prizes and an individual artist fellowship in fiction from the South Carolina Arts Commission.