Faculty & Staff

English

Joe Wilkins, M.F.A.
Director of Creative Writing and Assistant Professor of English
Phone: 641-585-8206
Fax: 641-585-8194
Email: wilkinsj@waldorf.edu

Education:

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing - the University of Idaho

Bachelor of Science in Engineering (honors) - Gonzaga University

Biography:

Joe Wilkins was born and raised north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana. He lives now with his wife and son on the north Iowa prairie, and his poems, essays, and stories appear in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sun, Orion, and Slate.

His work has won numerous awards and honors, including multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, appearances in Best New Poets 2006 and 2009, notable mention in Best American Essays, the Obsidian Prize for Nonfiction Writing about the American West, the 2008 Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers, and Memoir (and)’s Grand Prize for Memoir. A National magazine Award finalist, he was recently awarded the Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center, which goes to “a promising new journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice.”

His first collection of poems, Ragged Point Road, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing, and his second book, Killing the Murnion Dogs, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011.

Academic Experience:
•English Instructor, English Department, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho
•Literature Teacher, TRIO Regional Center for Math and Science, Moscow, Idaho
•Corps Member Advisor, Teach For America, Houston, Texas
•Writing Tutor, University of Idaho Writing Center, Moscow, Idaho
•Pre-Algebra Teacher, Teach For America Corps Member, Cassie Pennington Junior High School, Title I, Indianola, Mississippi

Publications:
Books
•The Mountain and the Fathers. Berkeley: Counterpoint (forthcoming in 2012).
•Killing the Murnion Dogs. New York: Black Lawrence Press, 2011.

Chapbooks
•Ragged Point Road. Charlotte: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2006.

Additional Information:
Teaching Philosophy
I think of my classrooms as conversations, conversations that are rigorous, honest, and compassionate. With each course, my students and I have the unique opportunity of engaging with one another, and the writers and thinkers who have come before us, in the ongoing conversation concerning, say, modern and contemporary American literature or the writing of poetry. Through these conversations, we move toward a deeper, fuller understanding of the subject at hand; we further develop our skills as readers, thinkers, and writers; and we come to know more about ourselves as human beings, and how we might then move through our world more humanely.