A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan’s classes focus not only on Creative Writing but also on the ways in which engaging with film and using historical research can influence the writing. Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). He has taught at a number of institutions including University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University of Texas at Austin, where he was tenured as an Associate Professor, Rutgers University-Newark where he served as the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor, and at University of Michigan, where he served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature, and as Director of the Helen Zell Writers MFA Program.