Creative Writing

Faculty

Sara Jaffe

Sara Jaffe

Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, 2014-2015, 2018-2020, 2023-
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Sara Jaffe has been a returning visiting faculty member at Reed since 2014. In her fiction, nonfiction, and multi-genre workshops, students come together as peer artists, supporting each other in the practice of writing. Grounded in a commitment to anti-racism and inclusion, these workshops give students the tools to develop their voices not only on the page but in order to situate themselves as writers in relation to others, their communities, and the world at large. Sara teaches introductory workshops as well as special topics workshops focused on queer writing, writing the contemporary moment, and practices around being a working writer in the world. In her own work, Sara mines small moments of becoming and unbecoming around gender, queerness, friendship, "coming of age," and parenthood, and also frequently draws on her experience as a musician to explore questions of performance and cultural production. Sara Jaffe is the author of Dryland (Tin House Books). Her short fiction has been published in JoylandFenceBOMBCatapultThe Offing, and elsewhere. Her essays and criticism about literature and music have recently appeared in Hanif Abdurraqib's 68 to 05 project and in Third Man Records' Maggot Brain. Sara is currently working on Hurricane Envy, a collection of short stories, and I'm My Own Grandpa, a novel.

 

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Joan Naviyuk Kane

Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing, 2023-
Email (coming soon) | Website

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Prior to her 2023 chapbook Ex Machina, Kane’s most recent book, Dark Traffic, was a finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Award. Her other poetry and essay collections include The Cormorant Hunter’s WifeHyperborealThe StraitsMilk Black CarbonSublingualA Few Lines in the Manifest and Another Bright Departure. A graduate of Harvard College, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Recognitions for her work include a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, the American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hilles Bush Fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and a 2020 Mellon Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown UniversityKane is an editor, writer, and collaborator for the Finland-based Mediated Arctic Geographies projects, primarily Indigenous Geographies: Circumpolar Connections, an anthology of Arctic Indigenous Art and Cultural Criticism. Her essays, poems, and short stories have been published widely, appearing or forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing MotherhoodThe Hopkins ReviewYale ReviewAll We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate CrisisMore Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive, Shapes of Native NonfictionOrionPoetry, TerritorySolastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing WorldThe Norton Reader, and elsewhere. A nonfiction book, Passing Through Danger, is forthcoming in 2024. She has recently taught literature, creative nonfiction and poetry at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), Harvard University, Tufts University, and in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico since helping found the program in 2013. She has also served as a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, teaching courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism. 

 

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Peter Rock

Professor of Creative Writing, 2001-
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On sabbatical 2023-24

Peter Rock joined the Reed College faculty in 2001. He teaches the writing of prose, both fiction and non-fiction, with special interest in the intersection between the two, economical forms, the fantastic and invisible, animals, ghosts and linkages of every kind. His favorite book is most likely Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Or Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel, Passersthrough, involves a murder house, a fax machine, communications between the living and the dead, and a mountain lake that moves from place to place. He is also the author of the novels The Night Swimmers, SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The AmbidextristCarnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Alex Award, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Leave No Trace, the film adaptation of My Abandonment, directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released to critical acclaim in 2018.