Cyrus Mulready, Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Co-Editor of The Shawangunk Review since 2016. He is the author of the forthcoming book Object Studies: Introductions to Material Culture (Palgrave) and Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion before and after Shakespeare (Palgrave 2013), as well as several articles on Shakespeare, book history, and pedagogy. 

(MA, English 2003, SUNY New Paltz) is a writing instructor and the Staff Assistant for the Writing & Rhetoric Program at SUNY New Paltz. Her poems appear in Chronogram, The Shawangunk Review, Awosting Alchemy, as well as A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press), Typishly, Stone Poetry Journal, the Calling All Poets Twentieth Anniversary Anthology (CAPS Press) and others. She is the poetry co-editor of WaterWrites (Codhill Press). Her essay on teaching Understanding Poetry appears in Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press) and Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan). Ask her about cats, true crime, or confessionalism. 

Kristopher Jansma is the author of Why We Came to the City and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He has written for the New York Times, Chicago Quarterly Review, ZYZZVA, The Believer, and Prairie Schooner. His work has been noted as Distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016 and The Best American Essays 2014. He is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz.

Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines such as The Yale Review, Mantis, Eco Theo Review; The Caribbean Writer, The Minetta Review, Artemis Magazine, and many others.  Jerrice has been the featured poet at the Woodstock Poetry Society, and at the International Women’s Writing Guild.  She has been facilitating poetry workshops for fifteen years.

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Katie Cavallucci is a graduate student in Creative Writing. When she isn’t writing poetry, you might find her hiking, playing piano, or hunched over her latest crochet project.

Bri Castagnozzi graduated from SUNY New Paltz’s 4+1 English program in the fall of 2021 with an MA in English. As a TA, she taught composition and rhetoric courses to first-year students. Her interests include ethnic writing, animal theory, pedagogy of composition, and visual storytelling. She has published four works with Stonesthrow Review and two with the Shawangunk Review.

Susan Chute is a poet, librarian, archivist, sometimes bookbinder, and curator/founder of Next Year’s Words: a New Paltz Readers Forum, now in its 8th year. She has been published in the CAPS (Calling All Poets) 2020 anthology; in La Presa, Lightwood, and the Wallkill Valley Writer’s Anthology 2015; and in Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018); and on the blogs of The New York Public Library and Women’s Studio Workshop. She holds an MFA in Theatre from the Univ. of Michigan, and an MLIS from Pratt Institute.

Charles Cullen will be graduating from SUNY New Paltz’s MAT program in May 2022. A Hudson Valley native with a global perspective, Charles is especially interested in historical and World Literature; his favorite authors include Franz Kafka and William Shakespeare. His goal is to be an ELA teacher at a secondary school in New York State by the end of the year.

This is Dennis Doherty’s 35th? year of teaching at SUNY New Paltz (including as a TA). He is the former Director of the Creative Writing Program and has published 4 volumes of Poetry: The Bad Man, Fugitive, Crush Test, and Black Irish, as well as a book length meditation on the Twain novel: Why Read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Recent  publications include the poem “Evolution” in Larry Carr’s new and excellent online journal Lightwood. His novel, Subic, arrived in 2022. Harry Stoneback’s review is posted on the publisher’s online page (Mad Duck Coalition). He is the Interim Creative Writing Director this semester.

Thomas Festa is Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and the author of a forthcoming chapbook of poems, Earthen (Finishing Line Press), as well as a monograph on John Milton’s poetry, The End of Learning (Routledge, 2006; paperback:  2014). He has served as co-editor of four anthologies, most recently Locating Milton (Clemson and Liverpool UP, 2021). Other recent and forthcoming work includes an ecopoetic reading of W.S. Merwin’s late poetry (in ISLE:  Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.1) and poems in Bennington Review, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Poetry Quarterly, and Stone Poetry Journal. 

Sophia Field graduated with her BA in English and Creative Writing from SUNY New Paltz in 2020. She is a current MA student in Literature and a Graduate Teaching Assistant, expecting to complete her degree in the spring of 2022. Her research interests include women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, composition, writing pedagogy, and contemporary literature and theory. Sophia is currently working on her master’s thesis in English, which examines contemporary transgender literature, domestic spaces, and temporality. Her creative work has been featured in Stonesthrow Review, RiPPLE, Queeries, and Writers’ Kingston.

Mike Jurkovic’s latest full length collections include mooncussers (Luchador Press 2021) and AmericanMental (Luchador Press 2019). He’s the president of Calling All Poets, now in its 23rd year, a reading series that moves throughout the Hudson Valley. His music reviews are at All About Jazz and Lightwood. He hosts New Jazz Excursions, a radio show on alternating Saturdays from 10am-12pm on WIOX 91.3FM, Roxbury, NY and streaming live at wioxradio.org.

He loves Emily most of all.

Daniel Kempton, emeritus faculty, is former English Graduate Director and Co-editor of the Shawangunk Review.

Demetri Kissel will be graduating from SUNY New Paltz’s Creative Writing MA program in December 2022. When he isn’t yelling about Kafka’s works, he is also interested in horror, science fiction, and superheroes. Demetri somehow splits his time between teaching at New Paltz, and playing Dungeons and Dragons twice a week.

Shannon Moran recently graduated from SUNY New Paltz’s BA/MA program in 2021. Her literary interests include queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and environmental theory. Following her time at SUNY New Paltz, Shannon will be attending the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University to pursue a career in Family Law and LGBTQ+ Advocacy.

Dylan Perles will be graduating from SUNY New Paltz’s English MA program in May 2023. She is a scholar of British literature with an emphasis on Shakespeare and the 19th century. Her interests include Jane Austen, Shakespeare, feminist criticism, Victorian literature, the domestic sphere, the marriage plot, and the Victorian Flower Language. Dylan is also the Graduate Assistant for the English Department.

Emma Philippas is in her final semester of graduate studies at SUNY New Paltz, graduating with an MA in English, with a primary focus in Creative Writing, in May. She is a writer of prose, poetry, and the occasional song.

Guy Reed is the author of Second Innocence (Luchador Press), The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press), and co-author, with Cheryl A. Rice, of Until The Words Came (Post Traumatic Press). A Minnesota native, Guy has lived in the Catskill Mountains for the past twenty-five years.

Moshe Siegel graduated from SUNY New Paltz’s Master of Arts in English, Creative Writing Specialization in December of 2021. His current research involves mycology, fairy-folklore, and abandoned parking lots.

Nicole Short will graduate with her Masters in English Literature from SUNY New Paltz in 2022. She has taught Composition and Writing and Rhetoric classes at SUNY New Paltz, applying her background in media analysis and journalism to her course designs. Her research interests include materiality, embodied cognition, and phenomenology.

Lizzy Sobiesk is finishing up her first year of SUNY New Paltz’s English MA program. Her interests include feminist literature, queer studies, speculative fiction, poetry, and so much more! 

Jason Taylor is a communications professional in the Hudson Valley. He completed coursework in New Paltz’s English MA Program in the 1990s and provided typesetting and production supervision for Shawangunk Review from 1998-2017.