Faculty & Staff
Our Department Chair
Prudence Arceneaux
Poetry, Prose, Forms of Literature, Fiction
MFA in English & Creative Writing
Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Academy of American Poets’ Poem- A- Day, Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry– DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY.
Lindsey Lane
Children’s Literature
MFA in Writing for Children and YA
Lindsey Lane’s love for story and writing began when she read BLACK BEAUTY. Over and over and over. Even at a young age, she felt like that story told the truth about how love and cruelty live side by side in the human heart. It is that kind of truth-telling she aspires to write on every page, whether it is a play, an article, a book or a poem. Lindsey graduated from Hampshire College with a B.A. in Theatre Arts-Playwriting and Vermont College of Fine Arts with an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She has written numerous plays, like the award winning The Miracle of Washing Dishes; worked as a Features journalist at the Austin Chronicle and the Austin American Statesman, interviewing death row inmates, cops, prostitutes, and wayward millionaires. Clarion Books published her picture book SNUGGLE MOUNTAIN, named Best Children’s Book by Bank Street College of Education in 2003. In 2010, PicPocket Books also published SNUGGLE MOUNTAIN as an iTunes app. In 2014 her young adult novel THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN was published by Farrar Straus Giroux/MacMillan Books. She is currently an adjunct professor at Austin Community College’s Arts and Digital Media Department, and teaches workshops all over the world. She is also a volunteer in women’s prisons since 2016
Luke Garza
Screenwriting
MFA in Screenwriting
Luke Garza is a screenwriter and producer. As a story analyst for HBO Films, Ratpac-Dune Entertainment, and Phoenix Pictures, he evaluated projects for potential development into feature films, TV movies and series, and critiqued the works of David Mamet, Elmore Leonard, Ron Bass, and J.J. Abrams. He also co-produced three independent features: the horror film Vampire Winter, the documentary Andy Paris: Bubblegum King, and the sci-fi anthology Xenophobia. His favorite film is The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin and written by William Peter Blatty
A. R. Rogers
Poetry, Forms of Literature
MFA in Creative Writing, B.A. in English
A.R. Rogers is a poet, first-generation student, and former ACC student. She’s taught freshman composition at Austin Community College and Texas State University, where she also worked as a Writing Center tutor. A.R. currently teaches with ACC’s Ascender program and Free Minds, a Clemente Course in the Humanities. In addition to teaching new academic writers, she’s taught creative writing with Logos Poetry Collective, Badgerdog Creative Writing Camps, and Upward Bound. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and a BA in English from Texas State, and an AA in Creative Writing from Austin Community College. A.R. treasures the work of Emily Dickinson, Ellen Bass, Chen Chen, and Ada Limón. She has been published in Juke Joint, Permafrost, North Dakota Quarterly, and was shortlisted for the River Heron Review Poetry Prize, in 2020.
Robert Crowl
Fiction
Robert Crowl teaches composition, literary studies, and creative writing at ACC. He grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, but he currently lives in Austin with his wife and twins. He is a published writer, and his influences range from Toni Morrison to Mary Oliver, from Anthony Doerr to Alysia Nicole Harris. He’s particularly interested in literature and the humanities as agents of change and social healing.
Eli Ryder
Eli Ryder’s horror and sci-fi has appeared in numerous online, in-print, and audio publications, and his plays have appeared on stage in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He teaches full time for ACC and has appeared as a panelist and podcast guest for several venues discussing both the craft of writing and the thrill of dark fiction. He is a Roswell Award honoree and stole his M.F.A. from U.C. Riverside. He plays D&D, has the best kid ever, and is an avid lover of all things spooky.
Ysella Fulton Slavin
Ysella Fulton Slavin, a novelist and poet, grew up in the Mesilla Valley and Southern NewMexico and El Paso, Texas. For undergraduate she attended Cardinal Newman College and the University of Notre Dame and received a M.F.A. from American University. When she studied and wrote in Washington, D.C. she also worked at the White House and at Pen/FaulknerFoundation when it used to be at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She and her husband, Eric (from the Santa Fe Guitar Quartet) lived for many years in Argentina where she first taught. In Argentina, she translated into English the short story collection Voices from the Pampas. For over 20 years she taught at El Paso Community College and was faculty advisor for their award winning literary magazine Chrysalis and founder and director of EPCC’s Community Literary Center: PaPaGaYo. For the last 5 years she has been teaching at ACC in the Composition and Literary Studies Department and is Outreach Coordinator for Liberal Arts: Humanities and Communications. Her writing includes the novel Pomegranate (Stanley Press) and poetry published in numerous literary journals including Folio, The Juggler, American Literary, and BorderSenses.
Arun John
Fiction
MFA in Creative Writing
Arun John is a published writer and has an MFA in creative writing from New York University. Since 2007, Arun has been a faculty member in the Composition and Literary Studies Department at Austin Community College. Currently, he is the chair of the Liberal Arts Gateway Program at ACC, where he supervises course redesigns and the program’s administration across various departments at the college. Before joining ACC, Arun taught creative writing at NYU and was a writing instructor at the City University of New York System. Arun continues to reread and marvel at the writing of Etgar Keret, Han Kang, Sylvia Plath, and Albert Camus, among others.
Adeena Reitberger
Flash, Forms of Literature
MFA in Fiction
Adeena Reitberger received her MFA in Fiction from Western Michigan University. Her stories and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Mississippi Review, Cimarron Review, Nimrod International, Third Coast, Sierra Nevada Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and other magazines, and her work has been recognized in the Best American Series. She is the coeditor and director of American Short Fiction. A few of her favorite writers are Amy Hempel, Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Joy Williams, and Yoko Tawada.
Vivé Griffith
Poetry, Fiction
M.F.A. Poetry and Fiction, Austin Michener Fellow MA English
Vivé Griffith is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared inThe Sun, Oxford American, River Teeth, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in Free Minds, an ACC partnership that brings free college humanities classes to adults who have faced barriers to the classroom, and is Director of Outreach and Engagement for the national Clemente Course in the Humanities. An advocate for nontraditional students in higher education, she has published op-eds in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dallas Morning News
Katie McClendon
Katie McClendon grew up on the West Coast, adventured into the Midwest, and settledherself down right here in the South. She received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing fromPurdue University and teaches in the Humanities and English department at ACC. Herfiction has appeared in Cutbank Literary Magazine, Emerge Literary, Juked, andSmokelong Quarterly. Her poems have been published in Crab Fat Magazine, MareNostrum, and Portland Review, among others. She believes great writing will changeboth the writer and the reader, and that words have the power to make extraordinary things happen.
Joe O’Connell
Fiction, Nonfiction, Memoir
MFA in Creative Writing
Joe O’Connell teaches fiction and memoir at ACC. He’s an award-winning short story writer, the author of the novel-in-stories, Evacuation, and the director of the documentary films Danger God and Rondo and Bob. His favorite collection is There’s Something I Want You to Do: Stories by Charles Baxter.
Tessa Livingstone
Tessa Livingstone is a poet and professor in Austin, TX. She enjoys engaging the transformative and macabre in her poems, which have appeared in Willow Springs, Northwest Review, Salt Hill, Juked, Five:2:One, Whiskey Island, Water~Stone Review, Heavy Feather, South Dakota Review, and Portland Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Portland State University.