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 has taught at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX, since 1998. Prudence Arceneaux earned a Bachelor of Art in English & Creative Writing and Communications (University of New Mexico) and a Master of Fine Arts in English and Creative Writing (Southwest Texas State). A poet, she returns again and again to the works of Naomi Shihab Nye, Raymond Carver, Sheryl St. Germain and Sandra Cisneros. She looks for inspiration in museums, street festivals, bars and random side streets.
Sidney Brammer
Fiction, Flash, Memoir
MFA in Creative Writing
Sidney Brammer is a published writer, playwright and screenwriter as well as an editor and journalist. She had a 20 year career in the film industry prior to joining the ACC faculty. She currently resides in NE Oklahoma and teaches online classes for ACC, and face-to-face English classes for Rogers State University, and memoir writing classes for Osher Lifelong Learning of Oklahoma State University. Her favorite works include Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. Bleak House, Charles Dickens. Plays of 20th Century American Realism, Judith Kitchen. The Overstory, Richard Powers.
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.
Lindsey Lane
Children’s Literature
MFA in Writing for Children and YA
Lindsey Lane is a mentor and teacher to many writers through private classes, the Writers League of Texas, Austin SCBWI, and as an adjunct professor of Children’s Literature at Austin Community College. She was a featured journalist at the Austin Chronicle and the Austin American Statesman where she interviewed death row inmates, cops and wayward millionaires. In addition to writing award-winning plays like The Miracle of Washing Dishes and Dogtails, she is the author of Snuggle Mountain and Evidence of Things Not Seen. Her favorite novel is Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
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.
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
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.
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.
Irwin Tang
Poetry, Fiction, Screenwriting
MFA Fiction and Screenwriting
Irwin A. Tang is the author or co-author of four books. How I Became a Black Man and Other Metamorphoses is his first book-length work of fiction. Irwin’s latest nonfiction book is When Invisible Children Sing, co-written with Dr. Chi Huang, MD. Irwin’s first nonfiction book was The Texas Aggie Bonfire: Tradition and Tragedy at Texas A&M. He is the editor and co-author of Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives. In2006, Irwin Tang earned his License of Professional Counseling-Intern license. He works as a counselor, community college creative writing teacher, and independent writer in Austin, Texas.
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.
Robert Crowl
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.