Artists in Residence

Fall 2006: Colleen Abel

Colleen Abel was born and raised in the Chicagoland area, and she studied creative writing at universities in the United States and abroad. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has received awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the KHN Center for the Arts, and the Poetry Center of Chicago. Her work has appeared in journals including Heliotrope, Rockhurst Review, Briar Cliff Review, Agenda (U.K.), Bellevue Literary Review, and Branches Quarterly, and is forthcoming in the anthology The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.

Ms. Abel is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and her first book of poems, Woman with Drawers, was named a finalist for both the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Four Way Books Intro Prize.

Spring 2006: Constance Squires

Constance Squires earned her Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University in 2005, where she taught creative writing, literature, and composition. She also served as editor of the international literary magazine the Cimarron Review from 2003 to 2005 and co-edited the first and second editions of Speculations: An Anthology for Reading, Writing and Research (Kendall Hunt Publishing). Her major areas of study are fiction writing and the modern period, with an emphasis on narrative theory, postcolonialism, and British novels of empire.

Short stories from Dr. Squires's dissertation, American Thighs and Other Stories: A Collection of Short Stories with a Critical Introduction have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Gingko Tree Review, Bayou, The Briar Cliff Review, The Arkansas Review, Eclectica, and the Chiron Review, and have been nominated for Best New American Voices 2005, the O. Henry Prize Series 2003, and twice for the Pushcart Prize (2003, 2005). Other stories in the collection were awarded the Bob Shacochis Award for the Short Story (2004), The Briar Cliff Review 2004 Fiction Award, Honorable Mention in the Atlantic Monthly 2003 Fiction Contest, third place in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly fiction contest, and Honorable Mention from the AWP's Intro Journals Project and have been named among storySouth's Million Writer's Award Notable Stories of 2005. A novel, Contact High, was a finalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship in 2004. Dr. Squires's article, "‘A Just and Loving Gaze': Iris Murdoch's Theory of the Novel,” appears in the Fall 2005 issue (vol 3) of the Philological Review; she won the 2005 Leonard J. Leff Film Studies Award at Oklahoma State University for the essay "'Is it Late or Early?': Time and Narrative in Nicholas Roeg's Insignificance."

She is a native Oklahoman and lives in Edmond with her husband, professor and novelist Dr. Steve Garrison.

Fall 2005: Nathan Brown

Nathan Brown received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2005 in the fields of English and Journalism. He received a Bachelor's in Linguistics and Master's in Creative Writing from the same university.

Interspersed with his academic career, Nathan also worked as a professional musician and songwriter for years. He lived in Nashville for a while, working in the studio and touring with artists like Tom Wopat (the "dark-haired" Duke of Hazzard), Michael Johnson, Cynthia Clawson, and the fabulous guitarist/songwriter Billy Crockett, from Dallas, Texas.

Dr. Brown's first book of poetry, Hobson's Choice, was published by Greystone Press. He has published articles and individual poems in Christian Ethics Today, Oklahoma Gazette, The Oklahoma Observer, Baptists Today, WLT2 – a student publication of World Literature Today, and Windmill. He also currently writes the poetry reviews for the Special Features page of The Sunday Oklahoman.