Faculty & Staff
MFA Co-Directors
Bryce Berkowitz is a poet and screenwriter based in Indianapolis via Montana, West Virginia, L.A., Chicago, and southern Illinois. He dropped out of college at 19 to book touring hip hop acts until career shifts took him from restaurant worker to film/tv industry professional to professor.
Bryce has participated in Butler’s Inclusion Advocate program and served as program coordinator for Butler’s Visiting Writers’ Series. In addition to creating Butler’s screenwriting minor, he serves as Co-Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program and is the recipient of Butler University’s Outstanding Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship. His course topics range from Writing for Sustainability to Arts-Based Social Justice to the TV Writers’ Room to Brain Candy, and his professional development interests include working with students who have ADHD, as well as innovative and inclusive assignment design that reflect pragmatic applications to the work world. His current community engagement focus is prison writing workshops.
He thinks of the classroom as a practice field where students can figure out who they are and what matters to them, where perfection is an illusion that gets in the way of learning, where mistakes are not failures but are instead part of a greater learning process in the journey toward self-discovery.
As a screenwriter, Bryce is the recipient of the Austin Film Festival AMC TV Pilot Award, the writersXwriters fellowship, the Roadmap Writer’s Jumpstart Competition, and a two-time NBC TV Writers Program finalist. As a poet, his work has appeared twice in Best New Poets, and he’s the author of Bermuda Ferris Wheel, recipient of the 42 Miles | Indiana University Press Poetry Award. Currently, he’s working on a second poetry collection, a crime novel, and multiple feature-length screenplays.
When not teaching, Bryce enjoys watching movies at Kan-Kan, picking up produce from Mad Farmers Collective, attending First Friday art shows, growing his two side hustle businesses (power tools x investment properties), walking his dog Millie (she’s an Australian Cattle Dog + Australian Shephard mix), and supporting Indy’s many great lit hubs, including Dear Mom, Tomorrow, Loudmouth, Golden Hour, Whispering Shelf, and Indy Reads.
At the time of this writing, his two favorite restaurants in Indianapolis are Bluebeard and Julietta’s Tacos .
Find out more about him at bryceberkowitz.com
Author of a couple of novels, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson and Do Not Go On. Co-author (with Sarah Layden) of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. Editor of a few anthologies, My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Reanimated and An Indiana Christmas. Co-editor (with Michael Martone) of the anthology, Winesburg, Indiana. Stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere, including New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Wishes he was a hawk, believes that breakfast burritos are the perfect food.
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Faculty
Bryce Berkowitz is a poet and screenwriter based in Indianapolis via Montana, West Virginia, L.A., Chicago, and southern Illinois. He dropped out of college at 19 to book touring hip hop acts until career shifts took him from restaurant worker to film/tv industry professional to professor.
Bryce has participated in Butler’s Inclusion Advocate program and served as program coordinator for Butler’s Visiting Writers’ Series. In addition to creating Butler’s screenwriting minor, he serves as Co-Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program and is the recipient of Butler University’s Outstanding Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship. His course topics range from Writing for Sustainability to Arts-Based Social Justice to the TV Writers’ Room to Brain Candy, and his professional development interests include working with students who have ADHD, as well as innovative and inclusive assignment design that reflect pragmatic applications to the work world. His current community engagement focus is prison writing workshops.
He thinks of the classroom as a practice field where students can figure out who they are and what matters to them, where perfection is an illusion that gets in the way of learning, where mistakes are not failures but are instead part of a greater learning process in the journey toward self-discovery.
As a screenwriter, Bryce is the recipient of the Austin Film Festival AMC TV Pilot Award, the writersXwriters fellowship, the Roadmap Writer’s Jumpstart Competition, and a two-time NBC TV Writers Program finalist. As a poet, his work has appeared twice in Best New Poets, and he’s the author of Bermuda Ferris Wheel, recipient of the 42 Miles | Indiana University Press Poetry Award. Currently, he’s working on a second poetry collection, a crime novel, and multiple feature-length screenplays.
When not teaching, Bryce enjoys watching movies at Kan-Kan, picking up produce from Mad Farmers Collective, attending First Friday art shows, growing his two side hustle businesses (power tools x investment properties), walking his dog Millie (she’s an Australian Cattle Dog + Australian Shephard mix), and supporting Indy’s many great lit hubs, including Dear Mom, Tomorrow, Loudmouth, Golden Hour, Whispering Shelf, and Indy Reads.
At the time of this writing, his two favorite restaurants in Indianapolis are Bluebeard and Julietta’s Tacos .
Find out more about him at bryceberkowitz.com
Professional Bio
Michael Dahlie teaches in Butler University’s English Department and MFA program. He’s the author of two novels with W.W. Norton and his short fiction has been published in journals and magazines including Harper’s, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He’s received the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Award, and he was a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2020.
Teaching Goals
“My role as a creative writing teacher is to help students say the things they want to say, write about the subjects they think are important, and to do it in a way they value. I assign a wide variety of published work, and my courses emphasize the fact that first-rate narrative comes from a diverse set of sources and in a broad range of forms. Most important, I work hard to ensure my classes give students a sense of belonging, camaraderie, and a feeling of common purpose, all while making sure each person has resources and encouragement to develop and refine their own unique literary vision.”
Chris Forhan is the author of four books of poetry: Black Leapt In; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars; Forgive Us Our Happiness; and the forthcoming The Ghost Won’t Go. He has also written two books of nonfiction: My Father Before Me: A Memoir and A Mind Full of Music: Essays on Imagination and Popular Song. He has published three chapbooks, Ransack and Dance, x, and Crumbs of Bread, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, Georgia Review, Field, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes and has earned a “Discover Great New Writers” selection from Barnes and Noble. He was born and raised in Seattle and has taught at Butler since 2007. More at http://www.chrisforhan.com.
Teaching Goals:
“My courses emphasize that writing is not merely about communicating clearly what you think. It is about discovering what you think, then questioning it, complicating it, and discovering in it a truth worth communicating, even if that truth is beautifully messy and ambiguous. That’s okay: life is beautifully messy and ambiguous. This focus on the process of writing and thinking informs the way I teach almost everything, from courses in the Core Curriculum to classes in creative writing. In my poetry courses, we consider how poems enchant, delight, and unsettle us by being intensely attentive to all the characteristics of language, including its sounds, rhythms, and capacity to enact wild, associative leaps. When students pay attention to these things in their own experiments with words, they have the means to discover what lurks in the shadowy corners of their interior and to let it sing.”
Author of a couple of novels, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson and Do Not Go On. Co-author (with Sarah Layden) of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. Editor of a few anthologies, My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Reanimated and An Indiana Christmas. Co-editor (with Michael Martone) of the anthology, Winesburg, Indiana. Stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere, including New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Wishes he was a hawk, believes that breakfast burritos are the perfect food.
Author, Huck Finn’s America (2014), A Brain Wider Than The Sky (2009), The First Emancipator (2005), The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1992), and co-editor of Creating Fiction (1994) and Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1997). Essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, American Scholar, Missouri Review, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Winner of Slatten award for Biography (2005), reviews of work and public appearances include Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered and This American Life, Spin, Sports Illustrated, C-Span, Salon, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and other places. Teaches US literature and culture, speculative fiction and creative writing.
Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer, raised in Las Vegas, NV and Hialeah, FL. She is a first-generation college graduate of Northwestern University and a graduate of the MFA program in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica, Longreads, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Lima’s writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions, The Offing 10-Year Anniversary Anthology, and noted twice in Best American Essays. Her work has received support from PEN America Emerging Voices, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshops, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hedgebrook Writers’ Residency.
Teaching Goals:
As the first in my family to graduate from high school, the world opened up to me in college. I prioritize introducing students to diverse voices, particularly writers from underrepresented communities. I believe that bringing in contemporary work from established and emerging writers, from all backgrounds, better reflects the world we live in today—and celebrates it, too. Having once been a new writer myself, I want to guide my students as they find their own voice without being discouraged or feeling isolated from the literary establishment.
Alessandra Lynch, Senior Lecturer/Poet-in-Residence at Butler University, is the author
of four collections of poems, Sails the Wind Left Behind (Alice James Books), It was a
terrible cloud at twilight (LSU Press, winner of the Lena Miles-Wever Todd Award),
Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize and the LA
Times Poetry Book Prize, winner of the 2017 Balcones Prize in Poetry, one of The New
York Times’ ten Best Poetry Books of 2017) and Pretty Tripwire (Alice James Books).
Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The New England Review, The
Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and other literary journals. In 2015, Alessandra received
a Creative Renewal Fellowship, from the Indianapolis Council for the Arts. She was
also one of the three poets involved in the Stream / Lines: Reconnecting to Our
Waterways project, funded by the National Science Foundation. Alessandra has received
fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, and Yaddo.
Robert Stapleton is a proud product of California public schools. He earned his MFA from Long Beach State and has taught at Butler since 2003. He teaches in the MFA program as well as courses in creative writing, graphic novels, and the First-Year Seminar. He is the founder and editor of Booth, and his writing has appeared in various publications.
Teaching Goals: I am a first-generation college student from a working-class family. As a student, I learned to love being in the classroom from teachers who invited thinking and writing on non-traditional subjects in innovative ways. A a teacher, I work to frame my courses with contemporary texts that offer a wide spectrum of voices and class representations while centering student expression in discussions and activities. My classes offer many opportunities for students seeking to integrate their own passions into creative exercises and assignments.
Visiting Faculty
Lili Wright worked as a newspaper reporter for ten years before earning her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. She is author of the travel memoir, Learning to Float (Broadway, 2002.) Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Down East, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, Cream City Review, and many other literary journals. Her work was noted for distinction in Best American Essays 2010 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. Her first novel, Dancing with the Tiger, a literary thriller set in Mexico, will be published by Putnam Penguin in July.
Faculty Emeriti
Hilene Flanzbaum is a Professor of English and the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. She also holds the Allegra Stewart Chair in Modern Literature. Her specialties include Modern and American Poetry, Jewish-American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature and creative writing. See attached cv for details.
Susan Neville is the author of six works of creative nonfiction: Indiana Winter; Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Twilight in Arcadia; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; Light, and Sailing the Inland Sea. Her collections of short fiction include The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction; In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan prize; and Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and in anthologies including Extreme Fiction (Longman) and The Story Behind the Story (Norton.) Her story "Here" won the 2015 McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review, and recent stories and essays have appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, Image, North American Review, The Collagist, The Missouri Review, Diagram, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing, a seminar in Willa Cather, and courses in Butler’s First Year Seminar program.