RopeWalk Writers Retreat

RopeWalk Staff

	Tom Wilhelmus is professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana and senior editor of the Southern Indiana Review. His reviews of contemporary fiction appear frequently in The Hudson Review. Together with Matthew Graham, Tom is a founding director of RopeWalk. We have a nice new color picture of Tom, but he doesn't look nearly so literary and wise as in this one.
	Matthew Graham is the author of three books of poetry, A World Without End, New World Architecture and 1946, and is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Vermont Studio Center. He teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana where he also co-directs The RopeWalk Writers Retreat, the RopeWalk Visiting Writers Series, and is senior editor of the Southern Indiana Review. He plays hockey on one of the worst teams ever to lace up skates.
	Linda Cleek is director of Continuing Education and associate dean of Extended Services at USI, a job requiring her to do "everything not specifically assigned to someone else," happily including RopeWalk. She handles logistics for the retreat and refuses to have a new picture taken.
	Ron Mitchell is managing editor of the Southern Indiana Review and editor and co-founder of the RopeWalk Press. He teaches composition and creative writing at USI. There's a rumor that Ron's background includes a stint with now-extinct rock band Quick Nixon. You can ask him when you see him.
	Randy Pease teaches English at USI and is an alumnus of RopeWalk. An accomplished songwriter, he has two CDs to his credit, Call Me Ishmael (1997) and Sometimes the Moon (2003). He recently completed his first novel and is trying diligently to get it published. Randy returns for his second year as Abbot of the Barn Abbey. If we are lucky, he'll play his songs for us.
	Nicole Louise Reid is the author of the novel In the Breeze of Passing Things. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, turnrow, New Orleans Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Grain. She is the winner of the 2001 Willamette Award in Fiction, and has also won awards from the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and Glimmer Train. She teaches creative writing at USI, is fiction editor of Southern Indiana Review, and co-directs RopeWalk Reading Series. Of all the things that bring her pleasure, building a career on the art of telling lies is one of the finest.
	Shannon Wooden was fiction editor at the Carolina Quarterly before coming to USI. Her primary research interests lie in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, but she has also written on contemporary texts for Southern Indiana Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Journal of African Travel Writing, and The Journal of Popular Culture. At USI Wooden teaches literature, literary theory, and composition. As the newest addition to the RopeWalk junta, we haven't anything snarky to say about her . . .yet!

RopeWalk Writers Retreat
a program of the University of Southern Indiana