Prior Program Faculty

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Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of 18 books, including the bestsellers She’s Not There and Mad Honey, (co-authored with Jodi Picoult). The former was the first bestselling work by a transgender American; the latter spent over half a year on the NYT bestsellers list in 2022 and 23. A novelist, short story writer, memoirist, YA author, and journalist, Jenny served as national co-chair of GLAAD for four years. Currently she is a Trustee of PEN America. Since 2014 she has been the Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; in 2022-23 she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her many opinion columns and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is on the faculty of the Breadloaf Writers Conference of Middlebury College and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She holds degrees from Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Colby,; an honorary M. Phil from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine; and honorary doctorates from Sarah Lawrence, the New School and Wesleyan University. She taught at Colby for 25 years, serving both as Director of Creative Writing as well as co-chair of the English Department.

Michael Burke

Michael D. Burke taught Creative Writing and English at Colby for 36 years, specializing in Creative Nonfiction, Adventure Writing, Nature Writing, and Environmental Literature. His publications include the 2024 nonfiction collection, The Art of the Myth, and the memoir/adventure, The Same River Twice. His feature nonfiction and essays have appeared in the anthology Alive to This, and in Down East, Yankee, Islands, Outside, Boston Globe, The New York Times, Maine Décor, AMC Outdoors, The Sunday Times (South Africa), and other national publications. He is also a playwright, having won the 2018 Maine Literary Arts Award for “The Town Meets.” For more than 30 years he was a whitewater and wilderness river guide in Idaho, Alaska, Oregon, California, Arizona and Mexico. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an Honorary MA from Colby College. He is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and English at Colby.

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Natalie and Peter Harris

Peter Harris taught American literature and creative writing for over forty years. He is the author of two books of poetry, Blue Hallelujahs and Freeing the Hook. He has published in magazines and journals such as the Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Seventeen Hills, and Sewanee Review. Harris has been awarded residencies at Macdowell, the Guthrie Center, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He’s a Zen priest.

Natalie Harris got her PhD in English at Indiana University in 1977 and began teaching American literature at Colby that year, offering the department’s first course in modern American poetry. She taught a range of courses in American literature for about twenty years until she hit a mid-life career crisis, took a year off to accompany her husband Peter to Cork, Ireland, where he was director of the then-Colby-program-in-Cork, and enrolled in a year-long graduate program in psychodynamic psychotherapy, thinking she might make
a career leap. The surprise, however, was that she found herself making up stories and having a grand time doing so. At that point, Natalie turned from academic writing to publishing short stories and personal essays in a range of literary magazines. Natalie was grateful to have found a new place for herself in Colby’s English department as a teacher of creative writing. She offered the first courses in creative nonfiction at the college, a branch of the program that now stands proudly beside fiction and poetry.

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Susan Kenney

Susan Kenney spent her childhood in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State before finally settling in Maine in 1968. After 55 years here she obviously never wants to live anywhere else.

Susan spent over 37 years at Colby teaching English literature and Fiction Writing. For her perseverance and creative longevity she was appointed the Charles A. Dana Professor of Creative Writing in 1992. In 2007 after her long career at Colby she retired to devote more time to writing and her family. She has two grown up children and six young grandchildren and is married to Anthony Corrado, a retired Colby professor of Government.

In addition to her novels In Another Country and Sailing, Susan is the author of three mysteries, Garden Of Malice, Graves In Academe, and One Fell Sloop. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Epoch, The Hudson Review, McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, and Family Circle, as well as several anthologies. She stopped writing New York Times and other book reviews and dust cover blurbs in 1995. She is still writing in her specialty, autobiographical fiction.

Susan is currently working on The Opening, the second of two planned novellas that follow her novella Escape, (EPOCH 2005). Another planned work in progress, The House We All Come Back To is a family saga set in her hometown of Skaneateles, New York and New York City, which comes out of another short story also published in EPOCH, “How We Leave Her.”

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Richard Russo

Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir, a book of essays, and several produced screenplays. His novel Empire Falls won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and his screenplay for the HBO miniseries was nominated for an Emmy. He was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association, and in 2017 received France’s Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine for Everybody’s Fool. His most recent novel is the bestselling Chances Are…. Somebody’s Fool will be published in July, 2023.

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Ira Sadoff

Ira is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently COUNTRY, LIVING (Alice James), a critical book on poetry and culture called HISTORY MATTERS (U.of Iowa), a novel, and THE IRA SADOFF READER, a collection of stories, essays, and poems. He has published some four hundred poems in THE NEW YORKER, APR, THE NEW REPUBLIC, among others. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and besides Colby, he taught at the Iowa Writers workshop, the graduate writing program at UVA, and Warren Wilson College.