Meet the Fellows
The Writing Fellows are all recent graduates of the University of Iowa's MFA programs in Writing and Translation.
Michael Anichini
MICHAEL ANICHINI was born and raised in Rogers Park, a northside
neighborhood of Chicago. He received his B.A. from Loyola University
Chicago in 2000, and recently graduated from the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, where he was a Maytag Fellow in 2005. He has lived in Rome as
well as Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he worked as a restaurant manager
for several years. Before moving to Iowa, Michael was performing at
Chicago's Improv Olympic Theater, and he hopes to rejoin the them
someday. He's currently finishing a volume of poetry titled Painted
Brink, and is saving money to travel into space, which, he'd like you
to know, should soon be attainable if not common.
Katie Chase
KATIE CHASE writes fiction, and when she moves, she goes west. A Michigander, she grew up outside Detroit and studied English at U-M Ann Arbor. In Chicago, she worked as a bookseller and as a copy editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica. She then came to Iowa City, where she received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop last spring. Her work has recently appeared in The Missouri Review.
This year, she is starting work on a novel and hopes to advise undergrads planning to pursue creative writing. Her spring fiction writing class will explore such classic forms as the fairy tale in efforts to identify recurring archetypal patterns in literature and the imagination and better understand the storytelling impulse.
Matthew Davis
MATTHEW DAVIS graduated with an MFA in nonfiction from the Nonfiction
Writing Program in spring 2007. He won the 2005 Atlantic Monthly
Student Writing Competition in nonfiction and had a notable essay in
the 2006 Best American Travel Writing Series. His work has appeared,
among other places, in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Bellevue
Literary Review and the Mid-American Review. While at Iowa, he was an
Iowa Arts Fellow, a Stanley Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at the UI
Museum of Art. He is currently a post-graduate writing fellow working
at the International Writing Program. Before he came to Iowa, Matt
lived in Mongolia for three years, a country which is the focus of
much of his writing work. He likes foods that begin with 'P',
especially pretzels, pasta and pork, though not at the same time,
that's just gross.
Steve McNutt
STEVE MCNUTT has a B.A. in Art and Political Science from Bucknell University and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. At the UI, he was an Iowa Arts Fellow and T. Anne Cleary Fellow and taught undergraduate classes in composition and creative nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Believer (upcoming), the Des Moines Register, The Morning News, and on WSUI's Weekend America (Iowa Edition). His essay "SUV vs. Bike, SUV Wins" was a finalist for the Florida Review's 2006 Prize for Nonfiction. Other attempts at negotiating the vagaries of late capitalism include two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African country of Gabon, and stints as a cartoonist, Internet company project manager, and freelance designer.
Caryl Pagel
CARYL PAGEL received her B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. Since then she has lived in Prague and Chicago—where she received a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded the Powell's North Reading Series, and worked for the Illinois Arts Council. Her poems can be found in Coconut, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Octopus Magazine, Parcel, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop last May, and currently works for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
