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New Faculty for Spring 2012

The Ashland University MFA Program extends a warm welcome to Thomas Larson and Bonnie J. Rough, joining the program as honored visiting graduate faculty this spring.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, Ohio University Press / Swallow Press, now in its third printing. He teaches, lectures, and holds workshops on memoir writing throughout the United States.

Larson writes personal essays, memoir, feature articles, book reviews, and literary criticism. For the last twelve years, he has been a contributing writer for the weekly San Diego Reader where he specializes in investigative journalism, narrative nonfiction, and profiles.

His writing has appeared in numerous reviews and journals, among them Tampa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, Fourth Genre, Amazon.com/Shorts, the Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1997, Contrary Magazine online where he does quarterly book reviews, and New Letters where his memoir, "Mrs. Wright’s Bookshop," won the journal’s Reader’s Award for the Essay in 2008.


Bonnie J. Rough is the author of the memoir Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, which won a 2011 Minnesota Book Award. Her writing has appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Creative Nonfiction, and periodicals including The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Sun, The Iowa Review, Defunct, and Brevity. Rough, who has her MFA from the University of Iowa, has taught at The Loft Literary Center and is a prose editor for Versal.

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