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E-Mail: cochrane@canisius.edu
Office: Tower 901
Phone: 888-2662
Office hours: T-R 11 a.m.-1 p.m. and by appointment
Mick Cochrane, professor of English and Lowery Writer in Residence, was born and raised in St. Paul, MN. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of St. Thomas and a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota. His first novel, Flesh Wounds (Nan Talese/Doubleday), was named a finalist in Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Competition. His second novel, Sport (St. Martin’s/Dunne Books), was selected for the annual New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age List. His stories have been published in a number of literary journals, including The Cincinnati Review, Kansas Quarterly, Northwest Review, and Minnesota Monthly. He’s also published critical essays on Raymond Carver, Bob Dylan, baseball literature, and the art of biography, and he’s received grants from the Saltonstall Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was named Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor three times. His latest book is a novel for young adults, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (Knopf).
His teaching interests include fiction writing, literary publishing, literary nonfiction, and writing for young adults.
“I’ve been blessed with some wonderful readers: people who read drafts of my work with great generosity and sympathy, who enter into it, and are able to let me know where it’s most alive and fresh and where it’s flat. That’s what I try to do for my students—read their work as attentively as I possibly can, describe to them what I think is going on, and help them see new possibilities in what they’ve written, so they can return to it with greater insight and energy.” -- Mick Cochrane
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Chair of English Department
E-mail: cookson@canisius.edu
Office: Tower 909
Phone: 888-2653
Office hours: MWF 9:30-11 a.m., TR 12-2 p.m., & by appointment
Sandra Cookson, professor and chair of English, is a poet whose work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Passager, Karamu, RHINO, Yet Another Small Magazine, and in the anthologies Hello, Goodbye and Common Ground.
Her teaching interests include poetry writing, American women’s poetry, modern and montemporary poetry, and the lyric poem.
In 2009, Cookson was the recipient of a a Traditional Fulbright Scholar Award. She will use her 10-month Fulbright grant to teach American poetry courses at Udmurt State University in Izhevsk, Russia.
“When I introduce beginning creative writing students to writing poems, I often have them imitate a poem by a published poet we have been reading in class. I ask them to model their poem on the form and subject matter of the model, including stanza structure and line lengths, syntax, even using the first line of the model poem as a launching pad for their own. The result is often a poem that is more developed in style and subject than one they might have written completely on their own. I think this exercise surprises students because it produces a poem that, though it starts out as an imitation, results in a poem distinctly their own.” -- Sandra Cookson
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E-mail: ganswore@canisius.edu
Office: Tower 902
Phone: 888-2113
Office hours: M 2-3 p.m., T 1:30-5 p.m., W 2-3 p.m., and by appointment
Eric Gansworth, professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence, is a member of the Onondaga Nation who was born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation Territory in Western New York. He is the author of seven books, including the novel, Mending Skins, which won the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award in 2006, and the collection of poems and paintings, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function, which appeared on the National Book Critics Circle’s “Good Reads” List for Spring 2008. His next book, From the Western Door to the Lower West Side--a representation of Western New York’s Indian communities in poems and photographs--is a collaboration with social documentary photographer, Milton Rogovin, and will be published in 2009. His work, fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual art, has been published in more than a dozen anthologies and has appeared or is forthcoming in: The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, Shenandoah, Cold Mountain Review, The Cream City Review, Poetry International, New York Quarterly, Yellow Medicine Review, American Indian Quarterly, Stone Canoe, UCLA American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Studies in American Indian Literature, and Slipstream, among others. He has held residencies at The Seaside Institute, The Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities, Michigan State University, Just Buffalo Literary Center, Inc., The Solstice Summer Writing Conference, and The Institute for American Indian Art. As a visual artist, Gansworth has exhibited in many group shows and has had solo or two-person exhibits at Niagara University, The Stuyvesant Gallery, Bright Hill Center, Canisius College, and Colgate University. e was also the recipient of an Individual Artist's Grant for Fiction, from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, in 2007.
Gansworth's teaching interests include creative Writing (fiction, poetry, memoir), contemporary Native American literature, film adaptation, interdisciplinary studies, the graphic novel, and contemporary fiction.
“I believe that the act of creative writing is, in equal measure, finding the doorway into the work, whether it is a story, a poem, or an essay, and being equipped to document the magic revealed from behind that door. I believe the teaching of creative writing involves that same two-fold belief: helping students find their own doorways into their work, and offering practical exercises in creative writing technique to facilitate the most fully realized and polished expressions of their writing imaginations.” -- Eric Gansworth
Janet McNally '02, MFA
E-mail: janet.mcnally@gmail.com
Phone: 888-2939
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Janet McNally '02 is among 18 fiction writers from New York State to receive the prestigious New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship. Previous NYFA fellows include Spike Lee, Tony Kushner, Todd Haynes and Junot Diaz. McNally holds a bachelor's degree in English from Canisius and a master's in fine arts from Notre Dame University. She has published stories in a number of literary magazines, including New Madrid, Iron Horse and Traffic East; and is currently at work on her first novel.
McNally's teaching interests include fiction and poetry writing, contemporary poetry and fiction, and modern American women’s fiction.
"I believe the secret to good writing is good reading. I try to introduce my students to a wide variety of contemporary writers, both established and emerging. This takes a certain amount of patience and a willingness to read often and closely, but the rewards are worth it.” -- Janet McNally