M. Allen Cunningham
TEACHING PROFILE
Welcome! From this page, you can view my Teaching Portfolio and Student Testimonials.
I will be thinking about [Cunningham's] course for the rest of my writing life. -Portland State University student, 2019
Introduction
I’ve been devoted to the discipline of creative writing for twenty-two years, and my path as a writer has been an unusual one, including the release of my first novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow in 2004, when I was 26. Though my background is firmly rooted in literature, which I have studied for nearly thirty years, I came of age as a writer mostly in solitude, without the benefits of direct mentorships or publishing industry affiliations, and received an MFA degree late in my second decade of writing and publishing. Consequently, my teaching is profoundly influenced by the desire to provide developing writers with the help I never had when starting out. Over the last twenty years I’ve taught extensively in college-level courses, workshops, seminars, lectures, and presentations. I offer my students energetic, rigorous, and empathetic instruction couched in unusually personal perspectives from a life of reading and many years of publishing. I have published ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Green Age of Asher Witherow (selected by the American Booksellers Association as a #1 Indie Next Pick) and Lost Son, an experimental biographical novel about Rainer Maria Rilke which was named a Top Ten Book of the Northwest by The Oregonian and was added to the official Rilke bibliography in Europe. My novel Perpetua's Kin was named one the most anticipated books of the season in New York Magazine and a favorite summer read in The Oregonian. January 2021 brought the release of my hybrid book Q&A from Regal House Publishing. My work appears widely in magazines and literary journals. I am the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, as well as residencies at Yaddo, and I've served on the Yaddo Literature Panel. I am a former Contributing Editor for the Northwest literary journal Moss, and I founded the independent literary press Atelier26 Books, where I've edited and published debut works honored by the PEN/Hemingway Award and the PEN/Bingham Prize. To find out more about my own publications, please see the full bio on my "About" page. I hold a degree from Cedar Crest College's Pan-European Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, which took me to Vienna, Dublin, and Barcelona over three consecutive summers of intensive cross-cultural study. I'm an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University, where I teach intermediate and advanced fiction courses, as well as the summer interdisciplinary creative writing intensive in Vienna, which I developed. I have also served as a creative writing instructor for UC Berkeley's Academic Talent Development Program, facilitated the multi-genre MFA-format Atelier26 Creative Writing Workshops, designed and taught new courses at Portland's honored nonprofit Literary Arts, and served as lecturer and thesis advisor in the Pan-European MFA Program. I guest lecture regularly in various academic settings and conferences. For four years I traveled all around Oregon as a public scholar, facilitating intensive seminars in more than 25 communities for the Oregon Humanities Council Conversation Project. This section of my website is a record of some of my work as a teacher, and a reflection of my commitment to sharing and instilling the principles of creative writing as a discipline whose applications are profoundly relevant in many areas of life and citizenship far beyond the classroom or publishing arena. Thank you for taking the time to learn more about what I offer as a teacher. -Mark Allen Cunningham Continue to: MY TEACHING PORTFOLIO MY CV STUDENT TESTIMONIALS |