Faculty in Arts & Letters

Chad Barbour
PhD, University of Kentucky.
Chad Barbour specializes in American culture and literature, teaching courses in American literature, Native American literature, comics and graphic novels, and children’s/young adult literature.
He is the author of From Daniel Boone to Captain America: Playing Indian in American Popular Culture (University Press of Mississippi). He has published articles on Native appropriation and representation in comics and underground comix.
Recent work includes a book chapter in Inventing Destiny (University Press of Kansas), "Revising Hannah Duston: Domesticity and the Frontier in Nineteenth-Century Retellings of the Duston Captivity." Another book chapter--"Jack Jackson, Native Representation, and Underground Comix"--is forthcoming in Graphic Indigeneity (University Press of Mississippi).

Julie Brooks Barbour
MFA, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

George Denger
PhD, Wayne State University

Tyler Dettloff
MA, Northern Michigan University.
Tyler Dettloff is an Anishinaabe Métis, Italian, and Irish writer, professor, musician, gardener, and water protector raised on the edge of the Delirium Wilderness. He currently lives in Gnoozhekaaning (Bay Mills, Michigan) and teaches College Composition at Lake Superior State University. Mostly, he enjoys walking along rivers with his wife Daraka and daughter Meadow and through swamps his dogs Banjo and Fiddle.
He is the author of Belly-up Rosehip: a Tongue Blue with Mud Songs, a book of poems, from Swimming with Elephants Publications, 2019.

Louann Disney
PhD, Texas Tech University

Mary McMyne
Prof. Mary McMyne, MFA, New York University, specializes in fiction. Her debut novel, The Book of Gothel, will be released from Redhook and Orbit UK in 2022. Her second novel is forthcoming from Orbit/Redhook in 2023. She has poems, stories, and essays published in venues like Gulf Coast, Strange Horizons, Redivider, Southern Humanities Review, Apex Magazine, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Her debut poetry chapbook, Wolf Skin (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), won the Elgin Chapbook Award. She edits fiction for Border Crossing and poetry for Enchanted Living.

Thomas Meacham
PhD, City University of New York-Graduate Center

Elizabeth Parks
MFA, Texas Tech University

Shirley Smart
MA, Central Michigan University.
Shirley Smart has presented at Writing Across the UP Conference at NMU in Marquette, MI - "A Linguistic & Grammatical Look at Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms" and participated in the panel, "Peer Editing" at the Writing Across the UP Conference at LSSU.

Jason Swedene
PhD, State University of New York at Buffalo