Authors and Hollins Faculty Thorpe Moeckel and Jessie van Eerden

Thorpe Moeckel has taught since 2005 at Hollins, where he’s the current director of the Jackson Center for Creative Writing. His newest poetry collection, According to Sand, was published in October 2022, and his middle grade novel, True as True Can Be, will be published in March 2023. He is the author of Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw: A Wonder Almanac, and his poetry books include Arcadia Road, Venison, Odd Botany, and Making a Map of the River. Meltlines, The Guessing Land, and Off Owl’s Head are among his chapbooks. Watershed Days: Adventures (a Little Thorny & Familiar) in the Home Range, a work of nonfiction, was published in 2015. His writings appear regularly in journals, and selections are featured in several anthologies. He has been honored with an NEA Grant for Poetry, a Sustainable Arts Foundation, as well as the George Garrett New Writing Award from The Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Jessie van Eerden, associate professor of creative writing at Hollins, is the author of three novels: Glorybound (2012), winner of the Foreword Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize; My Radio Radio (2016); and Call It Horses, winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction (released 2021). She is also the author of the portrait essay collection The Long Weeping (2017), winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, New England Review, Image, and other magazines, and in several anthologies, including The River Teeth Reader and Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She has been a member of the Hollins faculty since 2019.

Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund.

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