MFA Faculty Mentors

Steve Langan

Steve Langan


Biography

STEVE LANGAN graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. His most recent collection What It Looks Like, How It Flies was released in 2015. His collection of poems, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, 2009, is from BlazeVOX [books]. Notes on Exile & Other Poems, a chapbook, received the 2005 Weldon Kees Award from the Backwaters Press. Langan’s debut collection, Freezing, was published in 2001 by New Issues Poetry & Prose. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Chicago Review, DoubleTake, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Fence, Witness and Shade; recent publications include Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, The Iowa Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Gettysburg Review and Zoland Poetry. Langan serves as Executive Director of HONOReform, a national patient advocacy organization, and he’s founder and director of the Seven Doctors Project. He lives in Omaha and, during part of the year, on Cliff Island, Maine.

Teaching Philosophy

“In workshop and through correspondence and conversations during the mentoring process, I seek to guide writers toward achieving fullness in their poems and discursive writing—challenging them along the way to broaden aesthetic notions and their reading of poetry from the tradition and contemporary work—and helping them work to develop an original voice.”