photo: Michael Bailey Photography

photo: Michael Bailey Photography

John Casteen is the author of For the Mountain Laurel (2011) and Free Union (2009), part of the VQR Poetry Series from The University of Georgia Press. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry. He founded and directed the Sweet Briar Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference and now teaches writing in the English Department at the University of Virginia. He lives in Brown College at U.Va., where he serves as Director of Studies.

Casteen has contributed prose on gun policy, professional ethics, and environmental policy to Slate.com, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other magazines and newspapers; he has also written personal and topical essays for The Morning News and Field Notes. His criticism has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and for ten years was self-employed as a designer and builder of custom furniture. He has taught on Semester at Sea (Summer 2008, Fall 2011, Summer 2014), at Sweet Briar College and James Madison University, and as Visiting Artist Faculty in Residence at New York University.