Colleen Mayo

My teaching and creative work seek to explore and celebrate identity, community, and place within prose and the writing classroom. My writing appears in, among others, The Kenyon Review, The Sun Magazine, and Ninth Letter. I’ve received special mention for the Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction, the Jerome Stern Series Spotlight Award for Nonfiction, and an AWP Intro Journals Award for Fiction.

Born and raised in Austin, TX, I earned a BA in English-Creative Writing at Hendrix College in Arkansas before serving a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship for two years in South Korea. I later received my MFA in Fiction from The Florida State University and my PhD from The University of North Texas in Fiction (primary focus) and Creative Nonfiction (secondary). At UNT, I worked as managing editor of the international literary journal American Literary Review for two years.

Before coming to Berry, I held a postdoctoral teaching fellowship in the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation for Language and Literature at Hendrix College (2023-2026) where I taught courses in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, American Literature, and First Year Writing. I also started “Mockingbird Word”, a community-based radio project featuring creative writers local to central Arkansas.

Broadly speaking, both my creative work and teaching are most interested in the role of character in fiction. I love to explore the writing techniques used to capture psychological realism within prose, and to make study of elements such as point-of-view, voice, style, dialogue, interiority, and structure as means of better understanding character. Some themes that most compel me are identity, gender and sexuality, addiction, joy, community, motherhood, and intergenerational relationships. In addition to teaching creative writing, I also enjoy teaching courses in American Literature, and collaborative and epistolary rhetoric.

I am thrilled to have joined the Berry faculty in August 2026 as an Assistant Professor in the creative writing program.