Kristen Iversen's work includes the books Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (selected by universities across the country for their First Year Experience/Common Read programs and now forthcoming as a documentary), Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. Essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The American Scholar, and others, and she has edited two anthologies, Doom with a View and Don't Look Now (co-edited with David Lazar). A Colorado native, Iversen holds a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Literary Nonfiction editor of The Cincinnati Review. She is currently completing a literary biography of Nikola Tesla. Iversen will be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen, Norway in spring 2021.
Mentor Statement
My first step in working with a student is to learn and understand as much as I can about the vision they have for their creative work. What do they hope to accomplish? What do they have in mind, in terms of content, structure, form, and voice, for their story? From there we'll begin to talk about how to move forward, with steps that include individualized writing prompts, specific revision strategies (for overall structure as well as line-by-line editing suggestions), and looking to other books or authors for inspiration, ideas, and context. I tend to focus on narrative structure, and I like to take a "soup to nuts" approach -- that is, how to take an idea through the writing and revision process, and then how and when to approach agents, editors, and literary publications. As a working writer with several books in progress, I face many of the same challenges my students do. I enjoy being a faculty mentor and learning together with my students.
