Rebecca Byrkit

Rebecca (Becky) Byrkit, Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies and Creative Writing, currently teaches with the ASU Writers' Studio.

Rebecca is also Affiliate Faculty with the Leadership and Integrative Studies program, Affiliate Faculty with Creative Writing (English), Affiliate Faculty with Barrett Honors Faculty, and Affiliate Faculty with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

For nineteen years, Rebecca taught courses in creative nonfiction as a founding faculty member of the Master of Liberal Studies program at Arizona State University. Among these courses: Writing About Social Issues (MLS 501), and numerous original Special Topics courses (MLS 598), including The Arrival of Belief, Food Writing, Writing the Journey: Travel Narratives, Global Cinema, Humor Writing, Poetry and Memory, Biography, The Arrival of Belief, Writing About Science and Nature, and The Memoir and Personal Essay. She is also a principal mentor for the MLSt Applied Project, including Reading & Conference, and the MLSt Practicum.

Rebecca also taught in the undergraduate Liberal Studies program (LST 370: Dimensions of Liberal Studies), as well as poetry and fiction writing workshops at all undergraduate levels for the ASU Creative Writing program (English department). Rebecca serves as Affiliate Faculty with the Barrett Honors College, and Affiliate Faculty with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. While on faculty staff with ASU Polytechnic, Rebecca taught Writing for the Professions, Creative Nonfiction, and classes designed for first-year ASU international students.

She served as a visiting faculty member at the American College of Greece in Athens, taught creative writing workshops at the University of Arizona, and taught advanced writing courses for ASU online while living on Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii. Additionally, she served for three years as the Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival in Flagstaff.

Rebecca is an award-winning author whose work has appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology, Ploughshares, Arizona Highways, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Best of Exquisite Corpse, the online Rolling Stone, as well as numerous other excellent journals and anthologies. Her second full-length book of poems, Whoa, was published by Kariboux Ltd. (2012). Her first book, zealand, was nominated for the Western States Book Award in 1995, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize fourteen times.

Rebecca came to teach, write, and write about creative nonfiction as "a poet first, a teller of stories next, and a curator of memory, finally." She served for fifteen years as the Faculty Advisor in Creative Nonfiction for Superstition Review at ASU. She is an ongoing writing workshop facilitator and grantwriter for several Arizona state prison programs, specializing in trauma-affected veterans, women, and families.