Announcing New Naslund-Mann Faculty Mentors for Spring 2026

by Kathleen Driskell, Chair

I’m very pleased on behalf of our Naslund-Mann leadership team and faculty to announce three new mentors are joining our faculty and will be available to work with mentees during the Spring 2026 independent study. Look for their faculty videos, teaching philosophies, and spalding.edu email addresses in Canvas.

Please join us in welcoming writers and teachers Willie Davis, Jennie Malboeuf, and Danni Quintos to our writing community!

Willie Davis, Fiction

Willie Davis is the author of Honeysuckle Season, I Can Outdance Jesus, and Nightwolf. He is the winner of the James Baker Hall Award for Short Fiction, The Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, BODY, and The Berkeley Fiction Review, among other places. Willie has an MA from Johns Hopkins and an MFA in Writing from the University of Maryland College Park. He also teaches at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.

Jennie Malboeuf, Poetry

Jennie Malboeuf is the author of jump the gun, part of the American Poets Continuum Series (BOA Editions, 2025), and God had a body (Indiana UP, 2020), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Blue Lights Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and Harvard Review. Born and raised in Kentucky, she received a BA at Centre College and an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is the recipient of a 2020 NC Arts Council Fellowship. 

Danni Quintos, Poetry

Danni Quintos is the author of the poetry collection, Two Brown Dots (BOA Editions, 2022), chosen by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as winner of the Poulin Poetry Prize, and PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos. She is a Kentuckian, a mom, a knitter, and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. She received her BA from The Evergreen State College, and her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Cream City Review, Cincinnati Review, The Margins, Salon, and elsewhere. Quintos lives in Lexington with her kids & farmer-spouse & their little dog too. She teaches in the Humanities Division at Bluegrass Community & Technical College. 

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Kathleen Driskell, current Kentucky Poet Laureate, is the Chair of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and Professor of Creative Writing. She is an award-winning poet and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, Rattle, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods and The Vine Temple (both from Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Next Door to the Dead, (University Press of Kentucky), winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Her collection Seed Across Snow (Red Hen Press) was named a Poetry Foundation Bestseller. Her essay “Church of the Goat Man” was included in the anthology 2025 Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses. She served as Chair of the Board of Directors of AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs from 2019 to 2022.