Liberal Arts Faculty

Sarah Minor

Title Assistant Professor | Chair of Liberal Arts
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.7369

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Courses  Writing Across Gender

Degree PhD, Creative Nonfiction Writing, Ohio University
MFA, Creative Nonfiction Writing, University of Arizona
BA, Studio Art and Art History, St. Olaf College

Sarah Minor is a writer and visual artist and the author of the books Bright Archive, forthcoming from Rescue Press in Fall 2020, Slim Confessions, forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2021, and a digital chapbook entitled The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated from Essay Press (2016).

The recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grant, the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, and a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, Minor was also the 2018 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writer's Workshop. She currently teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at CIA and serves as the Video Essays Editor at TriQuarterly Review, curates of the Visual Essay series at Essay Daily and is the Assistant Director of the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival.

Specialty Areas:

• The Lyric Essay
• Visual Essays
• The Video Essay and Interactive Digital Texts
• Narrative Nonfiction
• Experimental Forms
• Text Installations
• Image-Texts and Photography
• Prose Poetry
• The Concrete Poetry Movement
• Book Arts and History of the Book
• Visual Rhetoric
• Multimodal Composition

Courses:

• LLC 203: Narrative Forms: Intro to Narrative Writing
• LLC 215W: Intro to Creative Writing
• LLC 273W: Art of the Personal Essay
• LLC 306W: Hybrid Writing: The Prose Poem
• LLC 315W: Creative Writing Topics: Text-as-Object
• LLC 419: Graphic Narratives
• LLC 424: Topics in Lit: Writing Across Gender
• LLC 435: Creative Writing Concentration: Body of Work

Jonathan Rosati

Title Coordinator of Writing Center + Learning Center | Assistant Chair of Liberal Arts
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.8018

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Courses  Writing + Inquiry II: Research + Intellectual Traditions

David Hart

Title Associate Professor of Art History
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.7302

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Degree PhD, Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
MA, Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
BA, Political Science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Dr. Hart is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Liberal Arts Department. He taught African-American Art at UNC Chapel Hill as well as Wake Forest University before he came to the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Gary D. Sampson

Title Professor of Art + Design History
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.7369

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Courses  Critical Issues in Visual Culture

Degree PhD, Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara
MA, Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara
BA, Art and Art History, California State University, Northridge

Gary Sampson teaches art and design history and theory. He is also adjunct in art history and occasional SAGES faculty at Case Western Reserve University. His areas of scholarship are in history of photography, urban design and representation, and media arts and visual culture. His publications include Imag(in)ing Race and Place in Colonialist Photography, with Eleanor Hight, Photographs at St. Lawrence University, with Catherine Tedford, and “Landscape and Fluid Imaging of the Emerging City," in Emerging Landscapes: Between Landscape and Representation. Sampson also engages in practice-based research in photography; one of his ongoing projects investigates city environments, infrastructure, and media.

Zachary Savich

Title Associate Professor
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.7000

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Courses  Creative Writing Senior Seminar | Writing + Inquiry III: Narrative Forms

Degree MFA, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
MFA, University of Iowa
BA, University of Washington

Zach Savich is a poet and nonfiction writer. His books include the poetry collections Daybed (2018) and The Orchard Green and Every Color (2016) and the memoir Diving Makes the Water Deep (2016).

Savich’s work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Award, a New American Poet citation from the Poetry Society of America, and other honors. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, and the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-a-Day. He serves as co-editor of Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series, an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books, and an associate editor at Tupelo Quarterly

Courses  Writing + Inquiry III: Narrative Forms

Degree PhD, University of Utah
MFA, Cornell University
BA, Oberlin College

Elizabeth Hoag

Title Lecturer
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.7000

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Courses  Anthropology of Gender Roles | Indigenous Cultures: The Inca, Aztec and Maya | Urban Ethnography

Degree PhD Candidate (ABD), The University at Albany, SUNY
MA, University of Cincinnati
BA, Ithaca College

Scott Lax

Title Lecturer
Department Liberal Arts
Phone 216.421.7000

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Courses  Art of the Personal Essay | Screenwriting

Degree BA, English, Hiram College

Scott Lax is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His first novel, The Year That Trembled, was named one of 1998’s “Milestones’ in Fiction,” by The Denver Post, whose book editor, Tom Walker, wrote, “A powerful coming of age story of a group of friends who are waiting to learn their fate in the selective service lottery that will determine whether they will be called on to fight in the Vietnam war... Those of us who came of age in those years remember the fear, the soul searching we went through. Lax captures the mood of the era and tells a strong tale of love, brotherly and otherwise.”

The Midwest Book Review wrote of his second novel, Vengeance Follows, “Scott Lax is a master wordsmith of the first order and once again demonstrates his talent and expertise with Vengeance Follows. A minor masterpiece of suspense and human nature, Vengeance Follows is a terrifically entertaining read from beginning to end. Very highly recommended."

Scott holds a BA in English from Hiram College. While at Hiram he studied Shakespeare's Histories in Cambridge, ran track, and played drums in the Jazz Ensemble. Scott is a recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bernard J. O'Keefe Scholarship in Nonfiction and Sewanee Writers' Conference Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction. He was presented with a Resolution of Congratulations for his body of work from Cleveland City Council in 2002 and named the 2002 Midwest Filmmaker of the Year by the Cleveland International Film Festival for the feature film version of The Year That Trembled, for which he was source-writer and producer.

Scott's two-act stage adaptation of The Year That Trembled was produced at Cleveland's University School in 2003 and 2013. Lax is also an award-winning movie producer, short story writer, nonfiction writer, journalist, speechwriter, and TV writer who co-write and co-created a television pilot with Fred Willard and Martin Mull, and has written for ESPN and Comedy Central.

Scott also periodically leads workshops and presents at writers' conferences and literary organizations. Scott's also a professional drummer who's played with Bo Diddley, among others. He recently finished a screenplay adaptation of Vengeance Follows, and is working on a book of fiction. Scott lives in the Chagrin Valley with his wife, Lydia, and son, Finn. – May 2020