About Darren DeFrain

Darren DeFrain is a Stanford Innovation Fellow, NEH Fellow, and the author of the novel The Salt Palace (Dzanc/New Issues) and story collection Inside & Out (Dzanc/MSR). He is currently at work on a book for KU Press on the postpunk history of Kansas with Fran Connor.

Along with Aaron Rodriguez (Ph.D. candidate at Florida State), DeFrain helped launch Vizling in 2020. Vizling seeks to bring together Visual Grammar, Haptics, and CBML coding to make comics and multimodal texts accessible and searchable.

DeFrain directs the Writing Program at Wichita State University. He has been at WSU since 2005 and was named the Barrier Award winner for Teacher of the Year. Before coming to WSU, DeFrain was an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley where he was named both a Kaplan Fellow and Teacher of Year for the entire campus. Prior to UW-Fox DeFrain worked for a year as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Waynesburg College in Waynesburg, PA.

Over the years and at these various institutions DeFrain has taught classes on fiction writing, graphic novels, publishing, narrative, video gaming, nature writing, composition and composition theory and more. At Wichita State one of his favorite roles is teaching incoming GTAs to teach at the college level.

His own education began at the University of Utah where he received his BA in English/Creative Writing, his BS in Psychology, and a minor in Italian. DeFrain has worked with Debra Monroe at Utah who encouraged him to apply to Kansas State University for his MA. After completing his MA DeFrain realized he wanted to pursue his writing and applied to Texas State, where Debra Monroe had recently been employed. He finished his MFA in 2 years and went to Western Michigan for his Ph.D. in Creative Writing where he studied with National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon and MacArthur Fellow Stuart Dybek, among others. While at Western DeFrain coordinated the Third Coast Writing Conference.