The Advisory Committee
By policy there is no application process to the San Ysidro Ranch Writer’s Residency. The Advisory Committee recommends a wide group of writers from which residents are invited. The Advisory Committee members are introduced below.
Jennifer Acker
Jennifer Acker is a writer, editor, and translator. She is founder and editor in chief of the global, award-winning literary magazine The Common and the author of two novels, Surrender and The Limits of the World, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Daily, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Slate, and Poets & Writers, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a BA from Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in Western Massachusetts and Portland, Maine.
Nan Cuba
Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread, one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine and winner of the PEN Southwest Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award. Cuba co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists and published other work in Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Columbia, and Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row. She reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine, and was featured in the Netflix docuseries, The Confession Killer. She won a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, was included in Texas Monthly’s “Ten to Watch (and Read),” and is founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink. Visit her website here.
Steven G. Kellman
Steven G. Kellman is author of Rambling Prose: Essays (Trinity); Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (Purdue); The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside (Purdue); Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton); The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska); The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (Twayne); Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (Archon); and The Self-Begetting Novel (Columbia). He edited Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (Nebraska); UnderWords: Perspectives on DeLillo's Underworld (Delaware); Torpid Smoke: Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Rodopi); and Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (Delaware). A widely published critic and essayist, Kellman served four terms on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and received its coveted Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. He has taught at Tel-Aviv University, the University of California campuses at Irvine and Berkeley, Tbilisi State University, and the University of Sofia. He is professor of comparative literature and Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Andrew Porter
Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Random House), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days (Alfred A. Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the short story collection The Disappeared (Alfred A. Knopf), which is forthcoming in 2022. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize XXXII, Ploughshares, One Story, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, Narrative Magazine, Epoch, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He is currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University.
Kevin Prufer
Kevin Prufer’s most recent books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024). His books have been named among the year’s best by The New York Times, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly, and his poetry collection How He Loved Them was long listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award. He is the 2026-2027 Texas Poet Laureate and directs the Unsung Masters Series. His forthcoming books are Good People: Poems (Copper Canyon, 2027) and the novel Summer of Shooting Stars (Slant Books, 2027).
Barbara Ras
Barbara Ras is the author of four poetry collections: The Blues of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series, 2021), The Last Skin (Penguin, 2010), which won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of 2010, One Hidden Stuff (Penguin, 2006), and Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and also received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Ras has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported her residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy. She has also been a resident at the San Ysidro Ranch Writers’ Residency, the Ucross Foundation, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Vermont Studio Center, and Altos de Chavόn, in the Dominican Republic. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, Five Points, American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, and Orion, as well as in many other magazines and anthologies. Her work has been featured in the podcast “Love What You Love” and in the online newsletters “Brain Pickings” and Maria Shriver’s “The Sunday Paper,” as well as in a video produced by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Ras has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and at workshops nationally and internationally. For four decades, Ras had a distinguished career in book publishing. She is the founding director emerita of Trinity University Press and lives in Denver.
John Phillip Santos
John Phillip Santos is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker from San Antonio, Texas. He has published two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (a National Book Award Finalist) and The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire. His book of poems is Songs Older Than Any Known Singer. He is an Emmy-nominated television producer with more than 40 broadcast documentaries and news programs for CBS and PBS. His journalism and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express-News, and more. He now lives in San Antonio with his wife, the poet Frances Treviño Santos and their daughter, Francesca de la Luz. Since 2010, he has been University Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies, teaching in the Honors College at the University of Texas San Antonio.
