Val Killpack has published fiction in Clackamas Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, Erasure, and Caesura. He is a PhD candidate (ABD) in creative writing at Binghamton University in upstate New York. He graduated with an MFA in writing and poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouc School of Disembodied Poetics and a BA in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has taught writing at Binghamton University, Adams State University, Colorado Mountain College, and Breckenridge Creative Arts and worked as residency program assistant for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA Creative Writing Program in Denver, Colorado.

Val is interested in how narrative and story can function as mediums for interrogation and apprehension in a complex, nuanced, and ever-changing world. He focuses on relationships of human to nonhuman—animals, environment, and machine—and the “becoming” which results in a climate-changed world. His fiction writing encompasses environmental, speculative, mystery, and literary tropes and explores narrative agency, perspective, and cognitive vision. Val’s research and scholarship addresses twentieth and twenty-first century ecological literature and climate fiction using narratology methods and theories of critical posthumanism, deep ecology, rewilding, and transnational/postcolonial ecocriticism.