The University of Arizona has a lot to offer, with over 300 majors and a faculty of about 3000 members. With such large numbers, it’s possible that students may not have the opportunity to learn about professors outside their own major. However, here are three professors from the creative writing program that you can get to know and possibly even meet during your time at the UA.

Francisco Cantú 

Francisco Cantú teaches mostly nonfiction creative writing courses at the UA. He will start his tenure track in the fall of this year. 

He studied international relations at American University and joined the border patrol soon after he graduated from 2008-2012. The program he studied at was geared toward getting students plugged into government jobs. Growing up in Arizona, he was interested in the U.S. and Mexico border. 

This experience led him to write “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border.” In this book, he talks about how he became a border patrol agent, his time with the border patrol and why he left that in his past and pursued teaching. 

His book was published in 2018 and was coined as “an instant New York Times bestseller” by Penguin Random House Canada. 

On what inspired him to share his story, Cantú said, “I think the day-to-day happenings of working as a border patrol agent were very unknown to me before I went into the job, and I also recognize that writing about them would sort of shed light on this thing that was often unseen. I imagined that I could maybe help change things from within in my brief time, which is pretty naive, but that’s how we are as young people a lot of times.”

Being in the border patrol he realized the things he imagined weren’t happening. 

“I started to realize the things I had imagined happening weren’t going to happen. The answers I imagined, I wasn’t going to find those answers. So that leads to my decision to leave the border patrol and to go back to my studies,” Cantú said. 

He got his master’s degree at the UA, where he wrote the majority of his book. 

“As writers we always hope that we can find a way to shift the conversation, even if it’s just by an inch at a time,” Cantú said.

As a professor who teaches mainly nonfiction courses, he said that he wants his students to feel at home in the classroom regardless of the topics they choose to write about.

Kindall Gray 

Professor Kindall Gray is a senior lecturer at the UA. She is employed by the writing program where she teaches freshman classes like English 101, 102 and 109. However, she also teaches fiction writing classes for the creative writing program like English 210, 304 and 404.

Gray has been teaching at the university since 2008 when she was a grad student. 

“I kind of fell into teaching,” Gray said. 

She attended the UA intending to get a creative writing and English degree, but she didn’t know what she wanted to do with it. When she got into grad school, the university gave her a teaching load as part of the program. Teaching the freshman English courses at 25 years old led her to where she is now. 

Growing up, she always liked to read, especially children’s historical fiction. One notable book she mentioned was “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” about the Salem witch trials. 

“I was intrigued by the idea that you could write about stuff that felt dark or taboo,” Gray said.  

She started writing short stories when she was in fifth grade. The stories started off as murder mysteries, but as she got into middle school and high school, she started to write more coming-of-age stories. 

She still writes today and has a few published works. When asked about what inspires her to write now, Gray said, “My students inspire me. Hearing and reading their work and talking to them and getting ideas from them. Hearing what they’re reading is fun. I never really read a lot of sci-fi until maybe the last five years. Part of that is that my students write and read so much of it that I started to look for more examples of it to teach, and then I actually liked it.”

Sara Sams

Rounding out the creative writing program is Sara Sams. She is an assistant professor in the creative writing program. She teaches primarily poetry workshops for both undergraduates and graduates and mentors students. 

She has been writing poetry since fourth grade. She wrote throughout her schooling, and as she entered young adulthood in college, she realized that poetry was the field she wanted to work in. 

She graduated from Davidson College with her undergrad and then proceeded to get her master’s at Arizona State University two years later.

“I’ve always been obsessed with language,” Sams said. 

This focus can be seen through her experience in Spain teaching English and an internship in New York over the course of two years. However, teaching was always at the front of the running for her poetry career. 

“I just had such brilliant teachers in undergrad and I knew that I wanted to do what they were doing. I wanted to spend time working with language, working with poetry and that the best way to work with poetry is in a community of people also trying to work with poetry,” Sams said.

Sams’ most current fascination and what inspires her poetry today is “using particle physics as a lens for literary analysis,” Sams said.

Her first book of poetry, “Atom City,” is poetry about the research she conducted while living in a Manhattan Project town that enriched the uranium for the atomic bomb. This project led her to the understanding that in order to write about physics and science, she needed to learn more about the discoveries and understand them to a certain level. 

This led her to partner with physics teachers in piloting a course about particle poetics in the spring of 2025. Her dream for the course is for students from both disciplines to enroll and learn and understand the different fields more fully.

This research that she is pursuing has led to some new poems. 

“What my research has been leading to my poetry has been unexpected. I don’t really know where it’s going. I just know I’m on the right track. If I feel uncomfortable and if I feel a little upset then I know this poem is doing something that’s important,” Sams said. 

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