Carol C. Harter, Executive Director & UNLV President Emerita
Dr. Harter took the helm at Black Mountain Institute in 2006, following her tenure at UNLV’s seventh and longest-serving president. During Harter’s eleven-year presidency, enrollment climbed to 28,000 and UNLV created more than 100 new degree programs and five new professional schools, including the William S. Boyd School of Law, the School of Architecture, and the School of Dental Medicine. She oversaw the construction of seventeen new buildings and the quadrupling of external research funding, and led a capital campaign, still ongoing, that raised more than $500 million from individuals and other private entities. Prior to her arrival at UNLV, Dr. Harter served as president of SUNY Geneseo for six years and spent almost 19 years at Ohio University, where she was a faculty member, ombudsman, and served in two vice presidential roles. A native of New York City, Dr. Harter is a three-time graduate of SUNY Binghamton, where she earned a BA in English with Honors in 1964, an MA in 1967, and a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1970. She is the author of numerous journal articles and published papers in English literature and higher education and has co-authored books about John Irving and E.L. Doctorow.

Richard Wiley, Associate Director
Richard Wiley is author of the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for best American fiction and reissued in 2007 by Hawthorne Books), Fools' Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, and Ahmed's Revenge. His most recent novel, Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show, was published by the new Michener Series at the University of Texas Press in 2007. Wiley has been a member of the UNLV English Department faculty since 1989.

Amber Withycombe, Assistant Director
Amber Withycombe, former deputy director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, joined BMI when it absorbed IIML‘s programs and activities. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she worked as an art director and graphic design instructor in San Francisco before completing an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. There, she was managing editor of The Iowa Review and a graphic designer for the Office of University Relations. She currently edits Witness.

Maritza White, Adminstrative Assistant
Maritza White is a former executive assistant with the 7-Eleven Corporation (Western Region/Las Vegas) and the Office of Corporate Business at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Port Hueneme, California. She has also worked as a secretary for the Fleet Liaison and Veterinary Services office at Port Hueneme.

Maile Chapman, Graduate Assistant
Maile Chapman received her MFA from Syracuse University, where she was a University and Creative Writing Fellow. She then spent a year in Finland as a Fulbright grantee, visiting functionally designed public buildings and working on a novel set in an early twentieth-century Finnish hospital. Her fiction has appeared in U.S. journals and anthologies such as A Public Space, Best New American Voices, Denver Quarterly, 5_trope, and Boston Review, and internationally in Stand Magazine, HUS, The Dublin Review, and The Stinging Fly. She is a Schaeffer Fellow at UNLV and edits fiction for Witness.

Leah Bailly, Graduate Assistant
Canadian fiction writer and playwright Leah Bailly's work has appeared in several magazines, including Prism, subTerrain, Room, Forget and Parlour Magazine, and recently as a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. A graduate of the University of Victoria's BFA in Writing program and The Banff Centre's Writing Studio, Leah has just returned from several years abroad, including extensive sojourns in Africa and India. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at UNLV, where she is deputy editor of Witness.