When Ferris State University professor Deirdre Fagan walks into a classroom, she wears all her many hats: widow, wife, mother of two, professor — and award-winning author.

And for that, her students are grateful.

“I believe I’m able to continue growing as an educator because I am out in the field of creative writing every day while also maintaining my foot in the classroom,” said Fagan, who publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship and has taught at Ferris State since 2015.

“Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death” is her most recent award-winning book. Published in 2022, the memoir explores how she and her 43-year-old husband, Bob, traversed their remaining months as a couple with two young children after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“Find a Place for Me” recently earned the 2023 Readers’ Favorite Grief & Hardship Gold Medal and top honors in the Death and Dying category in the 17th annual National Indie Excellence Awards, among many others. It was also featured on Disney/ABC's “Tamron Hall Show” and several other media outlets.

Other works include “The Grief Eater,” “Have Love” and “Critical Companion to Robert Frost.” Her work has also appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies.

Her latest book, “Phantom Limbs,” is a poetry collection that publishes in late September. Described as part celebration, part elegy, it’s about living fully despite — or perhaps even because of — repeated loss. The collection reveals intimate moments from childhood trauma to marriage, divorce, parenting, terminal illness, disability, caregiving, widowhood, remarriage, and mortality itself.

Fagan is a native New Yorker who holds a doctorate in humanistic studies (English and philosophy) and a master’s in English from the State University of New York at Albany and a bachelor’s in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

She taught college writing and literature courses for nearly two decades in New York, Maryland, Florida, and Illinois. After losing her husband, she moved to Michigan eight years ago to join the faculty at Ferris. In addition to her role here as a creative writing professor, she is coordinator for the Literature in Person Reading Series, which brings national and regional authors to the university.

It’s at Ferris State that her creative writing career blossomed.

Fagan has been eager to share her writing and publishing expertise with students. She’s piloting a new 300-level creative writing course in Genre Studies that focuses on a single writing genre each term.

“The idea is to allow students, after they have had an introduction to creative writing, to advance their knowledge of a single genre, as well as to more fully develop over several semesters their understanding of the various genres,” she said. This semester, the genre is fiction.

The university has made great strides, Fagan said, toward increasing creative writing offerings — and she’s happy to continue helping in whatever way she can.

“Working on the craft of creative writing develops not only one’s written and oral communication skills, but the creative and critical thinking that invigorates one’s career and personal life,” she said.

For more information on Deirdre Fagan’s publications, visit deirdrefagan.com.