Bryce Lillmars

Biography

Bryce Lillmars, MFA, is a Composition Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, where he has taught writing and rhetoric courses since 2017. He earned his MFA in Poetry from UC Irvine and holds a double degree in Bassoon Performance and Spanish from the University of Cincinnati, where he graduated summa cum laude. Lillmars also holds TESOL certification from the School of International Training.

At UC Irvine, Lillmars teaches courses in writing and rhetoric, argument and research, and composition. His teaching approach emphasizes genre analysis and rhetorical strategies, with recent courses examining food writing through the Norton Anthology of Food Writing and bioethics through Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. From 2017 to 2021, he also taught creative writing courses at Orange County School of the Arts, including graphic novel writing and advanced creative writing. His students have won UCI Writing Awards in 2017, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2025, and he has been nominated for Lecturer of the Year in 2021 and 2024.

Lillmars has published poetry in American Literary Review, Conduit, DMQ Review, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, and Southern Humanities Review. He received the Gerard Creative Writing Endowment Award and an Academy of American Poets Prize Honorable Mention at UC Irvine. Before his academic career in California, Lillmars worked as an ESL instructor in Oaxaca, Mexico from 2009 to 2013 and as a Title I Reading and Math Specialist in Tucson, Arizona, bringing over 17 years of classroom experience across elementary through college levels.

Education

• MFA in Poetry, University of California - Irvine, 2017
• TESOL Certification, School of International Training (SIT), 2009
• BM in Bassoon Performance, University of Cincinnati, 2009
• BA in Spanish, University of Cincinnati, 2009

Distinctions

• Academy of American Poets Prize Honorable Mention, University of California - Irvine
• Gerard Creative Writing Endowment Award, University of California - Irvine