2000 Faculty

PATRICIA HAMPL is best known for her memoirs, A Romantic Education and Virgin Time. She has also published two volumes of poetry and Spillville, a prose meditation on Antonin Dvorak's summer in Iowa. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Bush Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; in 1990 she received a MacArthur Fellowship. She is Regents' Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and she is a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Seminars. Her most recent book is I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory.

GARRETT HONGO is the author of a memoir,Volcano. He is the editor of The Open Boat: Poems for Asian America and Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America, and he has published two books of poetry: Yellow Light and The River of Heaven, which was the 1987 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. He has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and his essays and poems have appeared in APR, Antaeus, New England Review, Ploughshares, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He teaches at the University of Oregon.

MICHAEL COLLIER, director of the Conference, is the author of four books of poems, The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, The Neighbor, and, most recently, The Ledge. He has received Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, two NEA fellowships, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Antaeus, The Nation, The New Republic, and Poetry. Mr. Collier has taught at Yale University and Johns Hopkins University, and is currently the co-director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland.

TOI DERRICOTTE has published four collections of poetry: Natural Birth, The Empress of the Death House, Captivity, and, most recently, Tender, which received the Paterson Poetry Prize for 1998. A memoir, The Black Notebooks, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction and other prizes. She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a United Black Artists, USA, Inc., Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award. She is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1999-2000 she is the Delta Sigma Theta Endowed Chair in Poetry at Xavier University. She is a co-founder of Cave Canem, a workshop retreat for African-American poets.

LINDA GREGERSON's most recent book of poems, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, was a finalist for both The Poet's Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award. She is also the author of Fire in the Conservatory (poetry); The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic; and Negative Capability: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry (forthcoming.) She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the NEA, the National Humanities Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, where she teaches Renaissance literature.

EDWARD HIRSCH, a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, has published five books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers, Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade, Earthly Measures, and, most recently, On Love. He has also published two prose books on the nature of reading poetry: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry and Responsive Reading. He writes a column on poetry for American Poetry Review, serves as the poetry advisor to DoubleTake magazine, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA has published eleven books of poems, including Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems 1977-1989, which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Thieves of Paradise, a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. Forthcoming are Talking Dirty to the Gods and Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999. He is a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University and a recently elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

MICHAEL PALMER has published eight collections of poetry and a prose work, The Danish Notebook. He has published translations from the French, Russian, and Portuguese and has collaborated with a range of visual artists and composers. His collection, At Passages, received the America Award for Poetry. He has received Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace-Reader' Digest Fund Writer's Awards. A new collection of poems, The Promises of Glass, is forthcoming.

DAVID ST. JOHN is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Study For The World's Body: New & Selected Poems, nominated for the National Book Award; The Red Leaves of Night; and In the Pines: Lost Poems, 1972-1997. He is also the author of a prose collection, Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Rome Prize Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. He is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at The University of Southern California.

CHARLES BAXTER's most recent book is a novel, The Feast of Love. He is the author of four books of stories, including Believers and A Relative Stranger, and two other novels, First Light and Shadow Play. He has also written a book of essays on fiction, Burning Down the House. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and was the recipient of the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

LYNN FREED's novels include The Mirror, The Bungalow, Home Ground, and Friends of the Family (formerly Heart Change). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Elle, and Vogue, among others. Born in South Africa, she came to the US as a graduate student, earning a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University.

DAVID HUDDLE is the author many books of stories and poems, including Paper Boy, Stopping by Home, The High Spirits, Only the Little Bone,The Nature of Yearning, Intimates, A David Huddle Reader, andTenorman, and a book of essays The Writing Habit.. In 1999 he published his first novel, The Story of a Million Years, as well as Summer Lake: New & Selected Poems. Huddle teaches at the University of Vermont and the Bread Loaf School of English.

.RANDALL KENAN's books include Walking on Water, A Visitation of Spirits, and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a collection of stories which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. The recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim fellowship and the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kenan has also written a young adult biography of James Baldwin, and is a frequent reviewer for The Nation. He teaches at the University of Memphis

BARRY LOPEZ's recent work includes a short story collection, Field Notes, and a collection of essays, About This Life. He is also the author of Arctic Dreams and a novella-length fable, Crow and Weasel. He writes regularly for Harper's, STORY, The Georgia Review, Manoa , and Orion. He is a recipient of the National Book Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. For the past thirty years he has lived in rural Oregon.

BEVERLY LOWRY has published six novels, including Come Back, Lolly Ray; Emma Blue; Breaking Gentle; and The Track of Real Desires; and a book of nonfiction, Crossed Over. Her work has appeared in The Mississippi Review, The New York Times , and The New Yorker. She has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships and a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction award. A new book about Madam C. J. Walker will be published in 2001.

ANTONYA NELSON is the author of three short story collections: The Expendables, In the Land of Men, and Family Terrorists; and three novels, Talking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, TriQuarterly, and Story, and in anthologies including O.Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. She was recently named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best young fiction writers in the country. She teaches creative writing in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at New Mexico State University.

JAY PARINI is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. He has published five novels, including The Last Station and Benjamin's Crossing; four collections of poetry, including Anthracite Country and House of Days; biographies of Steinbeck and Frost, a critical study of Theodore Roethke, and a volume of essays, Some Necessary Angels. He edited the Columbia Anthology of American Poetry and the Norton Anthology of American Autobiography. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.

HELEN SCHULMAN is the author of the novels The Revisionist and Out of Time, and a collection of stories, Not a Free Show. She is co-editor of an anthology of essays, Wanting a Child. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, STORY, and Ploughshares. She has written five commissioned screenplays. She presently teaches in the Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University.

SUSAN SHREVE's novel Plum & Jaggers will be publishedin June this year. She has written eleven other novels, most recently The Visiting Physician, The Train Home, and Daughters of the New World, which was an NBC mini-series. She is the author of twenty-three children's books and, with Porter Shreve, she is the co-editor of a series of anthologies of original essays, the third of which, Tales Out of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years, will be published this year. She has received NEA, Guggenheim, and Woodwork Wilson Fellowships. She is a professor in the MFA program at George Mason University.

DEVON JERSILD is administrative director of the Conference. Her book, Happy Hours: Stories of Women and Alcohol , is forthcoming in September. Her short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards. She has reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and The Chicago Tribune.

 Carol Knauss has been the administrative assistant for the Conference for twenty-four years. She is a graduate of Barnard College.

Julia Alvarez, Poet and Fiction Writer

Louise Glück, Poet

Paul Mariani, Poet and Biographer

Robert Pack, Poet, Essayist, and Director Emeritus of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

Nancy Willard, Poet and Fiction Writer