2001 Faculty

Vivian Gornick is a memoirist and an essayist. Her books include Fierce Attachments, Approaching Eye Level, and The End of the Novel of Love. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Threepenny Review. Two of her books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1990 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been teaching nonfiction writing in MFA programs for fifteen years. Her newest book The Situation and the Story: the Art of Personal Narrative will be published in September.

Jim Paul is the author of two nonfiction novels, Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon and Medieval in L.A. Paul began writing as a poet, publishing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a 10th-century verse for the English runes, The Rune Poem. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, and a California Arts Council Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. He is currently director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

David Baker has published seven books, most recently The Truth about Small Towns (poems) and Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (criticism). He has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and has taught at Kenyon College and University of Michigan. Currently he is professor of English at Denison University where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing; he is also poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. A new book of poems, Changeable Thunder, is forthcoming.

Linda Bierds's books of poetry include Flights of the Harvest-Mare; The Stillness, The Dancing; Heart and Perimeter; The Ghost Trio, and The Profile Makers, which won the 1998 PEN/West Poetry Prize. In November, 2001, her sixth book, The Seconds, will be published by Putnam's. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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.

Carl Phillips is the author of five books of poetry: In the Blood; Cortège; From the Devotions; Pastoral; and The Tether; his translation of Sophocles's Philoctetes is forthcoming. A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Massachusetts Artists Foundations, the Morse Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also directs the MFA program in creative writing.

Arthur Sze has published six books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web:Poems 1970-1998. A new collection, The Silk Dragon: Translations of Chinese Poetry, is forthcoming in 2001. He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Pojoaque, New Mexico and currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Chase Twichell has published five books of poems, the most recent of which is The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, 1998). She's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2000 she stopped teaching (at Princeton) to start Ausable Press, to publish poetry.

Ellen Bryant Voigt has published five volumes of poetry-Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, and Kyrie, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and excerpted for "Voices of 1918," a piece commis-sioned by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. She has co-edited a collection of essays, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, and a volume of her own craft essays, The Flexible Lyric, was released last year. A recipient of NEA, Guggen-heim and Lila Wallace fellowships, Voigt teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and currently serves as Vermont State Poet.

Sandra Benítez, Puerto Rican and Midwestern by heritage, spent her youth in Mexico, El Salvador, and Missouri. Her novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, was translated into five languages and won the Minnesota Book Award and the Barnes & Nobel Discovery Award. A second novel, Bitter Grounds, also widely translated, received an American Book Award. A third novel, The Weight of All Things, was published in February. Benítez is a past University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Writer in Residence. She recently held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.

Robert Boswell is the author of four novels (Crooked Hearts, The Geography of Desire, Mystery Ride, and American Owned Love), two story collections (Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies), one play (Tongues), and one pseudonymous sci-fi novel. His stories appear in Esquire, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and elsewhere. A recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and NEA, he teaches in the new MFA program at New Mexico State University. His new novel will be published in January 2002.

David Bradley is the author of two novels, South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, which was awarded the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His nonfiction has appeared in such publications as Esquire, Redbook, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, Bradley has recently taught in the MFA Program at the University of Oregon and at the Michener Center For Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. He is currently completing a nonfiction book, The Bondage Hypothesis: Meditations on Race, History and America.

Lynn Freed's novels include The Mirror, The Bungalow, Home Ground, and Friends of the Family (formerly Heart Change). Her new novel, House of Women, is soon to be published by Little Brown. 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 United States as a graduate student, earning a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University.

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, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and 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.

Thomas Mallon is the author of five novels: Arts and Sciences, Aurora 7, Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and, most recently, Two Moons. He has written non-fiction books about diaries (A Book of One's Own) and plagiarism (Stolen Words), as well as two volumes of essays: Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact. His work frequently appears in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. The recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, he served in 1998 as chairman of the fiction judges for the National Book Awards.

Kyoko Mori's most recent book is a novel, Stone Field, True Arrow. She is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, The Dream of Water: A Memoir and Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Two Cultures, two coming-of-age novels, Shizuko's Daughter and One Bird, and a book of poems, Fallout. She is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard University.

Antonya Nelson is the author of three novels: Talking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell; and four short story collections: The Expendables, In the Land of Men, Family Terrorists, and the forthcoming Female Trouble (Scribner, 2001). 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 is a 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellow, and she teaches at New Mexico State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

David Shields's most recent book, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and the PEN West Award in creative nonfiction. He is also the author of two novels, Heroes and Dead Languages; a collection of linked stories, A Handbook for Drowning; and a work of autobiographical nonfiction, Remote, which received the PEN/Revson Award. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Details, Village Voice, Utne Reader, Story, Witness, Threepenny Review, and Conjunctions.

Joan Silber is the author of the story collection In My Other Life, and the novels In the City and Household Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Voice Literary Supplement, and The Paris Review, and is included in The Pushcart Prize XXV. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the New York Foundation on the Arts. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. A new novel, How Did It Happen, will be published in fall 2001.

Devon Jersild is administrative director of the Conference. She is the author of Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman's Life. 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.

Noreen Cargill is administrative coordinator of the Conference. She has worked with writers and readers in several venues, most recently at an independent bookstore, The Book Rack & Children's Pages, where she directed the store's writing and language school and managed its publishing house, Onion River Press.