NONFICTION
David Haward Bain is the author of seven nonfiction works, including the definitive Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, a New York Times Notable Book, Book of the Month Main Selection, and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Sitting in Darkness, which received a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. Whose Woods These Are chronicles the history of Bread Loaf. Short work has appeared in Smithsonian, American Heritage, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere; he reviews regularly for the New York Times Book Review. He teaches at Middlebury College. An historical travel memoir, The Old Iron Road, is forthcoming in 2003.
Patricia Hampl is the author of the memoirs A Romantic Education and Virgin Time, a prose meditation on Dvorak, Spillville, and two volumes of poetry, including Resort and Other Poems, recently reissued as a Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary. Her essays, short fiction, and poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Essays. She is Regents' Professor at the University of Minnesota and permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program. She has received Guggenheim, NEA, and Bush fellowships, and was a 1990 MacArthur Fellow. Her most recent book, I Could Tell You Stories, was a National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist.
POETRY
Linda Bierds's books of poetry include Flights of the Harvest-Mare; The Stillness, The Dancing; Heart and Perimeter; The Ghost Trio; The Profile Makers, which won the 1998 PEN/West Poetry Prize; and The Seconds. Her awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Ingram Merrill foundations. In 1998, she was named MacArthur Fellow. 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 OtherPoems, 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 translation of Medea will be published in 2003. 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.
Linda Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory, as well as two books of criticism, The Reformation of the Subject and Negative Capability. A finalist for both The Poets Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award, she has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and (twice) the NEA. Gregerson is Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Edward Hirsch, a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, has published six books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (l989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), and Lay Back the Darkness (2003). He has also published three prose books: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller; Responsive Reading (1999); and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). He writes a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World and serves as President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Steve Orlen has published five books of poetry, including Kisses and This Particular Eternity. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the George Dillon Memorial Award from Poetry. He teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and in the low residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College.
Ellen Bryant Voigt has published six books of poetry: Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, Kyrie (a National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist and Teasdale Prize winner), and most recently, Shadow of Heaven. She also co-edited Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, a selection of craft essays by faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, where she teaches. Her own essays are collected in The Flexible Lyric. She has been a Guggenheim, Lila-Wallace, and NEA Fellow. In 2002 she was inducted in the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and received the Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and the O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Dean Young is the author of five books of poems: Design with X, Beloved Infidel, Strike Anywhere, First Course in Turbulence, and Skid. He has held a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Stegner from Stanford, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Fence, and Jubilat, and they have been selected for five editions of The Best American Poetry. He teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
FICTION
Andrea Barrett is the author of five novels, most recently The Voyage of the Narwhal, and two collections of short fiction: Ship Fever, which received the 1996 National Book Award, and Servants of the Map. A MacArthur Fellow, she has also been a Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and she has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She lives in Rochester, New York and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
Charles Baxter is the author of four novels: First Light, Shadow Play, The Feast of Love, and the forthcoming Saul and Patsy. He has also written four books of stories, including Believers and A Relative Stranger; a book of essays about fiction, Burning Down the House; and a volume of poetry, Imaginary Paintings. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work has been translated into many languages. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has taught at the University of Michigan and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He now lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Maxine Clair is the author of Rattlebone, a collection of short stories; October Suite, a novel; and Coping with Gravity, a volume of poems. She has received the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction and the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award and has been a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Clair grew up in Kansas and now teaches creative writing at George Washington University. She lives in Washington, DC.
Lynn Freed's novels include House of Women, The Mirror, The Bungalow, Home Ground, and Friends of the Family (formerly Heart Change). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others, and are widely anthologized. In 2002, she received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from the NEA and The Guggenheim Foundation.
Randall Kenan's books include Walking on Water, A Visitation of Spirits, and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a collection of stories. The latter was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was selected as one of 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. He is a frequent reviewer for the Nation, and he currently teaches at Duke University.
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. After taking a BA in literature and philosophy at the University of York in England, she moved to America, where she has taught in numerous writing programs including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Boston University, and the University of California at Irvine. She has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation and is the author of a collection of stories and four novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, and Eva Moves the Furniture. She is currently a writer in residence at Emerson College in Boston.
Thomas Mallon's six novels include Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Two Moons, and the forthcoming Bandbox. He has written non-fiction books about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). His work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. The recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing, he is a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
Cornelia Nixon is the author of two novels, Now You See It and Angels Go Naked, as well as a book of literary criticism. She has published stories in such magazines as Ploughshares, New England Review, Iowa Review, and Gettysburg Review, and her work has won two O. Henry Awards (one of them the first prize in 1995), two Pushcart Prizes, a Nelson Algren Prize, and the Carl Sandburg Award. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. She teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.
Sigrid Nunez is the author of four novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, and For Rouenna. She has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and of two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the 2000-2001 Rome Prize for Literature. She has taught at Hofstra University, Amherst College, Columbia University, and Smith College.
Peter Turchi is the author of four books, including the forthcoming Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. He co-edited, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life and, with Andrea Barrett, the forthcoming The Story Behind the Story: Twenty-six Writers and How They Work. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Story, and Alaska Quarterly, among other magazines. His awards include an NEA Fellowship, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. He has directed and taught in Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers since 1993.
SPECIAL GUEST
Paula Fox is the author of six novels, including Desperate Characters, The Widow's Children, and Poor George. She is also a Newberry Award-winning children's book author. She has worked as a journalist, a model, a worker in a rivet-sorting shop, a lathe operator at the Bethlehem Steel during World War II, and as a teacher of troubled children. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ADMINISTRATION
Devon Jersild is associate 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.
Our guests in 2003 will include
Miriam Altshuler, President, Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency
John Donatich, VP and Publisher, Basic Books, Basic Civitas, Counterpoint
Esmond Harmsworth, Literary Agent, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency
M.M.M. Hayes, Editor and Publisher, StoryQuarterly
Amy Holman, Director, Literary Horizons, Poets & Writers
Betsy Lerner, Literary Agent, The Gernert Company
Fiona McCrae, Editor-in-Chief, Graywolf Press
April Ossmann, Director, Alice James Books
Jordan Pavlin, Editor, Alfred A. Knopf
Heidi Pitlor, Editor, Houghton Mifflin Co.
Denise Roy, Senior Editor, Simon & Schuster
Jodee Rubins, Managing Editor, New England Review
John Rubins, Editor, Tatlin's Tower
Elizabeth Sheinkman, Literary Agent, Elaine Markson Agency
Janet Silver, Editor-in-Chief, Houghton Mifflin Co.
Carol Houck Smith, Editor-at-Large, W.W. Norton
Donna Baier Stein, Poetry Editor, Bellevue Literary Review
Christina Ward, Literary Agent, Christina Ward Literary Agency
Ronna Wineberg, Fiction Editor, Bellevue Literary Review
Rebecca Wolff, Editor, Fence
C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor, New England Review