Bread Loaf in Sicily Faculty 2013

NONFICTION

Ann Hood’s memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. She is also the author of ten novels, including the best-selling Somewhere off the Coast of Main, The Red Thread, The Knitting Circle, and most recently The Obituary Writer. The recipient of two Pushcart prizes, a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, a Best American Food Writing Award, and a Best American Travel Writing Award, Ann teaches at the New School in New York City. (www.annhood.us)

POETRY

Michael Collier, director of the Conference, has published six books of poems, including The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, most recently, An Individual History. With Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, he edited A William Maxwell Portrait. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Foundation and Thomas Watson Foundation fellowships, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004, he teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland.

Stanley Plumly’s Old Heart won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography was runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Distinguished Biography. Plumly is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. In 2010 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Plumly’s most recent collection of poems, Orphan Hours, was published in May 2012.

FICTION

Robert Cohen is the author of the novels Amateur Barbarians, Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now, and The Organ Builder, as well as a collection of stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience.  His stories and essays have appeared in Believer, Harper’s, Paris Review, and many other magazines, and his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Pushcart Prize.  Having taught fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Houston, Harvard University, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program, he currently teaches at Middlebury College.

Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the publications to which she has contributed are Believer, Conjunctions, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the New York Times, and Threepenny Review. Her honors and awards include three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.