2013 Faculty and Guests
Nonfiction
Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Also the author of Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants, Whiteout, and The Routes of Man, he contributes to Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, and other publications. A recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Conover is a distinguished writer-in-residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.
Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations and, most recently, Rough Likeness (essays). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she has received Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright fellowships. In addition she has won three book prizes: the AWP Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry. Recent work appears in Agni, Field, Georgia Review, New Republic, New Yorker, Orion, Paris Review, andelsewhere. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, and the novel Torch. Strayed has written the “Dear Sugar” column on TheRumpus.net since March 2010. Her writing has appeared in Allure, Brain, Child, Creative Nonfiction, Missouri Review, New York Times Magazine, Self, The Sun, Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, and elsewhere. The winner of a Pushcart Prize, her essays and stories have been published in Best American Essays, Best New American Voices, and other anthologies. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota.
Poetry
Linda Bierds’s ninth book of poetry, Roget’s Illusion, will be published in 2013. Her prizes include the PEN/West Poetry Award, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations. In 1998 she was named a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. Bierds’s poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, New York Times, New Yorker, and Poetry. She teaches at the University of Washington and lives on Bainbridge Island.
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Hurston Wright Award. His other poetry books are Wind in a Box, Muscular Music, and Hip Logic. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Sally Keith is the author of The Fact of the Matter and two previous collections of poetry, Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Dwelling Song. She has published poems in a variety of literary journals, including A Public Space, Black Clock, Gettysburg Review, Literary Imagination, and New England Review. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize and recent fellowships at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, UCROSS Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso, she is a member of the MFA faculty at George Mason University and lives in Washington, DC.
James Longenbach is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Iron Key; his poems have also appeared in many magazines, including New Republic, New Yorker, and Paris Review. Longenbach frequently reviews contemporary poetry in the Nation and the New York Times Book Review. His most recent book of literary criticism is The Virtues of Poetry. He teaches regularly in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at the University of Rochester, where he is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English.
Alan Shapiro has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Night of the Republic, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Shapiro has also published a novel, Broadway Baby, and two memoirs, The Last Happy Occasion, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vigil. He is the William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tom Sleigh's many books of poetry include Army Cats, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ John Updike Award, and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has published a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides' Herakles. His work appears in American Poetry Review, New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Yale Review, as well as Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. He has received the PSA's Shelley Prize, awards from the American Academy in Berlin, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lila Wallace Fund, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in Hunter College's MFA program.
Ellen Bryant Voigt has published seven volumes of poetry, including Kyrie, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Shadow of Heaven, a National Book Award finalist; and Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006, winner of The Poets’ Prize and a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays on craft have been published as The Flexible Lyric and The Art of Syntax, and a new collection of poems, Headwaters, will appear in October 2013. She has received the O.B. Hardison, Jr. Prize for poetry and teaching, from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, where she was subsequently elected a Chancellor.
Fiction
Charles Baxter is the author of five novels and five books of short stories, most recently Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. He has also published two books of criticism, Burning Down the House and Beyond Plot. He is the editor of The Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Robert Boswell has published seven novels, three story collections, and two books of nonfiction. His most recent novel is Tumbledown. His work has earned him National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, the Iowa Prize, the PEN West Award, and the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting. The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards was a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Fiction. Virtual Death was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. He shares the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
Michael Byers is the author of the story collection The Coast of Good Intentions, the novella The Broken Man, and two novels, Long for This World and Percival's Planet. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. A former Stegner Fellow, he directs the MFA program at the University of Michigan.
Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels: All This Talk of Love, The Saint of Lost Things, and A Kiss from Maddalena. He is the artistic director of Grub Street, teaches every other semester in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and for the fall 2013 term will be a visiting professor at Swarthmore College. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Vikram Chandra’s latest novel, Sacred Games, was the recipient of the Hutch Crossword Prize for English Fiction in India, a Salon.com Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Love and Longing in Bombay and Red Earth and Pouring Rain. His previous honors include the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region), the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the David Higham Prize, and the Paris Review Discovery prize. He divides his time between Bombay and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.
Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, and The Sky Below, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. She is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Boston Review, New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. Her fourth novel, Wonderland, is forthcoming in spring 2014.
Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits; two works of nonfiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He edited and wrote the introduction for The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize. He is professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound, and six short story collections, including Nothing Right. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, New Yorker, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a 2009 United States Artists Fellowship, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. Nelson teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and in University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas.
Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels, including Follow Me, Liberation, Tourmaline, Make Believe, The Manikin, and Arrogance, and two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody. Her new novel, The Gilt Cabinet, is forthcoming. Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Helena María Viramontes is the author of the novels Their Dogs Came with Them and Under the Feet of Jesus as well as collection of stories, The Moths and Other Stories. Named a USA Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Luis Leal Award. Selected for the Mary Routt Chair in Writing for Spring 2012 at Scripps College, Viramontes is a professor of creative writing in the department of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a new novel.
Special Guests
Frank Bidart’s books of poetry include Metaphysical Dog, forthcoming in May 2013; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90; Desire, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; Stardust;and Watching the Spring Festival. His awards include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Bollingen Award. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Wellesley College.
John Elder taught English and environmental studies at Middlebury College from 1973 until his retirement in 2010 and lives in the nearby village of Bristol with his wife, Rita. His most recent books, Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run, and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa, explore the meaning of Vermont’s landscape and environmental history for him as a teacher, writer, and householder. He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing.
Louise Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of eleven books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Poems 1962 to 2012 was published in the fall of 2012. Louise Glück taught at Williams College for twenty years and served as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2003-2010. Currently Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Our guests in 2013 will include:
Miriam Altshuler, President, Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency
Julie Barer, President, Barer Literary Agency
Millicent Bennett, Senior Editor, Free Press
Stuart Bernstein, Agent, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists
Jill Bialosky, Executive Editor, W.W. Norton
Sven Birkerts,Editor, Agni
H. Emerson Blake, Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director, Orion Magazine
Diane Boller, Editor, Poetry Daily
Kevin Craft, Editor, Poetry Northwest
Katherine Fausset, Agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Whitney Frick, Editor, Scribner (a division of Simon and Schuster)
Gabriel Fried, Poetry Editor, Persea Books
Amy Holman, Literary Consultant
Jenna Johnson, Senior Editor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Carolyn Kuebler, Managing Editor, New England Review
PJ Mark, Agent, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Fiona McCrae, Editor-in-Chief, Graywolf Press
Ginger Murchison, Editor, Cortland Review
Kathy Pories, Senior Editor, Algonquin Books
Ladette Randolph, Editor-in-Chief, Ploughshares
Adeena Reitberger, Editor, American Short Fiction
Martha Rhodes, Director, Four Way Books
Carey Salerno, Executive Director, Alice James Books
Jesseca Salky, Agent, HSG Agency
Don Share, Senior Editor, Poetry
Jeffrey Shotts, Senior Editor, Graywolf Press
Janet Silver, Literary Director, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
Abe Streep, Senior Editor, Outside magazine
Liz Van Hoose, Editor, Viking Penguin
G.C. Waldrep, Editor-at-Large, Kenyon Review, and Editor, West Branch
Mitchell Waters, Agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor, Copper Canyon Press
