2012 Faculty and Guests
NONFICTION
Patricia Hampl's most recent books, The Florist's Daughter and Blue Arabesque, were each included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, the New Yorker, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow, Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, visiting professor at the Centre for Life Narratives, Kingston University-London, and on the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program. Her book of essays on memoir, I Could Tell You Stories, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.
Ann Hood is the author of nine novels, including The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine; a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life; and the memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2006 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the recipient of two Pushcart prizes, a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and a Best Food Writing 2011 Award.
Scott Russell Sanders lives in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley. He is the author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, A Private History of Awe and A Conservationist Manifesto. His Earth Works: Selected Essays appears in spring 2012. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 to 2009.
POETRY
David Baker is the author or editor of fourteen books of poetry and criticism, most recently Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets and Never-Ending Birds, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011. Other honors include fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Society of Midland Authors, Poetry Society of America, and Mellon Foundation. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Endowed Chair at Denison University, teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and is poetry editor of the Kenyon Review.
Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated in London, New York, and Dublin. Her most recent volume of poetry is Domestic Violence. Other titles include Against Love Poetry, which was a New York Times Notable Book; The Lost Land; An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987; In a Time of Violence; Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990; and The Journey and Other Poems. Boland is the author of two books of prose, A Journey with Two Maps and Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time; and co-editor, with Edward Hirsch, of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, and, with Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Boland is the Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities at Stanford University and Lane Professor for the Director of the Creative Writing Program.
Linda Gregerson is the author of four collections of poetry and two volumes of criticism. Her third poetry collection, Waterborne, won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; her fourth, Magnetic North, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award; her fifth collection, The Selvage, will appear this fall. Gregerson’s many honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, and the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon foundations. She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Jane Hirshfield’s seven books of poetry include Come, Thief; After, named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She is also the author of Nine Gates, a book of essays on poetry. Her work appears in the Atlantic, six editions of The Best American Poetry; McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, Orion, and Poetry. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets.
Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai’i and grew up on the North Shore of O’ahu and in Los Angeles. He was educated at Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and UC Irvine, where he received an MFA. His work includes three books of poetry, three anthologies, and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i. He is the editor of The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America and Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America. His most recent book of poetry, Coral Road, was published in 2011. He is presently at work on a book of nonfiction entitled The Perfect Sound. He teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.
Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently Double Shadow, and a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry. His honors and awards include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and awards and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was named a Chancellor in 2006. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Natasha Trethewey is author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and three collections of poetry, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard—for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation. At Emory University she is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing. Her new book, Thrall, is forthcoming in 2012.
FICTION
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of two novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, and a story collection, Hunger. Hunger was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the winner of the Southern Review Fiction Prize. Inheritance won the PEN/Beyond Margins Prize for the Novel. She is the recipient of a Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has taught fiction writing at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl, and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Paris Review, and has been selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories. One of Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists," he teaches in the MFA Program of the University of Michigan.
Percival Everett is the author of more than twenty books of fiction, including most recently Assumption and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has also published three volumes of poetry and a book for children. His awards include the PEN USA Award for Fiction, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award, and the Hillsdale Award for Fiction. Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing, Everett lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons.
Lynn Freed’s books include six novels, a collection of stories, and a collection of essays. Her work has appeared the Atlantic, Georgia Review, Harper’s Magazine, narrativemagazine.com, National Geographic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Southwest Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, among others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/O. Henry Award, fellowships, grants, and support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Born in South Africa, she now lives in northern California.
Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, and the forthcoming Watergate. His seven books of nonfiction include studies of diaries, letters, plagiarism, and the Kennedy assassination. He is a frequent contributor to the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, and the New Yorker. A recipient of Guggenheim Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, he was recently awarded the Vursell prize, for distinguished prose style, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Washington, DC, and directs the creative writing program at The George Washington University.
Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, biographer, and critic. His seven novels include The Last Station, Benjamin's Crossing, and The Passages of H. M. His poetry includes The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. His nonfiction includes such books as The Art of Teaching, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America. The Last Station was made into an Academy Award-nominated film in 2009. He is Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College.
Helen Schulman is the author of the novels This Beautiful Life, A Day At The Beach, P. S., The Revisionist, and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P. S. was also made into a feature film starring Laura Linney and was written by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd. She co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as GQ, the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Time, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. She is an associate professor and the fiction coordinator of the Writing Program at The New School.
Danzy Senna is the author of Caucasia, winner of the Book of the Month Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. A recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, Senna is also the author of the novel Symptomatic; a memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History; and most recently, a short story collection, You Are Free. She lives in Los Angeles.
Brad Watson is the author of Last Days of the Dog-Men, The Heaven of Mercury, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award in Fiction, and Aliens in The Prime of Their Lives, a finalist both for the St. Francis College Literary Award and the PEN/Faulker Award in Fiction. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His books have received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes Colleges Association, the Southern Book Critics Circle, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
Helena María Viramontes is the author of Their Dogs Came with Them, a novel, and two previous works of fiction, The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel. 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
Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001; and The Keep. Her new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine.
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.
Our guests in 2012 will include:
Miriam Altshuler, President, Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency
Julie Barer, President, Barer Literary Agency
Diane Boller, Editor, Poetry Daily
Kevin Craft, Editor, Poetry Northwest
Katherine Fausset, Agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Gabriel Fried, Poetry Editor, Persea Books
Ted Genoways, Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review
Amy Holman, Literary Consultant
Alex Jacobs, associate, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates
Carolyn Kuebler, Managing Editor, New England Review
PJ Mark, Agent, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Alane Salierno Mason, Vice President & Senior Editor, W.W. Norton & Company
Fiona McCrae, Editor-in-Chief, Graywolf Press
Ginger Murchison, Editor, Cortland Review
Kathy Pories, Senior Editor, Algonquin Books
Ladette Randolph, Editor-in-Chief, Ploughshares
Martha Rhodes, Director, Four Way Books
Carey Salerno, Executive Director, Alice James Books
Don Share, Senior Editor, Poetry
Jeffrey Shotts, Senior Editor, Graywolf Press
Janet Silver, Literary Director, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
Abe Streep, Senior Editor, Outside magazine
Mitchell Waters, Agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor, Copper Canyon Press
