2010 Featured Presenter Biographies
2010 Annual Conference & Bookfair
April 7-10, 2010
Denver, Colorado
Hyatt Regency Denver & Colorado Convention Center
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Michael Chabon was born in 1963, in Washington, D.C. and raised mostly in Columbia, a planned city with utopian aspirations in the Maryland tobacco country. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at UC Irvine, and spent most of the past two decades in California, with brief sojourns in Washington State, Florida, and New York State. Since 1997, he has lived with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a novelist, and their children, in Berkeley.
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Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was originally written for his master’s thesis at U.C. Irvine and became a New York Times bestseller. Chabon’s second novel, Wonder Boys, was also a bestseller, and was made into a critically acclaimed film featuring actors Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire. Michael Chabon believes that three things are required for success as a novelist: talent, luck, and discipline. As he says, “Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.” Chabon’s hope and trust certainly paid off.
Random House published his third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in September 2000. Chabon is also the author of two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories and Werewolves In Their Youth. His first young adult novel, Summerland, was published in 2002 by Talk Miramax Books and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. He has also written articles and essays, a number of screenplays and teleplays (as well as sharing story credit for Spiderman 2), and edited The Best American Short Stories 2005. Chabon’s story "Son of the Wolfman" was chosen for the 1999 O. Henry collection and for a National Magazine Award. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was selected by the American Library Association as one of the Notable Books of 2000 and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It won the New York Society Library Prize for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize. Chabon’s novella The Final Solution was awarded the 2005 National Jewish Book Award and also the 2003 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review. Michael Chabon also writes a regular column for the magazine Details.
Michael Chabon has lectured widely on topics including the art and craft of writing, the tradition of Jewish fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name but a very few. He has appeared before audiences all over the United States and in Russia, Finland, Lithuania, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany and Canada. He has spoken to the creative teams at Pixar Animation Studios about fantasy and childhood, to the employees of Industrial Light and Magic about the art of storytelling, and to many different literary, Jewish, and corporate organizations about a wide variety of topics.
Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a hardboiled detective novel set in an alternate world where Israel failed to be born and millions of European Jewish refugees took shelter in Alaska, creating a miniature American Yiddishland. It became a New York Times bestseller immediately upon publication and was nominated for an Edgar Award; it also won the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2008. In November 2007, his short swashbuckling adventure novel, Gentlemen of the Road, serialized in fifteen chapters in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, was published by Del Rey. Michael Chabon’s collection of essays entitled Maps & Legends was published by McSweeney’s in March 2008. A new collection of essays, entitled Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures & Regrets of a Husband, Father & Son, is due out in October 2009.
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Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. The author of four books of poems, including The Venus Hottentot, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, Alexander recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has received many grants and honors, most recently the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship and the 2007 Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets & Writers. A professor at Yale University where she is chair of African American Studies, Alexander, was recently named the Inaugural Poet, only the fourth poet asked to read at a presidential inauguration.
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Steve Almond is the author of two short-story collections: My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow. He has a novel, Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and a nonfiction book, Candyfreak. His latest book is (Not That You Asked), a collection of essays. He lives outside Boston.
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Rick Bass is the author of twenty-four books of fiction and nonfiction including, most recently, a memoir, The Wild Marsh. A previous memoir, Why I Came West, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Other honors include a PEN/Nelson Algren Special Citation for fiction, grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Bass has been anthologized in O.Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, Best American Travel Writing, Best Spiritual Writing, and Best American Short Stories, among others.
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Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Q Road and the story collections American Salvage and Women & Other Animals. She has received the AWP Award for Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, and the Eudora Welty Prize. Her poetry collection Love Letters to Sons of Bitches won the 2009 CBA Letterpress Chapbook award. Campbell teaches at Pacific University Low Res MFA program.
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Cyrus Cassells is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, and More Than Peace and Cypresses. His fifth book, The Crossed-Out Swastika, and a translation manuscript, Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, are forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants, and a Lambda Literary Award. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos and has served on the faculty of Cave Canem, the African American Poets Workshop. He divides his time between Austin, New York City, Paris, and Barcelona on occasion, where he works as a translator of Catalan poetry.
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Sandra Cisneros is the founder of The Macondo Foundation and organizer of the Latino MacArthur Fellows, los MacArturos. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, 2 National Endowment for the Arts, and a Texas Medal of Arts. Her House on Mango Street is required reading in schools across the nation. Her books have been published in over 20 languages.
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Matthew Dickman won the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New Yorker and Tin House. He has received fellowships for his work from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Matthew has been profiled in Poets & Writers and the New Yorker, with his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal, the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service in 2006, and the Library of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner, Museum, Thomas and Beulah, Grace Notes, Selected Poems, Mother Love, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and American Smooth. Her works also include short stories, Fifth Sunday; the novel, Through the Ivory Gate; essays, The Poet's World; the play, The Darker Face of the Earth; and a song cycle, Seven for Luck. For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. She is the editor of Best American Poetry 2000, and from 2000 to 2002 she wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post. Her latest poetry collection, Sonata Mulattica, will be published in the spring of 2009. Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
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Cornelius Eady is the author of seven books of poetry, the most recent being the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather, which has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His other titles include: Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Brutal Imagination. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is co-founder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature in 1985; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1993; a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship to Tougaloo College in Mississippi from 1992-1993; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy in 1993; and the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award in 1994. In June 1997, an adaptation of You Don't Miss Your Water was performed at the Vineyard Theatre, in New York City. In April 1999, Running Man, a music-theatre piece co-written with jazz musician Diedre Murray, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and awarded a 1999 Obie for best musical score and lead actor in a musical. Eady has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, where he directed its Poetry Center, City College, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, The Writer’s Voice, The 92nd St Y, The College of William and Mary, and Sweet Briar College.
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B.H. Fairchild
B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. The Arrival of the Future, his first full-length book of poems, appeared in 1985 and was republished in 2000. His third book, The Art of the Lathe, was a Finalist for the National Book Award and also received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN Center West Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poems of 2000. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Fairchild is the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. In 2001 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize for “consistent excellence over a long career.” Fairchild’s fourth book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, appeared in 2003 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress. In 2005, a revised edition of his second book, Local Knowledge, was published, and Fairchild was honored with the Aiken/Taylor Modern Poetry Award from The Sewanee Review. His limited-edition fine press book, Trilogy, appeared from PennyRoyal Press in January, 2009, with illustrations by Barry Moser, and Usher, his sixth book of poems, was published in June, 2009.
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Nick Flynn is the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb. He is also the author of two books of poetry, including Some Ether. He has received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress, and he teaches one semester per year at the University of Houston.
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Beth Ann Fennelly received a 2003 NEA and a 2006 USA grant. She has written three books of poetry, Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, as well as a book of essays, Great With Child. She has three times been included in the Best American Poetry series and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright to Brazil. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi.
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Kimiko Hahn is the author eight collections of poems, including The Narrow Road to the Interior and forthcoming Toxic Flora, and has received the PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award. She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, Queens College, The City University of New York.
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Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation. Her seven books of poetry include She Had Some Horses, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems. Her poetry has garnered many awards including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award: the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has released three award-winning CDs of original music and performances: Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, Native Joy for Real, and She Had Some Horses. A song from her forthcoming CD, Winding Through the Milky Way, just won a New Mexico Music Award. She has received the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award for overall contributions in the arts, from the American Indian Film Festival and a US Artists Fellowship for 2009. She performs internationally solo and with her band Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band (for which she sings and plays saxophone and flutes), and performs a one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. She co-wrote the signature film of the National Museum of the American Indian, A Thousand Roads. She is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column “Comings and Goings” for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News. She lives in Honolulu, Hawai’I,, where she is a member of the Hui Nalu Canoe Club, and in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Tranströmer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life. His essay collection Now & Then, which includes his Washington Post articles, was published in April 2007. As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW), an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. His most recent book is a collection of poems entitled Time and Materials, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In spring 2010, Ecco will publish The Apple Trees at Olema: Selected Poems & Essays, 1985-2009 and a collection of selected essays. He has been awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973. Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.
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Dave Hickey is a graduate of the University of Texas. Author of seven books and more than one hundred catalog publications for art and cultural exhibitions, his work appears in The Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002, he is currently Schaeffer Professor of Modern Letters at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, and Pieces of Air in the Epic, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M.; Autumn Sojourn; and The Firecage. She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. Hillman has received the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in California. She is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers' Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Etgar Keret, the voice of young Israel, is internationally acclaimed for his short stories. His book, The Nimrod Flip-Out, is a collection of 32 short stories that captures the craziness of life in Israel today. His books include Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God; Missing Kissinger; and Gaza Blues. Keret has received the Book Publishers Association’s Platinum Prize several times, has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize, and the Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Prize. More than forty short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize in 1998. As a filmmaker, Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep, which won First Prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Keret, at present, teaches at Ben Guryon University.
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David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and the author of The House of Blue Light and The Ha-Ha, both selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Poets series. He has published over twenty other books of poetry and literary criticism, most recently The Temple Gate Called Beautiful. Kirby’s work appears regularly in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
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Sydney Lea is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Ghost Pain. His prior collection, Pursuit of a Wound, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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Philip Lopate is the author of numerous books, including Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and Two Marriages, a work of fiction. He is the recipient of two NEA grants and holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University.
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Campbell McGrath’s many awards include a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kingsley Tufts Prize. The author of eight book of poetry, his most recent include Seven Notebooks and Shannon. He teaches at Florida International University, where he is Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.
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Michael Nava is the author of a seven-volume series of novels featuring a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer, Henry Rios. Published between 1988 and 2000, the Rios novels (The Little Death, Goldenboy, Howtown, The Hidden Law, The Death of Friends, The Burning Plain, and Rag and Bone) earned six Lambda Literary awards and won widespread critical acclaim. In 2000, Nava was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in gay and lesbian literature. Currently, Nava is at work on a historical novel set in an Arizona border town during the Mexican Revolution called The Children of Eve. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has also had a distinguished career as an appellate lawyer and is currently a staff attorney for the Honorable Carlos Moreno, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court in San Francisco.
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Achy Obejas' latest novel, Ruins, was published in March 2009. Her other books include Havana Noir, This is What Happened in Our Other Life, Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her fiction and poetry has been widely anthologized and published in literary magazines. She is the translator, into Spanish, of Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and, into English, of the upcoming anthology, Mexico City Noir. Achy Obejas is currently the Sor Juana Visiting Writer at DePaul University in Chicago.
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Marie Ponsot has published numerous works, including Springing and The Bird Catcher, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her latest collection is Easy.
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Barbara Ras is the author of the poetry collections, One Hidden Stuff and Bite Every Sorrow, which received the Walt Whitman Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her newest collection, The Last Skin, will be published in April 2010. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Georgia Review, the American Scholar, Orion, TriQuarterly, and other journals. She is the editor of Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion, and she has taught at writing workshops nationwide and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim fellowship. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she is the director of Trinity University Press.
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Sapphire is the author of two poetry collections, American Dreams and Black Wings and Blind Angels. In 2009, her novel Push was released as a motion picture, to great critical acclaim.
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George Saunders is the author of three collections of short stories: Pastoralia, a bestseller; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and In Persuasion Nation, a finalist for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection. Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were both New York Times Notable Books. Saunders is also the author of the novella-length illustrated fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and the New York Times bestselling children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, which has also won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands. Most recently, he published a book of essays, The Braindead Megaphone, which received critical acclaim. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, and Harpers Magazine, and has appeared in the O’Henry, Best American Short Story, Best Non-Required Reading, and Best American Travel Writing anthologies. In 2006, he was awarded both a MacArthur Fellowship, for "bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all his own," and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
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Philip Schultz is the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His other collections include Living in the Past and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of Deep Within the Ravine, recipient of The Academy of American Poets Lamont Prize; Like Wings, winner of an American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters Award as well as a National Book Award nomination; and the poetry chapbook, My Guardian Angel Stein. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Partisan Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and Slate, among other magazines. He is the recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 1981, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 1985, as well as the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. He lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, sculptor Monica Banks, and their two sons, Elias and August.
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Danzy Senna's debut novel, Caucasia, the story of two biracial sisters growing up in racially charged Boston during the 1970s, became an instant national bestseller. The winner of the BOMC Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and of an Alex Award from the American Library Association, it was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, one of Glamour's three best books of the year by a new writer, one of School Library Journal's Best Adult Books of the Year for Young Adults, and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Senna's second novel Symptomatic, is a psychologically astute novel that continues to examine the complicated topic of race. Senna's newest book is the memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History. In addition to fiction, Senna writes essays on issues of race, identity, and gender. She has also written extensively on the frequent experience of being mistaken for white, and how it’s led to an uncomfortable exposure of prejudices and intolerance in those around her. Senna is currently working on a memoir. She lives in LA.
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David Shields’s nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead; Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography. His three novels include Dead Languages, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award; Heroes; and Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories. His next book of nonfiction, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is forthcoming in September 2009. Shields’s many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel. Shields lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. He has also been a faculty member of Warren Wilson College’s Low-residency MFA Program since 1996. His work has been translated into more than nine languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Turkish, and Japanese.
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Leslie Marmon Silko is the author of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, articles, and film scripts. Silko is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the “Native American Renaissance”. She received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 1981 and has won prizes, fellowships, and grants from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts and The Boston Globe. She was the youngest writer to be included in The Norton Anthology of Women's Literature for her short story "Lullaby." Her novel, Ceremony, was first published in 1977 to rave reviews, remains the Native American novel most often set on college and university syllabi, and is one of the few individual works by any Native author to have received book-length critical assessments. Her last novel, Gardens in the Dunes, was praised as having a “distinctive tone (elegiac, retrospective) and many fine inventions… it has agendas, lots of them--feminist, anticlerical, millennial” according to Suzanne Ruta of the New York Times Review.
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Patricia Smith is the author of Blood Dazzler, which chronicles the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, a fnalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Smith’s previous book, Teahouse of the Almighty, was a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the first ever Hurston/Wright Award in Poetry. Her other poetry books are Close to Death, Life According to Motown, and Big Towns, Big Talk. She is the winner of the Chatauqua Literary Journal Award in poetry and a Pushcart Prize. A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam, Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman plays, one produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. In addition to her poetic works, Smith is also the author of Africans in America, a companion volume to the groundbreaking PBS documentary. Her children’s book Janna and the Kings won the Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Award. She has served as a Cave Canem faculty member, a Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University, and writer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. In 2008 she was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas. She is currently at work on Shoulda Been Jimmie Savannah, a memoir written in formal verse; the young adult novel The Journey of Willie J, and a Blood Dazzler collaboration with Paloma McGregor, a choreographer with Urban Bush Women. Smith teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine and is a professor of creative writing at the City University of New York/ College of Staten Island.
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Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Davis. He graduated from Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1951. After graduate study in Linguistics at Indiana University, he entered Graduate School at U.C. Berkeley in the Department of East Asian Languages. In 1956 he moved to Kyoto, Japan to study Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture and returned to North America in 1969. For the last thirty-eight years he has been living in northern Sierra, Nevada where he has divided his time between environmental and cultural issues and teaching with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics, and bioregional praxis at the university. He has travelled widely and has an ongoing engagement with innovative cultural movements in East Asia and Europe. His books have been translated into at least ten languages. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975, and his selected poems, No Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. Mountains and Rivers Without End won the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1997. In 2004 he was awarded the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize in Japan. In 2008 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for achievement in poetry.
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Michael Thomas is the author of Man Gone Down, selected as one of the Times Book Review's top five novels of the year, as well as a New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book. In June 2009, Thomas was awarded the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative literary prizes in the world—his novel was selected from 145 books nominated by libraries around the globe, of which four were from the US. The New York Times writes, "The IMPAC Dublin award is often described as 'the largest and most international' literary prize in the world after the Nobel." Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. Currently, he is a full-time professor of English at Hunter College. Born and raised in Boston, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children. In 2010, Thomas will publish a memoir, The Broken King, about four generations of men in his family.
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Natasha Trethewey is the author of three books, including Domestic Work, winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Prize (selected by Rita Dove) and Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She is Phillis Wheatley Professor of Poetry at Emory University.
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Jean Valentine is the current state poet of New York (2008–2010). She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her tenth and most recent book of poetry is Little Boat. Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Her newest chapbook is entitled Lucy. Valentine has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, among many other places. For more information and to hear Jean Valentine reading her work, visit www.jeanvalentine.com.
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Diane Wakoski, who was born in Southern California and educated at UC, Berkeley, lived and began her poetry career in New York City. She has earned her living as a book store clerk, a junior high school teacher in Manhattan, a library story-teller, a Visiting Writer and, for ten years on-the-road, by giving poetry readings on college campuses. Since 1975, she has been Poet In Residence at Michigan State University, where she continues to teach as a University Distinguished Professor. Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many volumes since her first book, Coins & Coffins, was published in 1962. Her selected poems, Emerald Ice, won the William Carlos Williams prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. In the nineties, Wakoski completed a four volume epic poem of The West, using the Medea myth and simple allusions to the ideas posed by quantum theory, called The Archaeology of Movies and Books. Since 2000, when her last collection, The Butcher’s Apron (selected poems focusing on the aesthetics of food and drink), was published, she has completed a new collection, The Diamond Dog Poems, which will be published Spring of 2010. She is working on a longer collection of new poems, tentatively titled Palm Trees and Celluloid Longings.
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Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over forty years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, “magpie” scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She grew up in Greenwich Village, where she still lives part-time, and bifurcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974. There, she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West. She currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. Allen Ginsberg has called her his “spiritual wife.” She is the author of over forty books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text: Outrider, which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal. Her most recent book-length poem is Manatee/Humanity. She is also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800-page epic Iovis trilogy. She is editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats at Naropa. A book of her poems translated into Chinese is forthcoming in 2009.
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Terry Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. She has testified before Congress on women’s health issues, been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda. Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her most recent book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, was published in October 2008 by Pantheon Books. In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Terry Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.
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David Wroblewski is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. He grew up in rural central Wisconsin, not far from the Chequamegon National Forest, where The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is set. He earned his master's degree from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Over the years he has lived in La Crosse, Minneapolis, and Austin, Texas. Currently, he makes his home in Colorado with the writer Kimberly McClintock, their dog Lola, and their cat Mitsou.
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Gary Young’s honors include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands, Days, Braver Deeds (winner the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), No Other Life (winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America), and most recently, Pleasure. His New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from White Pine Press. He is the co-editor of The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. He has produced a series of artist’s books, most notably Nine Days: New York, A Throw of the Dice and My Place Here Below. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lives in the mountains north of Santa Cruz with his wife and two sons.
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Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, including Jelly Roll: A Blues, finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently, Dear Darkness. Young is the editor of five other collections, including The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. He is Atticus Haygood Professor of Poetry and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
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Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including the Boston Review, Fence, Alaska Quarterly Review, Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, the New Yorker, and the New Republic. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. His third full-length collection of poems, Come On All You Ghosts, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. He lives in San Francisco, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert.
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Craig Arnold (born November 16, 1967) was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells, was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and a MacDowell Fellowship. He taught poetry at the University of Wyoming. His poems have appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1998 and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, and in literary journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, New Republic and Yale Review. Arnold grew up in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University in 1990 and his PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah in 2001. He was also a musician, and performed as a member of the band Iris. As of April 30, 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the small volcanic island of uchinoerabujima, Japan. He went for a solo hike to explore an active volcano on the island and never returned to the inn where he was staying. While Japanese law mandates government-backed searches for three days, on April 30, 2009, the Japanese government agreed to extend the search an additional three days. Arnold was not found, and the search was then picked up by the international NGO 1st Special Response Group. Craig Arnold's trail was found near a high cliff, and he was presumed to have died from a fatal fall near the date of his disappearance.
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Mahmoud Darwish was the most acclaimed poet in the Arab world. His poetry has been an indisputable testimony to the catastrophe of the Palestinian people. But over the last twenty years, especially since the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, his poetry has come to embrace exile as a universal human emotion. Darwish published his first book of poetry in 1964, at the age of 22. During his lifetime, he published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into 35 languages. His twenty books of poetry include The Adam of Two Edens, Mural, A Bed of Stranger, Diwan, Unfortunately It Was Paradise, The Butterfly's Burden, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, and Eleven Planets. His most recent book, If I Were Another, is available from FSG. He received numerous international awards, including France’s highest medal as a Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres, the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, and Holland’s Prins Claus Award for achievement in poetry. A former member of the PLO’s Executive Council, and the Poet Laureate of Palestine, he helped draft the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence. He had been a member of the PLO executive council but resigned over the Oslo accords in 1993. The final years of his life he split his residence between Ramallah (where he continued to edit the internationally acclaimed literary review, Al-karmel) and Amman, Jordan. Darwish died on August 9, 2008 following heart surgery. He was buried in the West Bank City of Ramallah and granted a state funeral.
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Vine Deloria Jr. was a leading Native American scholar, whose research, writings, and teaching have encompassed history, law, religious studies, and political science. He is the former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, a retired professor of political science at the University of Arizona, and a retired professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Evolution, Creationism, and other Modern Myths; Spirit & Reason; God Is Red; Red Earth, White Lies; Power and Place: Indian Education in America, Custer Died for Your Sins, and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties.
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Madeline DeFrees has published two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves and Blue Dusk, which was awarded the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Both books received Washington State Book Awards (2002 and 2007). She has published essays, reviews, and short stories, as well as two nonfiction books about convent life. DeFrees spent 38 years as a nun with the Catholic Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. She entered the community after high school and later requested release because, in her words, “religious life and poetry both demand an absolute commitment.” As Sister Mary Gilbert, DeFrees earned a BA in English from Marylhurst College in 1948 and an MA in Journalism from the University of Oregon in 1951. She taught at Holy Names College in Spokane from 1950 to 1967, and resumed her baptismal name before going on to teach at the University of Montana from 1967 to 1979. From 1979 to 1985, she taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since she retired in 1985, she has held residencies at Bucknell University, Eastern Washington University, and Wichita State University. DeFrees received fellowships in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008, the University of Washington awarded her the Maxine Cushing Gray Visiting Writers Fellowship.
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Edward Dorn was born in 1929 and grew up in eastern Illinois, on the banks of the river Embarras (a tributary of the Wabash). He never knew his father, his mother was of French ancestry, and his grandfather a railroad man. He attended a one-room school, while in high school played billiards with the local undertaker for a dime a point, and after two years at the University of Illinois and two stops at Black Mountain College, traveled through the trans-mountain West following the winds of writing and employment. From 1965 to 1970 he lived in England, where he lectured at the University of Essex. He then lived and taught in Kansas, Chicago, and San Francisco; throughout the 1980s he taught in the Creative Writing Program of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and, with his wife Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, edited the newspaper Rolling Stock. He died of cancer at his home in Denver, Colorado, on December 10, 1999. His major works of poetry include: The Newly Fallen, Hands Up!, Geography, North Atlantic Turbine, Recollections of Gran Apachería, Hello La Jolla, Yellow Lola, Gunslinger, and Abhorrences. His major works of prose include: The Shoshoneans, Some Business Recently Transacted in the White World, By the Sound, and Way West: Stories, Essays, and Verse Accounts: 1963-1993.
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Charles Johnson taught creative writing at the University of Washington from 1976 to 2009. His first book, a collection of political cartoons entitled Black Humor, appeared in 1970. In fall 1972 Johnson introduced himself to John Gardner, author of many distinguished novels and then professor of English at Southern Illinois. Under Gardner’s tutelage, Johnson began writing his first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing. His critique of the phenomenological aesthetics of contemporary African American fiction, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, appeared in 1988. Following the well-reviewed Oxherding Tale, Johnson wrote his masterpiece, Middle Passage, which won the prestigious National Book Award (Johnson became just the second African American male to win the prize, following Ralph Ellison in 1953 for Invisible Man). Johnson published a fourth novel, Dreamer, and three collections of short fiction: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Soulcatcher and Other Stories, and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories. He published some of his essays about his spiritual growth and Buddhist philosophy in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. He has written more than twenty screenplays, including the script for the prize-winning PBS film of Booker T. Washington (Booker). Moreover, Johnson has written or edited the text to such important nonfiction books as Black Men Speaking, Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., and Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Struggle for Civil Rights. His body of work has garnered many prizes, most notably a MacArthur Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
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William Kittredge grew up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon and taught at the University of Montana for 29 years, retiring as Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing in 1997. Kittredge’s books include a memoir, Hole in the Sky; and two collections of essays, Owning It All and Who Owns the West? along with Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin, The Best Stories of William Kittredge; and The Willow Field, a novel published in 2006. The Last Rodeo: Best Essays of William Kittredge was published in 2007. Kittredge and Annick Smith edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology and were co-producers of A River Runs Through It. Kittredge received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts, was co-winner of the Montana Governor’s Award for Humanities and co-winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Charles Frankel Award for service to the humanities, awarded by President Clinton. In 2006 he was given the Chiles Award for Service to the Great Basin, in 2007 the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angles Times and in 2008 he received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Western Literature Association.
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Reg Saner is the author of many collections of poetry and essays, including Reaching Keet Seel, Climbing into the Roots, and The Dawn Collector. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including the Georgia Review, On Earth, and Ecotone. His honors include the Walt Whitman Award and the Wallace Stegner Award. He is professor emeritus at the University of Colorado.
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Reginald Shepherd was the author of Fata Morgana; Otherhood, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Prize; Wrong; Angel, Interrupted, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and Some Are Drowning, winner of the Associated Writing Programs’ Award. He also wrote fiction, creative nonfiction and critical essays. Editorial posts included The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Lyric Postmodernisms, and Bayou. Shepherd was born on April 10, 1963 in New York City and raised in the Bronx. He earned his BA from Bennington College in 1988, and MFAs in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1991 and the University of Iowa in 1993. He taught literature and/or creative writing at Antioch University, the University of West Florida in Pensacola, Cornell University and Northern Illinois University during his academic career. Reginald met his partner, Robert Philen, in December, 1999 in Ithaca, New York. They lived together in Pensacola from July, 2001, until Shepherd's death on September 10, 2008 after a courageous battle with cancer. Shepherd was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Florida Book Award (Silver Medal) and two Pushcart Prizes. He received a Fellowship from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation in 2004 and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2000. Shepherd also earned a Merit Award from the George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, a Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Literature Fellowship from the NEA. He was a winner of the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Paumanok Poetry Award, an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the George Kent Prize from Poetry magazine.
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Photo Credits:
- Rick Bass photo by Antonin Borgeaud
- Michael Chabon photo by Stephanie Rausser
- Sandra Cisneros photo by Ray Santisteban
- Mahmoud Darwish photo by Mohammad Abu Ghosh
- Rita Dove photo by Fred Viebahn
- Cornelius Eady photo by Chip Cooper
- Nick Flynn photo by Matt Valentine
- Robert Hass photo by Margaretta Mitchell
- David Kirby photo by Barbara Hamby
- William Kittredge photo by Tony Cesare
- Campbell McGrath photo by John Klingler
- Michael Nava photo by Dan Nicoletta
- Achy Obejas photo by Ross Furman
- Marie Ponsot photo by Michael Lionstar
- Barbara Ras photo by Anna Zoe Rucker
- Reg Saner photo by Timothy Saner
- Sapphire photo by Lina Pallotta
- George Saunders photo by Catlin Saunders
- Philip Schultz photo by Monica Banks
- Alan Shapiro photo by John Rosenthal
- Reginald Shepherd photo by Robert Giard
- Patricia Smith photo by Peter Dressel
- Gary Snyder photo by Doug Tompkins
- Natasha Trethewey photo by Matt Velentine
- Jean Valentine photo by Max Greenstreet
- Anne Waldman photo by Greg Fuchs
- Terry Tempest Williams photo by Mark Babushkin
- David Wroblewski photo by Marion Ettinger
- Kevin Young photo by Todd Martens
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