Featured Presenters

Click photos for biographies.

• John Barth
  

  John Barth is a novelist and short-story writer of over 21 works and is best known for his metafictive and postmodernist style. Born in Cambridge, Maryland, Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus).  He was a professor at Penn State University (1953-1965), University at Buffalo (1965-1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-1973), and Johns Hopkins University (1973-1995) before he retired in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road.  The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse  and the novella collection Chimera, were even more metafictional than their two predecessors. Since 1956 Barth was awarded many honors and credits, including the National Book Award for Chimera, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction in 1997, the following year he received the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1999 he was awarded the Enoch Pratt Society’s Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award.

• Kaye Gibbons
  

  Kaye Gibbons wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster at the age of 26 and it received thunderous critical acclaim, was honored in London as one of the Twenty Greatest Novels of the Twentieth Century, and since Ellen Foster has been widely translated and even made into a film for Hallmark Hall of Fame for CBS.  In 1989 A Virtuous Woman also received wide praise.  In 1997, the novel won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, the Louis D. Rubin Writing Award, and other major awards.  In 1996 Gibbons became the youngest writer ever to receive the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recognizing her contribution to French literature. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Gibbons lives in Raleigh, NC. Her last novel,  The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster, came out in December 2005 by Random House.

• Charles Wright
  

  Charles Wright went to Davidson College after serving four years in the army and then attended the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published several books of poetry, including The Grave of the Right Hand, Bloodlines, China Trace, The Southern Cross, Country Music: Selected Early Poems, The Other Side of the River, Zone Journals, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990,  and Chickamauga. Wright has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1974), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), the Academy of American Poets' Edgar Allan Poe Award (1976), an Academy Institute grant from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1977), the National Book Award in Poetry (1983), and the Brandeis Creative Arts Citation for Poetry (1987). Mr. Wright has also been awarded the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Things. Most recently, he won the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1996) for Chickamauga. He is now teaching at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, where he lives with his family.

• C.D. Wright
  

  C.D. Wright has written ten volumes of poetry including Steal Away: New and Selected Poems, Deepstep Come Shining; Tremble; Just Whistle, String Light, which won the Poetry Center Book Award; Further Adventures with You; and Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues. She has also published two state literary maps, one for Arkansas, her native state, and one for Rhode Island, her adopted state where in 1994 she was named State Poet Laureate. Among her numerous honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, as well as awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Prize, and a Whiting Award.

• Terrance Hayes
  

  Terrance Hayes is the author of Hip Logic and Muscular Music.  Hayes is the recipient of many honors and awards including a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Wind in a Box was recently published by Penguin in the spring of 2006.

• Coleman Barks
  

  Coleman Barks was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee and attended the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned poet and bestselling author of The Essential Rumi and Rumi: The Book of Love.  Robert Bly introduced him to translations of Jelauddin Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic whose wisdom and humor captivated Barks.  His first publication of the Rumi series, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, won him the Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award by William Stafford. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyer’s PBS television series on poetry, “The Language of Life” and “Fooling with Words.”  He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and is now retired and lives in Athens, Georgia.

• Ann Beattie
  

  Ann Beattie has published six collections of stories and six novels including Park City (1998), What Was Mine (1991), The Burning House (1982), My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997), Another You (1995), Picturing Will (1990), and Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976). She has received numerous awards for her work including an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ann Beattie grew up in Washington, D.C.  She has taught at Harvard College, the University of Virginia, and The University of Connecticut where she also earned her PhD. She and her husband, the artist Lincoln Perry, divide their time between Maine and Key West, Florida.

• Michael Martone
  

  Michael Martone was born in 1955 in Fort Wayne, Indiana and currently is a professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama.  He is the author of five works of short fiction: Seeing Eye, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List, Safety Patrol, and Alive and Dead in Indiana.  He also edits Story County Books, and his newest book, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, a collection of his own essays about the Midwest, won the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 1998.  He now lives with poet Theresa Pappas and their two sons Nick and Sam.

• Elizabeth Spencer
  

  Elizabeth Spencer was born in Carllton, Mississippi in 1921, and has written nine novels, seven collections of short stories, one work of non-fiction, and a play.  She received the O. Henry prize for short fiction five times over, has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1953 received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award. Spencer has received numerous other recognitions including the J. William Corrington Award for fiction and the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award for fiction.  In 2002 she received the Thomas Wolfe Award for Literature given by UNC-Chapel Hill and the Morgan Foundation, and was also inducted into the N.C. Hall of Fame.  Her major titles include The Night Travelers, The Salt Line, The Snare, No Place for an Angel, Knights and Dragons, The Light in the Piazza, The Southern Woman, Marilee, The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer and more.  After living in Italy, and then Canada Elizabeth Spencer came back to the states and now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

• Les Murray
  

  Les Murray is Australia's leading poet whose work has been published in ten languages.  Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and his book of poems Subhuman Redneck Poems, won the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. He attended the University of Sydney and served in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve. Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse (1999) centers on the picaresque life of a German-Australian sailor.  His other collections include Learning Human: New Selected Poems (2003) and Poems the Size of Photographs (2004).  Murray now resides in his native Bunyah, Australia.

• Tayari Jones
  

  Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood, with the exception of the one-year she and her family spent in Nigeria, West Africa. Although she has not lived in her hometown for over a decade, much of her writing centers on the urban south. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, is a coming of age story set during the city’s infamous child murders of 1979-81. Jones herself was in the fifth grade when thirty African American children were murdered from the neighborhoods near her home and school. Leaving Atlanta received many awards and accolades including the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. It was named “Novel of the Year” by Atlanta Magazine and “Best Southern Novel of the Year,” by Creative Loafing Atlanta. Her second novel, The Untelling, published in 2005, is the story of a family struggling to overcome to aftermath of a fatal car accident. In 2005, The Southern Regional council and the University of Georgia Libraries awarded The Untelling with the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices. Tayari Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. Currently, she is the Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Residence at George Washington University. Starting in the fall of 2007, she will be an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, Newark campus.

• Robert Olen Butler
  

  Robert Olen Butler has published ten novels and four volumes of short fiction, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  His latest book is Severance, a volume of short short stories in the voices of recently severed heads.  Among his numerous awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and two National Magazine Awards in Fiction. He is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.  He is married to the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry.

• John Barr
  

  John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation. John Barr has pursued parallel careers as poet and investment banker. As a businessman, he has been a managing director at Morgan Stanley, a managing director of Société Générale, founder and chairman of the Natural Gas Clearinghouse (now Dynegy Corporation), and founding partner of Barr Devlin Associates. As a poet, he has published six collections and has taught poetry in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. He has served on the boards of the Poetry Society of America, Yaddo, and Bennington College. 

• Rita Dove
  

  Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. Her books of poetry include American Smooth (W. W. Norton, 2004); On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Mother Love (1995); Selected Poems(1993); Grace Notes(1989); and Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
  She has also published Fifth Sunday (1985), a book of short stories; Through the Ivory Gate (1992), a novel; and The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), a verse drama; and edited The Best American Poetry 2000.

  Dove's many honors include the Academy of American Poets's Lavan Younger Poets Award, a Mellon Foundation grant, a National Humanities Medal, an NAACP Great American Artist award, as well as fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Dove was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

• Paul Zimmer
  

  Paul Zimmer has published eleven books of poetry including Family Reunion (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), which won an Award for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; The Great Bird of Love (University of Illinois Press, 1989); which was selected by William Stafford for the National Poetry Series;Big Blue Train (U. of Arkansas Press, 1993); and Crossing to Sunlight: Selected Poems, 1965-1995, (University of Georgia Press 1996).
  He has read his poems at close to 300 colleges and poetry centers from coast-to-coast, has recorded his poems for the Library of Congress, and has been awarded Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1974 and 1981. He has received three Pushcart Prizes and his poems have been widely anthologized. He was the Associate Director of the University of Pittsburgh Press (1967-1978), Director of the University of Georgia Press (1978-1984), and, until his recent retirement, Director of the University of Iowa Press in Iowa City.

• Albert Goldbarth
  

  Albert Goldbarth has published more than 20 books, including Adventures in Ancient Egypt; Many Circles; A Lineage of Ragpickers; Great Topics of the World; Marriage, and other Science Fiction; The Gods; Combinations of the Universe; and most recently, Budget Travel Through Space And Time: Poems.Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for Heaven and Earth, Goldbarth has been the recipient of numerous other prizes, awards, and fellowships. Among others, he received The Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Memorial Prize and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, both in 1995. He has held Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, A Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1975 received a nomination for the National Book Award for Jan. 31. Goldbarth is currently distinguished professor of humanities at Wichita State University in Kansas, where he has taught since 1987.

• Kevin Young
  

  Kevin Young was born 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1992, where he took poetry workshops with Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1996. His books of poetry include Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); To Repel Ghosts (2001), a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, and Most Way Home (1995), selected for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Zacharis First Books Award from Ploughshares. He is the editor of the anthologies Blues Poems (Everymans Library, 2003) and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000). His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Paideuma, and Callaloo.
  Young's awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He taught at the University of Georgia as an assistant professor in English and African American Studies. He is currently Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University.

• David Bottoms
  

  David Bottoms was born in 1949 in Canton, Georgia.  Bottoms's first collection, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, (1980), was selected by Robert Penn Warren for the 1979 Walt Whitman Award.  His most recent work includes Waltzing through the Endtime (2004), Vagrant Grace (1999), Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (1995) and the novel Easter Weekend (1990).  His poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Southern Review. He serves as editor for Five Points literary magazine, and his many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, an Ingram-Merrill Award, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Bottoms is Poet Laureate of Georgia and holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.

• Cornelius Eady
  

  Cornelius Eady is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Brutal Imagination (2001); You Don't Miss Your Water (1995); The Gathering of My Name (1991); BOOM BOOM BOOM: A Chapbook (1988); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Kartunes (1980). His honors include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation.  Eady is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

• Brigit Pegeen Kelly
  

  Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1951. She is the author of The Orchard (2004) and Song (1995), which was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets.  Her book To The Place of Trumpets (1987) was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review, and her work was chosen for the 1993 and 1994 volumes of The Best American Poetry. Brigit Pegeen Kelly has received many honors including a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award.  She has also received fellowships from the Illinois State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Brigit Pegeen Kelly now teaches English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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  Thomas Lux
  
  

  Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946. His books of poetry include The Cradle Place (2004); The Street of Clocks (2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans (1993); A Boat in the Forest (1992); The Drowned River: New Poems (1990); Half Promised Land (1986); Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (1983); Massachusetts (1981); Sunday (1979; The Glassblower's Breath (1976); and Memory's Hand grenade (1972). Lux has been the poet in residence at Emerson College (1972-1975), and a member of the Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Dean Young
  

  Dean Young’s books of poems include Skid (2002); First Course in Turbulence (1999); Strike Anywhere (1995), which won the Colorado Poetry Prize; Design with X (1988); and Beloved Infidel (1992). He has received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Stegner fellowship from Stanford, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry series three times over. He teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and also in the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program. He divides his time between Iowa City and Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Cornelia Nixon.