Featured Presenters

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• Kim Addonizio
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  Kim Addonizio is the co-editor of Dorothy Parker's Elbow, a mixed-genre anthology focusing on writing about tattoos. She has two books forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2009: Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within and Lucifer at the Starlite, a collection of poems. She is  the author of four more books of poetry as well as two novels from Simon & Schuster: Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. She teaches private workshops online and in Oakland, California.

• Dorothy Allison
  

  Dorothy Allison's first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award; her second novel Cavedweller was a New York Times Bestseller, won the 1998 Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Lillian Smith Prize. She is the author of a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, and a book of essays, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature. She is the Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry's Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2008.
  

• Mary Jo Bang
  

  Mary Jo Bang is the author of five collections of poems, including Louise in Love and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon.  Her most recent book, Elegy, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been the recipient of the PSA's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is currently a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
  

• Charles Baxter
  

  Charles Baxter is the author of several novels and short story collections, including Feast of Love. He is also the author of several collections of poetry and essays. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota.
  

• Robin Behn
  

  Robin Behn's recent books of poems include Horizon Note and Naked Writing. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, she teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama, where she directs the Creative Writing Club for young writers, and for Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is active as a collaborator with visual artists, composers, and choreographers.
  

• Frank Bidart
  

  Frank Bidart teaches at Wellesley College and is the author of eight books of poetry. He is the subject of On Frank Bidart, edited by Liam Rector and Tree Swenson. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His awards include the Bollingen Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. He is co-editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems and is Elizabeth Bishop's co-literary executor.
  

• Barrie Jean Borich
  

  Barrie Jean Borich is the Nonfiction Editor of Water~Stone Review and the author of My Lesbian Husband, winner of an American Library Association GLBT Nonfiction Book Award. Her first memoir is titled Restoring the Color of Roses. She is the recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship and a Loft McKnight Award for Distinction, and she is a member of the MFA faculty of Hamline University's Graduate School of Liberal Studies.
  

• Eric Bogosian
  

  Eric Bogosian is best known for writing and starring in the play, Talk Radio, as well as its film adaptation. For this work, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear Award. He received three Obie awards for solo performances Off-Broadway between 1980 and 2000. Bogosian has written a number of full-length plays including subUrbia, Griller, Red Angel, and Humpty Dumpty. He is the author of two novels, Mall and Wasted Beauty, and a novella, Notes from Underground. As an actor, Bogosian has appeared in numerous films and television programs including "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial," "Ararat," "Under Siege II," and "Wonderland." He currently stars in "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."
  

• Lucille Clifton
  

  Lucille Clifton is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College in Maryland.  She is the former Poet Laureate of Maryland and has won many prizes for her poetry, including a National Book Award. Clifton has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Cifton's first book, a collection of poetry entitled Good Times, was hailed by the New York Times as one of the year's ten best books. Clifton's later poetry collections include Next: New Poems, Quilting: Poems 1987-1990, The Terrible Stories, Generations: A Memoir, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969-1980, Blessing The Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988-2000, and Mercy.
  

• Steve Davenport
  

  Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise, which won Pavement Saw Press's Transcontinental Poetry Prize. His essay, "Murder on Gasoline Lake," is listed as Notable in Best American Essays and has been published as a chapbook. He is the Creative Nonfiction Editor of Ninth Letter and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  

• Kathryn Davis
  

  Kathryn Davis is the author of six novels, most recently The Walking Tour; Versailles; and The Thin Place. She has received a Kafka Prize for Fiction, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Fiction Award. She is the Senior Fiction Writer on the faculty of the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis.
  

• Kwame Dawes
  

  Kwame Dawes is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, including Gomer’s Song and Impossible Flying. He directs the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and programs the Calabash International Literary Festival. He was recently funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
  

• Rikki Ducornet
  

  Rikki Ducornet is the author of seven novels, including The Fan Maker's Inquisition, an LA Times Book of the Year; and The Jade Cabinet, an NBCC finalist. She has received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and an Academy Award in Literature. Her collection of short fiction, The One Marvelous Thing, was recently published.
  

• Stuart Dybek
  

  Stuart Dybek is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, as well as a volume of poetry, Brass Knuckles. He lives in Kalamazoo, where he is a professor of English at Western Michigan University.
  

• Katja Esson
  

  Katja Esson is an independent filmmaker who mixes documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. She has directed a variety of award-winning documentaries, short films, and commercials.
  

• Nick Flynn
  

  Nick Flynn's memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He is the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether and Blind Huber. He collaborated on the film Darwin's Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary. He teaches at the University of Houston.
  

• Carolyn Forché
  

  Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry, including Blue Hour and Angel of History. Her first poetry collection, Gathering of the Tribes, won a Yale Series of Young Poets Award. She teaches at Georgetown University.
  

• Reginald Gibbons
  

  Reginald Gibbons, author of eight volumes of poetry, most recently Creatures of a Day, has also published a novel, Sweetbitter, translations of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments, and other works. He has won Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Award. He is a professor of English and a co-director of the MA/MFA in Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
  

• Donald Hall
  

  Donald Hall was a U.S. Poet Laureate. His collections of poetry and prose include Without and The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon. He has published a memoir, Unpacking the Boxes. His awards include a Marshall/Nation Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
  

• Michael S. Harper
  

  Michael S. Harper is an American Poet from Brooklyn, New York. He has published more than ten books of poetry, most recently Selected Poems, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems, Honorable Amendments, and Healing Song for the Inner Ear. He was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island (1988-1993) and has received many other honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award, and a National Book Award nomination. Michael S. Harper teaches at Brown University and lives in Barrington, Rhode Island.
  

• Aleksandar Hemon
  

  Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. The Question of Bruno appeared on Best Books of 2000 lists nationwide, won several literary awards, and was published in eighteen countries. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon arrived in Chicago in 1992, began writing in English in 1995, and he now publishes regularly in the New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, McSweeneys, Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Hemon was awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. His latest novel, The Lazarus Project, was published in May 2008.
  

• C.J. Hribal
  

  C.J. Hribal is the author of the novels The Company Car, American Beauty, and Matty's Heart; and the collection The Clouds in Memphis: Stories and Novellas. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and the NEA.
  

• Andrew Hudgins
  

  Andrew Hudgins is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University and the author of one book of criticism and six books of poetry, including Ecstatic in the Poison, Babylon in a Jar, and The Glass Anvil.
  

• Gordon Hutner
  

  Gordon Hutner writes about U.S. fiction and has recently published What Americans Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960. He is also the founding editor of the scholarly journal American Literary History. He is Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  

• Major Jackson
  

  Major Jackson is the author of Hoops and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Callaloo, Poetry, and many other journals. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts as well as the Witter Bynner Foundation. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont and a faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
  

• Tyehimba Jess
  

  Tyehimba Jess's first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the National Poetry Series. He received an NEA Literature Fellowship and won a Whiting Writers' Award.
  

• August Kleinzahler
  

  August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of many books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. The first broad retrospective of his poetry, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, was published in 2008. He currently lives in San Francisco.
  

• Haki Madhubuti
  

  Haki Madhubuti is a poet, essayist, and editor. He is the author of more than twenty books including Heart Love: Wedding & Love Poems, Groundwork Selected Poems of Haki R. Madhubuti Don L. Lee, Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors, and Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973- 1983. His prose works include Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption, Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?, and Dynamite Voices I: Black Poets of the 1960s. He is the editor of Million Man March/Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology. Among his honors and awards are an American Book Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a professor of English and Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University.
  

• David Mason
  

  David Mason's books of poems include The Buried Houses, The Country I Remember, Arrivals, and the verse novel, Ludlow. His essays, “The Poetry of Life” and “The Life of Poetry,” appeared in 2000. He has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind, with John Frederick Nims; Twentieth Century American Poetry; and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke. Mason teaches at the Colorado College.
  

• Heather McHugh
  

  Heather McHugh's books of poetry include Eyeshot, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize; The Father of Predicaments; Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, a finalist for the National Book Award and named a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review; Shades; To the Quick; A World of Difference; and Dangers.
  She is also the author of a collection of literary essays entitled Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, and three books of translation: Glottal Stop: Poems of Paul Celan (with Nikolai Popov), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris); and D'après tout: Poems by Jean Follain. Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and, in 2006, one of the first United States Artists awards. From 1999 to 2006 she served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For over twenty years she has served as a visiting faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and since 1984 as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.
  

• Joe Meno
  

  Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, he is the author of four novels, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire. His short story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney's, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. He was a contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine. He teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. His latest novel, The Great Perhaps, is forthcoming in May, 2009.
  

• Honor Moore
  

  Honor Moore is the author of three collections of poetry, including Red Shoes. Her biography of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, titled The White Blackbird, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the American Scholar, the New Yorker, and O: The Oprah Magazine. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Moore lives in New York City and teaches at The New School and Columbia University.
  

• Valzhyna Mort
  

  Valzhyna Mort is a poet from Belarus. Her first U.S. book of poetry, Factory of Tears, was published by Copper Canyon last spring. Mort's work has been translated into many European languages and published in various literary magazines and anthologies, including an Anthology of Belarusian Poetry. She is known for her talks about The Politics of Language & the Poetry of Revolution.
  

• Bharati Mukherjee
  

  Bharati Mukherjee is the author of seven novels: most recently, Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride; two collections of short stories: Darkness and The Middleman & Other Stories; two books of non-fiction (the co-authored with Clark Blaise): Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy; and numerous essays on immigration and American culture.  She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Best Fiction. She has been a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley since 1989.
  

• Paul Muldoon
  

  Paul Muldoon was appointed Poetry Editor of the New Yorker in 2007. His main collections of poetry are New Weather, Mules , Why Brownlee Left, Quoof , Meeting The British, Madoc: A Mystery, The Annals of Chile, Hay, Poems 1968-1998, and Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. His tenth collection, Horse Latitudes, was published in the fall of 2006.
  

• Naeem Murr
  

  Naeem Murr's first novel, The Boy, was a New York Times Notable Book. Another novel, The Genius of the Sea, was published in 2003. His latest, The Perfect Man, was awarded The Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into eight languages. He has received many awards for his writing, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pen Beyond Margins Award. He has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Missouri, Western Michigan, and Northwestern University, among others. Born and brought up in London, he has lived in America since his early twenties, and currently resides in Chicago.
  

• Achy Obejas
  

  Achy Obejas has a forthcoming novel entitled Ruins. Her other books include Havana Noir; This is What Happened in Our Other Life; Days of Awe; and Memory Mambo. Her fiction and poetry has been widely anthologized and published in literary magazines. She is the Sor Juana Visiting Writer at DePaul University in Chicago.
  

• ZZ Packer
  

  ZZ Packer was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville. Her short-story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was included in the New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue in 2000, was a New York Times Notable Book, won a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award, received an Alex Award, and was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Packer's work has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope, Seventeen, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, New York Times Book Review, and Salon. Her work has also been anthologized in 25 and Under: Fiction. Packer lives in San Francisco with her husband and son. She is currently writing the novel The Thousands.
  

• Molly Peacock
  

  Molly Peacock, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is the author of five books of poetry, including Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Among her other works are How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle and a memoir, Paradise, Piece By Piece. She is the Editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses. Peacock's latest project is a one-woman staged monologue in poems, "The Shimmering Verge," produced by Femme Fatale Productions, which she is performing in theatres throughout North America. She is on the faculty of the Spalding University low residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
  

• Wang Ping
  

  Wang Ping is the author of the short story collections American Visa and The Last Communist Virgin, which won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of the poetry collections Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip, and the novel, Foreign Devil. She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Bush Foundation, theMinnesota State Arts Board, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
  

• Alice Quinn
  

  Alice Quinn is the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop. She was poetry editor of The New Yorker from 1987-2007 and at Alfred A. Knopf from 1976-1986. Her articles on and interviews with writers and artists have appeared in Artforum, The Forward, The New Yorker, and The New Yorker Online.
  

• Doren Robbins
  

  Doren Robbins has published several chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry and Driving Face Down, which won the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. His poems, prose poems, and short fiction have appeared in a wide array of literary magazines and anthologies, including the American Poetry Review, Kayak, Sulphur, and For Rexroth. His work has earned him numerous prizes and awards, including a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts. As the co-founder and co-editor of Third Rail, Robbins has also written critical essays on the work of many well-known writers. His interests extend to art, and he has produced poster-poems to benefit the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, poetsagainstthewar.org, and PEN. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at Foothill College, in Los Altos, California, where he is director of the Foothill College Writers' Conference.
  

• Marilynne Robinson
  

  Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping, which won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Gilead, was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She has served as writer-in-residence and visiting professor at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of Kent in England, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts. Her other works include Mother Country, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, and most recently, Home.
  

• Tomaž Šalamun
  

  Tomaž Šalamun, recognized as one of Central Europe's finest poets, is the author of thirty-five books of poetry in Slovenian, many of which have been translated into English, French, Italian, German, and other languages. His most recent books to appear in English are The Book for My Brother, Row, and Woods and Chalices . His poetry has received numerous awards, and he has served as Cultural Attaché to the Slovenian Embassy in New York.
  

• Scott Russell Sanders
  

  Scott Russell Sanders is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and personal nonfiction, including The Paradise of Bombs; Hunting for Hope; and Staying Put. His most recent book is A Private History of Awe, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Winner of the Lannan Literary Award, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award, and the John Burroughs Essay Award, he has received fellowships in support of his writing from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. He is distinguished professor of English at Indiana University.
  

• Roger Sedarat
  

  Roger Sedarat teaches Poetry and Translation in the MFA program at Queens College. He has received scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and a St. Botolph Society poetry grant. Sedarat's poetry collection, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, received the 2007 Ohio University Hollis Summers Poetry Prize.
  

• Glenn Sheldon
  

  Glenn Sheldon is a widely published author of numerous critical and creative nonfiction articles and poems in prestigious literary journals.  His critical monograph is South of Our Selves and his poetry collection is The Bird Scarer.  Sheldon is also known as a literary critic on Thomas McGrath’s work and has conducted extensive research at the McGrath archives in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  Sheldon is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at The University of Toledo.
  

• Sun Yung Shin
  

  Sun Yung Shin is a Bush Artist fellow for Literature and author of the collection of poems Skirt Full of Black. She is also co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption, and author of Cooper's Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English book for children.
  

• Brian Turner
  

  Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Poet's Prize, and was an "Editor's Choice" selection by the New York Times. He received a Lannan Literary Fellowship and an NEA grant.
  

• Luis Alberto Urrea
  

  Luis Alberto Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The Devil's Highway, his nonfiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, won the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize for fiction in 2006. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
  

• Rita Wolf
  

  Rita Wolf is an actress and theatre producer. Originally from Calcuta, she grew up in London where she trained at the Royal Court Youth Theatre. Wolf has appeared in several stage productions as well as films and television. Her credits include the lead role in the 1984 movie Majdhar. She also appeared in Girl 6 and in the television series Tandoori Nights, Law and Order, and A Wing and a Prayer. Wolf is the cofounder of the Kali Theatre Company in London, an organization that develops and promotes the work of Asian women writers. She and her children currently live in New York.

• B.D. Wong
  

  B.D. Wong received all five major New York theatre awards—Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Clarence Derwent—for his Broadway debut in M. Butterfly. His other theatre work includes his roles in Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, the Broadway musical revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Off Broadway appearance In As Thousands Cheer and The Tempest. He appears in the films Stay, The Freshman, Jurassic Park, Father of the Bride, And the Band Played On, and Seven Years in Tibet. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Following Foo (The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man), published by Harper Collins. His television credits include HBO’s Oz, Marco Polo and his current role of Dr. George Huang on Law & Order: SVU.
  

• David Yezzi
  

  David Yezzi's books of poetry are Azores, Sad Is Eros, and The Hidden Model. His libretto for a chamber opera by David Conte, “Firebird Motel,” received its world premiere in 2003 and was released on CD in 2007. His poems and criticism have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New
  York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2006, and elsewhere. His verse drama “On the Rocks” was recently performed by Verse Theater Manhattan in New York. He is executive editor of the New Criterion.
  

Tributes

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• Gwendolyn Brooks
  

  Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home; Blacks; To Disembark; The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems; Riot ; In the Mecca; The Bean Eaters; Annie Allen, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville. She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha, and Report from Part One: An Autobiography, and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

• William Gass
  

  William Gass, the David May Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Washington University, is the author of thirteen books including The Tunnel and A Temple of Texts, for which he won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Among his many major literary awards are an unprecedented three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the 1997 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award.

• Thomas McGrath
  

  Thomas McGrath, born in 1916, grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota. He strives to capture the vastness of the American West in his poems. Though his poetry is often unstructured, it is praised for its ability to loop back to the original theme or image.Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II is McGrath’s best known work and is considered his most important. Other works include The Movie at the End of the World, Waiting for the Angel, and Passages Toward the Dark.

Award Series

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• Scott Blackwood
  

  Scott Blackwood's award-winning collection of stories, In the Shadow of Our House, was published by SMU Press in 2001. His fiction has appeared most recently in the Gettysburg Review, Boston Review and Southwest Review, and the title story from his collection is featured on the New York Times Book Review's "First Chapters" website. While on a Dobie-Paisano fellowship in 2005, he completed We Agreed to Meet Just Here, a novel set in the Deep Eddy Neighborhood of Austin, Texas. Blackwood holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. He currently directs the Roosevelt University MFA Program.

• Sharon Dolin
  

  Sharon Dolin is the author of three books of poems: Realm of the Possible, Serious Pink, and Heart Work, as well as five poetry chapbooks. A poem from her winning poetry manuscript, Burn and Dodge, is forthcoming in the Best American Poetry 2007, edited by Heather McHugh, and another is in the new Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry published by Green Integer. Dolin is Poet-in-Residence at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. She has also taught for many years at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street in New York City. She directs The Center for Book Arts Annual Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Competition and is a Curator for their Broadsides Reading Series.

• David Vann
  

  David Vann is author of the bestselling memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea. He has features forthcoming in Esquire, Men’s Journal, Outside, and Outside’s GO. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Writer’s Digest, StoryQuarterly, and other magazines and has won various awards. Vann has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and John L’Heureux Fellow, taught at Stanford and Cornell, and is currently a professor at FSU.

• Sharon White
  

  Sharon White is the author of a collection of poetry, Bone House. Her memoir, Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize and an Honorable Mention from the Boston Author’s Club. Other awards include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Leeway Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in prose. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in many magazines and journals including Isotope, House Beautiful, Appalachia, Kalliope, and North American Review. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing at Temple University.