2011 Faculty and Guests
NONFICTION
Jane Brox’s fourth book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was published in 2010. Her previous books are Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
Ted Conover's latest book is The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. His Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Conover is also the author of Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes; Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants; and Whiteout. He contributes to New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Nation, and other publications. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is a distinguished writer-in-residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.
David Shields’s most recent book is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of nine other books, including 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 Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Slate. Shields’s work has been translated into fifteen languages.
POETRY
Marianne Boruch is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Grace, Fallen from and Poems: New and Selected, and two books of essays, Poetry’s Old Air and In the Blue Pharmacy. A memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, is forthcoming, as is The Book of Hours, a collection of poems. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and Isle Royale National Park. She developed the MFA program at Purdue University, serving as its first director from 1987 until 2005, where she remains on faculty. Since 1988, she has also taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program. She's been awarded a Fulbright-Visiting Professorship in the U.K. for spring 2012, where she will be teaching and writing at the University of Edinburgh.
Louise Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of ten books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her most recent book is A Village Life: Poems. Louise Glück taught at Williams College for twenty years and served as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2003-2010. Currently Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A. Van Jordan is the author of Quantum Lyrics; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times; and Rise, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Jordan was also awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2005 and a Pushcart Prize in 2006, its 30th Edition. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists Williams Fellowship, Jordan is a professor in the department of English at the University of Michigan.
James Longenbach is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Iron Key; his poems have also appeared in many magazines, including New Republic, New Yorker, and Paris Review. In addition, his reviews of contemporary poets appear frequently in Nation and New York Times Book Review; the most recent of his five books of literary criticism is The Art of the Poetic Line. He teaches regularly in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at the University of Rochester, where he is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English.
Tom Sleigh’s most recent book, Army Cats, was published this spring. Space Walk won the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award. His book of essays, Interview with a Ghost, was published in 2006. He has also published After One, Waking, The Chain, The Dreamhouse, Far Side of the Earth, Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks, and a translation of Euripides's Herakles. He has won the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College.
Arthur Sze has published nine books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light, winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award; Quipu; The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998; Archipelago, winner of an American Book Award; and The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese. He is also the editor of Chinese Writers on Writing. Among his many awards are a Lannan Literary Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe (2006-2008) and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Ellen Bryant Voigt has published seven volumes of poetry, including Kyrie (1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Shadow of Heaven (2002), and Messenger: New and Selected Poems (2007), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of The Poets’ Prize. Her prose work includes The Flexible Lyric, a collection of essays on craft, and The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. A former Vermont Poet Laureate, she has been a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and an elected member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, she has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, the Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, Best American and Pushcart prizes, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and lives in Cabot, VT.
FICTION
Past Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Richard Bausch currently serves as the Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writing Program at the University of Memphis. A Georgia native, he is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers: Three Short Novels, and most recently Something is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length motion picture that was directed by Bob Balaban. Bausch's work has appeared in Atlantic, Esquire, Harper's Magazine, New Yorker, Playboy, Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award, and The Pushcart Prize Stories. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and, for Peace, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Charles Baxter is the author of The Soul Thief; Saul and Patsy; The Feast of Love, a finalist for the National Book Award and made into a film by Robert Benton, starring Morgan Freeman; First Light; and Shadow Play. He has also published five books of stories, including his new collection, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, and essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. He has edited or co-edited three books of essays, The Business of Memory, Bringing the Devil to His Knees, and A William Maxwell Portrait. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Maud Casey is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy; and a collection of stories, Drastic. She has received international fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, and Chateau de Lavigny, and is the recipient of the Calvino Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl, and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic, and Paris Review, and has been selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories. One of Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists," he teaches in the MFA Program of the University of Michigan.
Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; A Seahorse Year, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award; and The Sky Below. She is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Boston Review, Bookforum, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, 1995-1997. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. In the spring of 2011, she will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome as the 2010-11 Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow.
Randall Kenan’s books include Walking on Water; A Visitation of Spirits; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and selected as one of the New York Times Notable Books of 1992. Kenan has also written a young adult biography of James Baldwin. His most recent book, The Fire This Time, is a work of nonfiction. Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Chang-rae Lee is the author of the novels Native Speaker, awarded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and an ALA Notable Book of the Year Award; A Gesture Life, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction, and cited as a Notable Book of Year by New York Times, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and Los Angeles Times; and Aloft, which was a New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book. His fourth novel, The Surrendered, published last year, was a New York Times Notable Book, and selected as a Top 10 Books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly and Entertainment Weekly. Lee has also written stories and articles for New Yorker, New York Times, Food & Wine, Granta, and many other publications. He was born in Seoul, Korea and was educated at Phillips Exeter, Yale University, and the University of Oregon. He is a professor in the Lewis Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where he teaches creative writing.
Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. Sempre Susan, her memoir about Susan Sontag, will be published in April 2011. Among the many journals to which she has contributed are the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, Believer, and Tin House. Her honors and awards include three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.
Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels, including Follow Me, Liberation, and Tourmaline, and two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Nation, Conjunctions, Black Clock, and other journals. Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of thirteen books, including The Hummingbird’s Daughter, winner of the 2005 Kiriyama Prize, and The Devil’s Highway, 2004 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and winner of the Lannan Literary Award. His most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, was a national bestseller and last year he published a graphic novel, Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush. In 2010, Urrea won an Edgar Award for best short story for his mystery, Amapola. His first book, Across the Wire, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award, and his collection of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 Small Press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. His memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, won a 1999 American Book Award. A member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame and winner of the 2009 Luis Leal Award for Chicano Literature, Urrea is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
SPECIAL GUESTS
John Elder taught English and environmental studies at Middlebury College from 1973 until his retirement in 2010, and lives in the nearby village of Bristol with his wife, Rita. His most recent books, Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run, and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa, explore the meaning of Vermont’s landscape and environmental history for him as a teacher, writer, and householder. He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing.
Philip Levine is the author of seventeen collections of poems and two books of essays. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1980 for Ashes and again in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California.
Our guests in 2011 will include:
Miriam Altshuler, President, Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency
Julie Barer, President, Barer Literary Agency
Elyse Cheney, President, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates LLC
Gary Clark, Development Director, Vermont Studio Center
Kevin Craft, Editor, Poetry Northwest
Thom Didato, Editor and Publisher, Failbetter.com
Ted Genoways, Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review
M.M.M. Hayes, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, StoryQuarterly
Amy Holman, Literary Consultant
Andy Hunter, Co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature
Jenna Johnson, Senior Editor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Carolyn Kuebler, Managing Editor, New England Review
Scott Lindenbaum, Co-Publisher and Editor, Electric Literature
PJ Mark, Agent, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Fiona McCrae, Editor-in-Chief, Graywolf Press
Kathy Pories, Senior Editor, Algonquin Books
Ladette Randolph, Editor-in-Chief, Ploughshares
Stephen Reichert, Editor and Founder, Smartish Pace
Martha Rhodes, Director, Four Way Books
Elizabeth Scanlon, Editor, American Poetry Review
Don Share, Senior Editor, Poetry
Jeffrey Shotts, Senior Editor, Graywolf Press
Janet Silver, Literary Director, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
Anjali Singh, Senior Editor, Simon & Schuster
Mitchell Waters, Agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor, Copper Canyon Press