Previous Visiting Writers

Jennifer Atkinson, poet, is the author of three collections of poetry, The Dogwood Tree, which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, The Drowned City, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, and most recently, Drift Ice. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals including The New Republic, The Iowa Review, and Three Penny Review, and has been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal and Japan and at the University of Iowa and Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University, where she teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Program and is an Associate Professor in English.

Kim Barnes, creative nonfiction, is the author of two memoirs, Hungry for the World and In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, which was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. In the Wilderness was also honored with a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. In 1995, Barnes received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction. Together, she and Mary Clearman Blew edited Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers. Barnes' personal essay, "The Ashes of August," was selected for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her first novel Finding Caruso was published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam in 2003. Her Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women over Forty, co-edited with Claire Davis, was published by Doubleday in 2006. Barnes teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband Robert Wrigley and their children on Moscow Mountain. She is currently serving as Idaho Writer-in-Residence.

Todd Boss grew up on an 80-acre cattle farm in Wisconsin, which is the setting for his debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (Norton, 2008). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and The New Yorker. His second collection, Overtures on an Overturned Piano, will be published by W. W. Norton in Fall, 2011. He is the co-founder of Motionpoems, a poetry film initiative. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is the poet laureate of Nina's Cafe.

Marilyn Chin, poetry, was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. She is the author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994), and Dwarf Bamboo (1987). Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including ones from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received a Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, the Paterson Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, as well as residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Residency, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her work has been featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. She was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series The Language of Life. She has read and taught workshops all over the world. Recently, she taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and was guest poet at universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney and Berlin and elsewhere. In addition to writing poetry, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. Presently, she is writing a book of poetic tales. She co-directs the MFA program at San Diego State University.

Jim Daniels, poetry, was born in Detroit and currently lives in Pittsburgh, where he is the Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and directs the Creative Writing Program. He is the author of nine books of poems, including Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Street, a book combining his poems with the photographs of Charlee Brodsky. In addition, he is the author of two collections of short stories, No Pets and Detroit Tales. He has two books forthcoming in 2007, Mr. Pleasant, a collection of short stories from Michigan State University Press, and American/Dream, poems from Eastern Washington University Press. He has edited or co-edited four anthologies of poetry, including Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He wrote the screenplays for “Dumpster” (2006) and "No Pets” (1995), two independent feature films, both of which appeared in film festivals in the U.S. and abroad. He has also received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.

J.D. Dolan, creative nonfiction, has published work in Esquire, Details, The Nation, New Stories from the South, and Best American Sports Writing. His first book, Phoenix: A Brother's Life (Knopf, 2000), was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, and one of the top ten memoirs of the year by the Detroit Free Press. He was recently awarded a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dolan is an associate professor at Western Michigan University, where he teaches in the creative writing program.

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932, has lived in the United States since 1939, and was educated in the public school system of New York City. She was graduated from Hunter College and did graduate work at Queens College, also a branch of the City University of New York. Espaillat taught high school English in New York City for several years, and writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her poems, essays, narratives and translations have appeared in numerous magazines, on many websites, and in over fifty anthologies.

Espaillat has published eleven collections of her work: Lapsing to Grace (Bennett & Kitchel, 1992); Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press, 2001), which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; "Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word" (Oyster River Press, 2001), a bilingual chapbook that is part of a series titled Walking to Windward: 21 New England Poets; a chapbook in the Pudding House invitational series, titled "Rhina P. Espaillat: Greatest Hits, 1942 - 2001" (Pudding House Press, 2003); The Shadow I Dress In (David Robert Books, 2004), winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize; a chapbook titled "The Story-teller's Hour" (Scienter Press, 2004); Playing at Stillness (Truman State University Press, 2005); a bilingual collection of poems and essays titled Agua de dos rios, published under the auspices of the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture (Editora Buho, 2006); a bilingual collection of short stories titled El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (CEDIBIL, 2007); and a poetry collection titled Her Place in These Designs (Truman State University Press, 2008).

Thomas French worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times for 27 years, writing serialized book-length narratives that appeared in the newspaper one chapter at a time. One of his projects, Angels & Demons, was awarded a Pulitzer prize for feature writing. French now teaches at Indiana University and in Goucher College's MFA program for creative nonfiction. He also teaches at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and at writing conferences around the world, from Paris to Singapore to Johannesburg. He is the author of three nonfiction books, including Unanswered Cries, an account of a Florida murder case, and South of Heaven, the story of the secret lives of high school students. His most recent book, Zoo Story, is based on seven years of reporting and research and chronicles life and death inside Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo. A New York Times bestseller, Zoo Story was recently featured on The Colbert Report, in People Magazine and on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Alice Fulton's most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment, published by W.W. Norton. Her book Felt (W.W. Norton), was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. This biennial poetry prize is given on behalf of the nation in recognition of the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. Felt also was selected by the Los Angeles Times as a Best Book and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Fulton's many honors include fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Michigan Society of Fellows. Her work has been included in six editions of The Best American Poetry series, the Pushcart Prize series, and has been adapted several times for musical and theatrical productions. Alice Fulton has been the Holloway Poet at University of California, Berkeley, and a Visiting Professor at University of California, Los Angeles; Ohio State University, Columbus; the University of North Carolina, Wilmington; and Vermont College. She is currently the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

Patricia Hampl, creative nonfiction, first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage, which was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1981. This book and subsequent works established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years. In 2004 Borealis Books (of the Minnesota Historical Society Press) published The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald co-edited and with an introduction by Patricia Hampl. Her most recent book is Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (a section of which appeared in Granta, Fall 2004 and was chosen for The Best Spiritual Writing 2005). The Florist’s Daughter, a memoir, was published by Harcourt in October 2007.

She has also published two collections of poetry, Woman before an Aquarium, and Resort and Other Poems. In 1987 she published Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak's summer in Iowa, with engravings by Steven Sorman. Virgin Time, a memoir about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 1992 (paperback Ballantine, 1993, new paperback from Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2005). In 2001, Resort and Other Poems was reissued by Carnegie Mellon University Press, as part of its Contemporary Classics series in American poetry.

In 1999, W.W. Norton published I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, as well as a new edition of A Romantic Education with a post-Cold War “Afterword” in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. I Could Tell You Stories was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Awards in the category of General Nonfiction in 2000.

Four of her books have been named "Notable Books" of the year by The New York Times Book Review. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Ms. Hampl has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bush Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (twice, in poetry and prose), Ingram Merrill Foundation, and Djerassi Foundation. Ms. Hampl’s fiction, poems, reviews, essays and travel pieces have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

Ms. Hampl is Regents Professor and also McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where she teaches fall semesters in the MFA program of the English Department.

William Heyen, poetry, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940. He is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at SUNY Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Ohio University. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has won NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, and other fellowships and awards. He is the editor of American Poets in 1976, The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, and September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Heyen's work has appeared in over 300 periodicals including Poetry, American Poetry Review, New Yorker, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, and in 200 anthologies. His books include Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology, The Host: Selected Poems, Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, and Ribbons: The Gulf War from Time Being Books; Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry and Crazy Horse in Stillness, winner of 1997's Small Press Book Award for Poetry, from BOA; Shoah Train: Poems, a Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, from Etruscan Press; and The Rope: Poems, The Hummingbird Corporation: Stories, and Home: Autobiographies, Etc. from MAMMOTH Books. Carnegie-Mellon University Press has recently released his first book, Depth of Field (Louisiana State University Press, 1970) in its Classic Contemporaries Series.

Richard Jackson is the author of nine previous books of poetry, two books of criticism, a translation from Slovene, and several chapbooks. His most recent collection, Resonance was published by the Ashland Poetry Press in January 2010. He is a winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH and Witter-Bynner Fellowships, five Pushcart appearances, as well as prizes from Prairie Schooner, Rattle and Crazyhorse. Jackson’s poems have been translated into 15 languages. He was a recipient of the Slovene Order of Freedom Award for Humanitarian and Literary work in the Balkans and recipient of the 2009 AWP George Garrett Award. Jackson has taught at the Iowa Summer Festival, Prague Summer Program, Bread Loaf and other venues, and teaches at UT Chattanooga and the Vermont College of Fine Arts low residency program, winning teaching awards at both schools.

William Kittredge, creative nonfiction, grew up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon and farmed there until he was 33, after which he studied at the University of Iowa. He taught Creative Writing at the University of Montana for 29 years and retired as Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing. Kittredge has held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, received two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Awards for Excellence. He was winner of the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts, co-winner of the Montana Committee for the Humanities Award for Humanist of the Year, and winner of the PEN West Award for non-fiction book of the year. He now lives in Missoula, Montana.

M.L. Liebler, poetry, teaches in the Department of English, American Studies and Labor Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit where he leads courses in cultural literature dealing with such topics as The Beatles Impact on Popular Culture, The Vietnam War through Literature, Labor & Working Class Literature, Performance Art and others. He is the author of several books of poetry including the recent book from The Wayne State University Press, Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (2008), a new CD with his Magic Poetry Band entitled The Kurl of the Butterfly's Tongue and the book/cd released from Western Michigan University's New Issues Press in 2004 entitled The Moon A Box, which features the music of members of The Minutemen, The Band, Hot Tuna, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe McDonald, Al Kooper, The Magic Poetry Band, The Van Morrison Band and Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. He also reads, teaches and performs in Israel, Russia, China, Germany, UK, Malta, France, Prague and across the USA. Liebler has taught at WSU since 1980. www.mlliebler.com

Phillip Lopate, creative nonfiction, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1943. He received a B.A. from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections: Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003).

Lopate has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best non-fiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood, and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award.

Debra Marquart, creative nonfiction, is a professor of English at Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as The North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Sun Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, Orion, Mid-American Review and Witness. In the seventies and eighties, Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories draws from her experiences as a female road musician. Marquart continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, with whom she has released two CDs: Orange Parade (acoustic rock); and A Regular Dervish (jazz-poetry). Marquart’s work has received numerous awards and commendations, including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award (Crab Orchard Review), the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater’s Prize from New Rivers Press, the Minnesota Voices Award, the Pearl Poetry Award (Pearl Editions), the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, and a Pushcart Prize. A performance poet, Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was published by Counterpoint Books in 2006, and she’s currently at work on a novel, set in Greece, titled The Olive Harvest.

Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002) which was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and Blessing of the Animals (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009).

She has received five Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, Utne Reader, The Georgia Review and Witness.

She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2004), and she serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of The New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and The Virgin of Bennington.

Kathleen Norris has published seven books of poetry. Her first book of poems was entitled Falling Off and was the 1971 winner of the Big Table Younger Poets Award. Soon after, she settled down in her grandparents’ home in Lemmon, South Dakota, where she lived with her husband, the poet David Dwyer, for over twenty-five years. The move was the inspiration for the first of her nonfiction books, the award-winning bestseller Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was selected as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal.

Her next book, The Cloister Walk, is structured as a diary of her monastic experience interspersed with meditations on virgin saints, Emily Dickinson, celibacy, loneliness, monogamy, and a hymnist of the early church, Ephrem of Syria. Her book Amazing Grace continues her theme that the spiritual world is rooted in the chaos of daily life. Her book, The Virgin of Bennington, is a continuous narrative in which she shares the period of her life before Dakota. Other books include Journey: New and Selected Poems, and Little Girls in Church.

Kathleen Norris is the recipient of grants from the Bush and Guggenheim Foundations. Her new book, entitled Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, was published in September 2008. It is a study of acedia, the ancient word for the spiritual side of sloth. She examines the topic in the light of theology, psychology, monastic spirituality, and her own experience.

Widowed in 2003, Kathleen Norris now resides in Hawaii, where she volunteers at her local Episcopal Church. She travels to the mainland regularly to speak to students, medical professionals, social workers, and chaplains at colleges and universities, as well as churches and teaching hospitals.

Ed Ochester’s most recent books are Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (Autumn House Press, 2007); The Republic of Lies (chapbook, Adastra Press, 2007); The Land of Cockaigne (Story Line Press, 2001); and American Poetry Now (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), an anthology of contemporary American poetry. He edits the University of Pittsburgh Press Pitt Poetry Series and the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction. From 1978 to 1998 he was director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and was twice elected president of Associated Writing Programs. Ochester has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He recently won the $15,000 “Artist of the Year” award of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and in 2006 won AWP’s George Garrett Award for service to literature. He co-edits the poetry magazine 5 AM and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College M.F.A. program.

Eric Pankey, poet, is the author of eight books: For the New Year, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Heartwood, Apocypha, The Late Romances, Cenotaph, which won the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia, Oracle Figures, Reliquaries, and most recently, The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University, he lives with his wife, the poet Jennifer Atkinson, in Fairfax, Virginia.

Scott Russell Sanders, creative nonfiction, was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1945. His father came from a family of cotton farmers in Mississippi, his mother from an immigrant doctor’s family in Chicago. He spent his early childhood in Tennessee and his school years in Ohio. He studied physics and English at Brown University, graduating in 1967. With the aid of a Marshall Scholarship, he pursued graduate work at the University of Cambridge, where he completed his Ph.D. in English in 1971. Since 1971 he has been teaching at Indiana University, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English.

Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put, Writing from the Center, and Hunting for Hope, and A Private History of Awe, a coming-of-age memoir, love story, and spiritual testament, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A Conservationist Manifesto, his vision of a shift to a sustainable society, was published in 2009.

He has received the Lannan Literary Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Book Award, the Kenyon Review Literary Award, and the John Burroughs Essay Award, among other honors, and has received support for his writing from the Lilly Endowment, the Indiana Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was named one of five inaugural winners of the Indiana Humanities Award. The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature recently named him the 2009 winner of the Mark Twain Award.

His writing examines the human place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.

Enid Shomer is the author of four books of poetry and two of fiction, most recently Tourist Season: Stories (Random House), which received the 2008 State of Florida Gold Medal in Fiction and was also selected for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great Writers” program. Imaginary Men won the Iowa Prize and the LSU/Southern Review Prize. Her poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Best New Stories from the South, etc. and in more than 60 anthologies and textbooks. The recipient of multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Arts Council, Shomer has taught as a visiting writer at the University of Arkansas, Florida State University and The Ohio State University. Since 2002, she has been Editor of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. Two books—Imaginary Men and Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran—were the subject of feature interviews on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

Floyd Skloot, creative nonfiction, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, and moved to Long Beach, NY, ten years later. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with a B.A. in English, and completed an M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella and the late novelist John Gardner. From 1972 until becoming disabled in 1988, Floyd worked in the field of public policy in Illinois, Washington, and Oregon. He began publishing poetry in 1970, fiction in 1975, and essays in 1990. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin and Marshall College. An Oregonian since 1984, Floyd moved from Portland to rural Amity when he married Beverly Hallberg in 1993. They lived in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods for 13 years before moving back to Portland. Floyd's current projects include The Wink of the Zenith, a new memoir about the forces that shaped him as writer, which appeared from the University of Nebraska Press in fall, 2008, and a volume of poetry, The Snow's Music, which Louisiana State University Press published in fall, 2008.

Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002) which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003. Currently, she is Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University.

Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. In her introduction to the book, Dove said, "Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength."

C. K. Williams is the author of ten books of poetry, the most recent of which is Collected Poems (2006). The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003, and previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His collection Flesh and Blood received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Williams has also published a memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, in 2000, and has published translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. A book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. Recently he was awarded the Twentieth Annual Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an honor given to an American poet in recognition of extraordinary accomplishment. Among his honors are awards in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Voelcker Career Achievement Award, and fellowships from the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University.

David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for best volume of poetry to be published during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997) and Spirit Cabinet (2002). His most recent collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, was published by Pittsburgh in 2006, and was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

He is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), and editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987-88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is also a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts. His newest collection, World Tree, will be published by Pittsburgh in the winter of 2011.

Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief; the novel Old School, and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Story Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford.

Kevin Young, poetry, is the author of five poetry collections, and editor of four others. His most recent volume is For the Confederate Dead, which has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and on NPR. Young's first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton, and later won the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. Young's second book, To Repel Ghosts, a "double album" based on the work of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was reissued in a "remix" version in 2005. Young's third poetry collection, Jelly Roll, won the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His previous collection, Black Maria, a film noir in verse, has been recently staged by the Providence Black Repertory Theater.

Young's poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and many other journals. He is editor of the anthology Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, The Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems, the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Blues Poems, and, most recently, a companion Jazz Poems. Kevin Young has an A.B. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is a recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and NEA Literature Fellow in Poetry. He has also taught at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, where he was the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry. Currently he is Atticus Haygood Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing, and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.