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WRITING WORKSHOPS DEAN ALBARELLI Crafting Fiction JULY 20—25 1pm–4pm Type: Fiction Price: $600 Open to all
When we send a manuscript out into the
world, we're implicitly telling readers that
we have something of consequence to
communicate. Something worth their time
and attention. Something that matters.
Making good on that promise is largely a
result of mastering the elements of craft.
And, too, a result of achieving that elusive
but essential narrative quality called
"authority." This course will combine the
advantages of workshop camaraderie and
detailed manuscript commentary toward
helping students hone their sense of craft
and attune their sensitivity to matters of
authority. A short exercise will be assigned
at the first class meeting and workshopped
later in the week. Please send: a story or novel excerpt (20 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-pt. font) by July 10; bring ten copies of the same piece with you to the Sunday orientation meeting.
GERRY ALBARELLI Concerned with and respectful of the facts, but absolutely willing to rearrange them according to the reasonable demands of imagination, memoir is most interesting when it goes beyond the narrow concerns of the self to tell a larger story. Memoir can serve as the impetus for imagining other lives, other realities, and as the story of a particular time and place. It should be open: to fact-like dreams, dreamlike landscapes, history. This is a workshop for those working in the memoir form who are interested in an expanded definition of that form, who are writing on the border between autobiography and fiction, fact and fantasy, prose and poetry. There will be writing assignments; we'll read and discuss our own work as well as the work of Clarice Lispector, Isaac Babel, Elias Canetti, Driss Ben, Hamed Charhadi, and Grace Paley.
RALPH ANGEL Perhaps the most challenging poetry to read well and with sophistication is one's own. In this workshop we will concentrate on close, careful reading, but we'll get there by doing a lot of writing. And by writing, by experimenting, we will come to better recognize and distinguish effective from less effective orchestrations of language, and, in that way, become better editors of our own work.
ROBIN BECKER This is a workshop for beginning poets interested in trying out a range of approaches, forms and styles. Each member of the group will generate a new poem (or poems) every day for discussion; together, we'll explore the poet's handling of line, metaphor, musical elements, syntax and word choice. We'll ask questions such as "What forms might suit this material?" and "How do we add lyrical/musical elements to this poem?" Daily hand-outs will supplement class discussion. My aim is to create a supportive atmosphere in which we attempt the unfamiliar and surprise ourselves with the results. This is a course for those with little or no previous work in prosody.
SARAH BLAKE
This workshop is for those of you who have
pages of notes, scraps of ideas, voices in
your head—but are flummoxed by how to
shape them. We'll spend each class writing
together, then working to develop the
necessary questioning eye: to see what we
have, and how we might begin to shape it.
What is interesting? What is fruitful? What
is ridiculous? What is ridiculous and fruitful?
How do we move from an image to an
idea? From an idea to a sentence? From a
sentence to a paragraph? To a story? We'll
read stories and poems by selected authors
as well as what we produce in class to get
you reading as a writer and learning to see
what you've got. Please bring: one page or poem by your favorite author to the first class.
AMY BLOOM "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett's line and the only way I know to approach writing fiction. We will look at other writers' most successful bits, identify our own strengths and weaknesses (in prose, plotting, narrative voice and persona) and figure out what to do about them. Focus will be on each student's problem areas, with reading and rewriting. Kind but relentless attention will be paid and expected. This class is suitable for intermediate and advanced writers meaning if you have never completed a piece of fiction (short story or chapters of a novel), this is not for you. Each person will be given the opportunity to revise one piece of work and begin a new one. Special instructions: Make copies of whatever section of your work you'd like discussed (15 double-spaced pages maximum) and send two copies to FAWC by July 11th. Come prepared to discuss what you think are the central problems with the piece.
BRIAN BOULDREY
Through the art of the personal essay,
this class will focus on both brushing up
the grammar and finding artful ways of
deploying the elements of style. Each day,
we will discuss, through a writer's eye,
the precision and freedom that can help
define personal style through its parts:
punctuation, diction, syntax, rhythm, and
irony. Part lecture, part discussion, part
exercise, part workshop, part learningby-
doing, I guarantee you'll never have so
much fun discovering how to make your
sentences—and all your prose—beautiful. Please send: ten copies of a personal essay or other work of nonfiction prose to FAWC by June 16. You'll receive the work of your peers in advance of class, as well as a few short writing and reading assignments.
CATHERINE BOWMAN The focus of this intensive workshop will be on generating new poems as well as revising old work. There will be daily writing exercises, optional take home assignments, readings from a packet of poems I bring to the workshop each day, and group discussions of the poems you have written. Each class will begin with a free-writing exercise on a particular topic, which will serve to generate new work and offer strategies for writing about difficult subjects. We'll discuss the poems you have written, then look at several poems by other poets. Class will end with another writing exercise based on our discussion of these poems and an optional take-home assignment.
CHRISTOPHER CASTELLANI We've all been told what makes a good opening to a novel or short story. We hook the reader with plot and character, we vividly describe the setting, we sprinkle some engaging dialogue. Soon we're chugging along, stretching this stuff across an adequate middle. But then the real handwringing begins. What does it all come to? How should the threads be resolved? Is it "satisfying" and what does that really mean, anyway? In this workshop, we will critically examine how all of the craft elements in your story or novel chapter are working (or not working) together, but we will pay special attention to the final pages. We will also look at classic and contemporary examples and investigate some theories about what makes some endings "better" than others. Please send: two copies of your manuscript (novel chapter or complete short story, no more than 25 doublespaced pages total) to FAWC by Monday, June 16th.
BROCK CLARKE In this workshop we will (of course) be workshopping your fiction, and as we do so we'll also be reading stories and novel excerpts with an eye toward what we can get out of them. What do these works of fiction teach us about point of view, plot, voice, narrative tension, structure, suspense, release? And how can we apply these lessons to our own fiction? Please send: two copies of 20 double-spaced pages maximum to FAWC by July 11th.
HENRI COLE This course is a concentrated workshop in poetry writing for those who wish to improve their craft as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry. Poems by students will be discussed in a "workshop" format with an emphasis on the process of revision. Daily assignments will be given. For contemplation: "Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail themselves and never write a poem as good as they know they are capable of)… lack the self-criticism necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role of a wrong thing in a right world and proclaim themselves the right thing in a wrong world… In a sense they are not honest and lack the impulse (or fight it) to revise and perfect… the poet who says ‘I am the greatest' has damned himself forever." - Theodore Roethke
MARTHA COLLINS
This workshop will focus on different
syntactic strategies for writing poems.
Through the reading of published poems
and the writing of daily exercises, we will
try to get beyond the predictable subjectverb-
object sentence ("I love you"), and in
the process explore ways in which syntax
and prosody—sentence and line—work
together to create complex poetic textures.
Participants should leave the workshop with
the beginnings of at least four new poems,
some of which we will discuss in class, as
well as starting points for other poems. Please bring: 11 copies of one poem for reading and brief discussion at the beginning of the workshop, and 11 copies of another for possible discussion later in the week.
MARK CONWAY In this workshop we will mainly generate new work. We'll also read visionary poetry from the past – I'm especially interested in "ecstatic" poetry, writing I hesitate to call mystical, but which shares certain attributes: the desire (and fear) of having the self invaded, of being exposed and broken open. But what makes a poem "visionary?" And how can we get that elusive quality into our own writing? We'll also make time for the anti-ecstatic, those moments when the prayer fails or when blessings turn into a curse. We'll look at poets (Blake, Dickinson, and others) and learn strategies from their work – how Dickinson interrupts herself and uses the broken off, the unfinished; Blake's "minute particulars" – as a way to write our way into this territory.
WYN COOPER
A poem doesn't need to be formal to have
form. In this workshop we'll explore the idea
of form—the prose poem, the postcard,
the grocery list, the sonnet, the suicide
note—to generate new work. Sometimes
the constraints of a form can be liberating,
but when those constraints keep the poem
from succeeding, there's no reason not to
go beyond that form to find the center of
the poem. Each student will have one poem
discussed each day. Please bring: 11 copies of one poem to the Sunday night orientation session.
KATHRYN DAVIS
This workshop is geared toward those
intermediate to advanced writers interested
in playing with the formal possibilities of the
novel (as opposed to the short story).
DAISY FRIED
Participants will present poems-in-progress
for rigorous and supportive mutual critique.
This workshop assumes that participants
are excited by and committed to revision,
and that there are no best schools of
poetry, but only individual poems finding
their own best form according to each
poem's internal logic. Also, that the
following qualities are often worthwhile
in a poem: story-telling techniques, rich
ambiguity, humor and irony as a way of
getting to serious matter, the yoking of
disparate dictions, the coincidence of the
messy and the elegant. Poets who like to
put as much real world as possible, in all its
texture and surprise, into their poems, may
especially value this workshop.
ROSS GAY So often we write poems knowing exactly where they're going. And, frankly, these are usually the least interesting poems to read (and write). How, then, do we separate the impulse or occasion of the poem from the heart that the poem must discover? In this class we will read poems by, among others, Rilke, Robert Hayden, Aracelis Girmay, Patrick Rosal, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Maxine Kumin, Adelia Prado, and essays by Federico Garcia Lorca, and Fanny Howe, to determine what makes a poem surprise and enlighten. To determine what lifts a poem from the predictable or mundane to the revelatory. The beautiful. The shattering. To this end we will do several exercises that might destabilize our own manner of composing poems, and perhaps even our manner of composing our worlds. Participants should be prepared to present a new poem each day to the workshop.
DAVID GESSNER This is a workshop in creative nonfiction with a special emphasis on writing about place. We will explore the role that writing about places—sometimes natural places, sometimes not—can play in writing personal essays and memoir. For nonfiction writers who are stuck for a subject, place often unlocks other topics and deeper concerns. For some writers turning their minds to a specific place they care for—a home, a patch of woods, a beach—can prove a reliable muse. At the same time, writing about deeply knowing a place can make us feel a little mystical, even silly. As the great Alaskan writer John Haines said: "To express a place in art we need to take certain risks… we need intimacy of a sort that demands a certain daring and risk: a surrender, an abandonment." Or as Barry Lopez puts it, we need to "become vulnerable to a place." We'll attempt this in our work and our reading.
JULIA GLASS
Some fiction writers find that their stories
germinate from a single visual image,
others from a moral imperative, still others
from a title or an opening sentence. Many,
however, follow the old adage "Character is
plot." To put it more precisely, personality
has consequence. When different
personalities mingle and collide, the
consequences blossom into drama—and
only when they are fully and deeply realized
by the writer can the drama become
genuinely compelling. We will discuss
and revise your work-in-progress with an
emphasis on character development as
a way to strengthen narrative. Rigorous
revision is essential, so bring work with the
expectation of a major overhaul. One or two
take-home exercises will help stimulate that
process. Please send: ten copies of a single short story or the beginning of a novel (20 doublespaced pages maximum) to FAWC by July 28. Specify on the first page if the work is an autonomous story or the beginning of a novel. IMPORTANT: if novel, beginning chapters ONLY.
ELANA GREENFIELD Complete a first draft of a one-act play, or the first act of full-length play. In this workshop we will be doing intensive in-class writing exercises exploring character, structure, plot, rhythm and tone, as well as workshopping an assigned number of pages each day. Participants will be expected to work very closely with one another during the process of completing their plays. Please read: 2 one-act or full-length plays of your choice (I'm glad to make suggestions) and be ready to speak in some way about your idea for the play you will write. Bring a "visual" (photo, postcard, an object you can easily carry, etc.) to the first class, which in some way speaks to you to the project you will be working on.
KIMIKO HAHN
The Penguin Book of Literary Terms defines
poetry as ‘a species of magic.' Rather than
conduct a fault-finding workshop where
we trim out flaws to produce a polished
product, I am interested in magic. I am
interested in holding a draft and seeing
where the source of the poem might be. As
part of this process, we will look at diction,
lineation, various kinds of rhyme/sounds—
as well as content. Sessions will include
looking at 2-3 new drafts from the past, say,
six months, as well as in-class exercises.
JOHN HASKELL
This workshop will explore the ways in
which fiction and non-fiction collude to
create literary reality. We will examine a
variety of narrative strategies, focusing
on using "real" events to communicate
ideas and emotions. Participants will look
for moments in their work in which the
writing has come alive, and then expand
those moments with an eye to sustaining
their imagined reality. During the week a
special emphasis will be placed on oral
presentation as a way to explore voice and
musicality and performance. Please send: Please send: two copies of a piece you'd like to workshop (15 double-spaced pages maximum) to FAWC by June 30, and bring 10 copies of the same piece to our Sunday orientation meeting.
DAVID HAYNES
This workshop is designed for writers who
feel like they've got a handle on most of
the basics and are now looking for the next
set of tools to move their writing forward.
Our draft stories as well as examples of
published fiction will direct us toward the
gaps in our various craft repertoire. My goal
is for each writer to leave with a stronger
sense of the issues in their own work
and with an increased confidence in the
possibilities of the stories yet to come. In
order to have some common texts, please
read the most recent edition of either Best
American Short Stories, the O'Henry Prize
Stories or both. Please bring: 11 copies of your fiction (15 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-pt. font) to the first class.
ROBIN HEMLEY This course is designed for writers of prose who aren't sure WHAT they're writing. Memoir? Fiction? Something in-between? In this course, you'll come with a "prose blob." We'll discuss various forms and how your work might or might not fit, and where it might cross the delicate boundaries that sometimes confound us. If you're writing a memoir that wants to be a novel or a novel that wants to be a memoir or something altogether distinct, then maybe this is the workshop for you.
PATRICIA HENLEY
Do you ever find yourself losing interest
in a story before you've completed it?
Chances are, you have not deepened the
characters enough to sustain your own
curiosity. This workshop will focus on the
discovery of longings, fears, dreams, and
desires—your own and your characters'.
For there will inevitably be kernels of
you in every character you invent. Using
critiques, brainstorming, raw material
writing exercises, readings from the work
of Jungian author Jean Shinola Bolen, and
Tarot experience, we will explore ways to
deepen the characters in your story. Please send: ten copies of a short story (no more than 15 double-spaced pages) to the Work Center by July 28. You'll receive the work of your peers in advance of class, as well as a few reading assignments.
MARCIE HERSHMAN
The process of writing memoir is anything
but straightforward. Although the bottom
line is honesty, memoir asks more from
us than a journal's faithful account of
remarks and chronologies. A memoir
demands shape, focus, voice, and events
that build toward force and meaning. This
workshop is designed to break through
the neatly factual surface of our day-today
story. Rather than edit each other's
manuscripts-in-progress, we will focus on
new ways to see our own material. We'll do
exercises to explore what lies at the heart
of our individual searches and discuss
how to draw the pieces together, devising
strategies for an overall structure. Please bring: ten copies of two to three pages from a published memoir that strikes you as distinctive, a small pocket mirror of your choosing, and paper and pens because we are going to write.
PAM HOUSTON Writing begins in the concrete sights, smells, sounds, textures and tastes of the physical world. Our 20-hour week will focus on how we take all those glimmers, those hunks of the physical world that arrested our individual attention, and remake them in language, how we might combine them with other, unrelated hunks of sensory detail and allow for the alchemical event that turns words into story. We will talk about the difficult moments when writing feels like juggling an apple, a chainsaw and a toaster, and celebrate the rare but intoxicating moments when the place we were most afraid to go did not kill us after all. We'll address structure, narrative tension, voice, point of view, dialogue, beginnings and endings. What to bring: 11 copies of your fiction (maximum 16, 12-point, double-spaced pages) and read Rock Springs, by Richard Ford, and The Entire Predicament, by Lucy Corin.
MARIE HOWE I'm interested in generating new work that breaks through the barriers of style we might not be aware of, barriers of syntax, tone, diction, subject matter, music, etc. We'll write together on paper and out loud and share our work without the usual critique. We'll read poems that might help us break out of patterns that are holding us back. My aim is to provide some strategies that might help us make new channels within ourselves so that new poems will have a place to travel through, out and into the world. Bring a fresh notebook and one or two books you love. You might also bring a few poems you've already written if you're prepared to make them new. The class will concern itself with breaking out of habits: the very new.
CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON Memory is creative work, compounded of fact, fantasy, and imagination. Transformed by distance in time and space, our memories are slippery stuff. In this workshop we'll explore the complementary roles of fantasy, myth, and accident in imagining memory. We'll be less concerned with recovering what "actually" happened than with uncovering the poetic structures, mythic resonance and psychic weight of memory. Exercises in both poetry and prose forms will help us reach into old territory with our imaginations, subjecting the past to the creative work of our remembering. We'll generate new work, and discuss what we've written with generous curiosity.
MAJOR JACKSON
To write poetry is to engage in a life-long
journey of honing one’s skills in attuning life
to the basic workings of language. It is a
kind of spiritual practice that requires a wild
discipline. The task is to uncover the joys of
making. In this poetry workshop, we will tap
into what we collectively know about how
poems function and offer feedback on how
to enrich a poem’s ability to say what has not
been said before. Please bring: three recently written poems and a list of your favorite devices and techniques in writing poetry. We will communally share our "tricks" of the trade, our enthusiasm, and our critical eye with the best intentions of helping each other grow in the art.
MATTHEW KLAM Writers of all levels and exceptional people of every sort are encouraged to attend. A writing class is an experiment, and while there's no correct way to proceed, our class might read a little bit of outside material (quietly stunning, instructive/inspirational), do some in-class writing (explosive, surprising, fluent, ripe for expansion), and have plenty of time left to discuss your stories. The discussion will unfold in a gentle, helpful manner. A writing class is a risk in the same way that a writing endeavor is a risk. If you're going to give yourself some room to experiment in fiction writing, Provincetown in the summer is an excellent place to do that work.
MAXINE KUMIN My plan is to focus intensively on participants' poems, especially the not-quite resolved ones, and to apply the nuts-andbolts approach to achieving a passionate clarity. We'll look at diction, syntax, the uses of imagery, form and meter. Often a poem that is going astray can be ordered, coaxed or even wrenched into a formal pattern and find its way to completion. Ways in which such ancient forms as villanelle and pantoum can be adapted, even subverted, will be part of our strategy. What to bring: Please bring one poem and 11 copies of it to our first meeting.
JAMES LECESNE
Plays, short stories, screenplays, novels,
dramatic monologues – a story takes
many forms. Whether we speak through
the voices of characters or allow ourselves
to use our own voice, each story is the
myth of our lives struggling to be heard.
This workshop is designed to explore
our individual myths, give voice to our
emotional, political, and personal truths and
create a structure that will carry them into
the world. The focus will be not only
on writing and shaping our stories, but
also on developing skills as storytellers. Please bring: examples of your own work and a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.
SARA LONDON
As writers, how do we craft narratives for
the unique word/image duet that defines
the picture book genre? How do we attune
our ears to the rhythms inherent in turning
the page? Stories from 250 to 1000 words
will be read and critiqued in class with
careful consideration given to issues of
subject, language, conflict, rhythm, pacing
and humor. We'll consider ways of distilling
a narrative down to its most essential and
compelling components; discuss how and
when to use dialogue; and how to freshen
elements of character and plot. We'll also
examine classics in the genre. During the
week, students will revise their work and
create "mock-up" picture books. Aspects
of illustration will be discussed, but visual
art talent is not necessary for this class.
Time permitting, we'll conclude with tips on
submitting a manuscript, finding an agent
and editor, and book production. Please send: one or two manuscripts (prose or poetry) for children ranging in age from three to eight to FAWC by July 28; bring ten copies of the same manuscripts to our Sunday orientation.
PHILLIP LOPATE
This workshop will focus on the writing
of memoir-pieces (either chapters of
book-length memoirs or free-standing
personal narratives) and reflective essays.
We will discuss ways of getting started,
the creation of a credible narrator, the
handling of delicate material, and literary
strategies that have worked for masters of
the form. (Students are urged to read the
introduction and as much as they can of
The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by
Phillip Lopate and bring the book to class).
Please bring: 11 copies of one manuscript (30 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-pt. font). Students are encouraged to bring more than one piece with them and we will critique as many as we have time to handle. There may also be exercises inclass and between sessions. The object is to enjoy ourselves while learning.
CLEOPATRA MATHIS
Bring in you most unruly "children"—the
teenage ones whose emotional life is still
beyond you. We'll aim for the closest look at
the essential questions and possibilities that
haven't yet been developed. In a rigorous,
line-by-line reading, we will identify the poem's
complexities and discuss ways to break
out of our usual habits and conventions.
The workshop will also examine the poem's
syntax and structure, and through them, bring
relevant aspects of craft into focus. Please bring: one poem to class each day. I also encourage you to bring the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry to the workshop, so I can make specific reading suggestions when we discuss your poems.
ALICE MATTISON We’ll talk respectfully but honestly about one another’s stories and novel excerpts, seeking ways to revise them and assuming that every piece of fiction will need many revisions before it becomes what it should be. We’ll speak especially often of structure, of the shape of a short story or of the way the excerpt we’re reading will eventually fit into a novel. We’ll also write a little and discuss that process, and read a few examples of short stories by other writers. What to bring: Participants should bring eleven copies, double-spaced, of a story or novel excerpt, 20 pages at most.
RICHARD MCCANN
"The secret in writing," writes Dorothy
Allison, "is that fiction never exceeds the
reach of the writer's courage… until I
started telling the stories that were hardest
for me, writing about exactly the things
that I was most afraid of and unsure about,
I wasn't writing worth a damn." In this
intensive workshop for prose writers of
all levels, we'll work toward the writing of
those life stories—whether in fiction or in
memoir—that seem the hardest and most
necessary to tell. We'll spend half our time
on generative exercises designed to help us
locate the images that contain the stories
of our lives, and half in critical discussion of
student works-in-progress. Please bring: 6 snapshots of your life and 11 copies of fiction, memoir, or personal essay (8 double-spaced pages maximum) derived from actual life.
PAMELA PAINTER Come with several very short stories, or come empty-handed, but do come ready to write new stories—one a day. This workshop will focus on the short short story form—stories that range from 250 to 500 words. We'll be writing a "list" story, a one-sentence story, a "he said/she said" story, and many more, often using a story from MicroFiction, Flash Fiction, or Flash Fiction Forward as a "model." You will also learn how to create your own "exercises" for writing the next twenty short shorts after this workshop ends. Everyone—yes, everyone will leave this workshop with new, publishable stories.
CARL PHILLIPS This workshop will explore ways of getting a stalled poem to begin moving again, via looking at strategies employed in assigned readings and seeing how we can use those strategies to ‘re-see' our own poems. We'll also discuss ways of discerning a poem's intentions, which often differ from the writer's. Finally, we'll see what new poems can be made from salvaging older work in the course of our week together.
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
This is a workshop for those who are writing
their way to the heart of their own material.
Any story can be "primal" if it reaches deep
enough, but we'll start with a few texts in
common: please read James Agee's A Death
In The Family, William Maxwell's They Came
Like Swallows, Katherine Anne Porter's classic
story, "The Grave," and Delmore Schwartz's
story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." Think
about these between now and June, and
please bring them with you. Please send: 10 copies of one story, 25 double-spaced page limit, to FAWC by Monday, June 2. Students will be asked to type a critique of each story upon to which base class discussion; the critiques will then be given to the writer as a help in revision. We'll discuss each story on its own terms, from theme, character, language and structure, to line edit.
MARIE PONSOT
This workshop will focus on the reading and
writing of poetry. Through close reading of
student work and a few poems we admire
by other writers, we will discuss the broader
issues of form, style and structure, as well
as more specific issues of craft such as
line, rhythm, and metaphor. We will use
the workshop participants' poems as
springboards for discussion. Please send: two copies of 4 or 5 poems of your own to FAWC by July 31, and bring 11 copies of a poem by someone you admire to the first meeting.
NAHID RACHLIN
To reach readers, whether in fiction or
personal memoir, it is important to develop
believable, three-dimensional characters.
How do you create complex, real people
within the context of plot, dialogue,
viewpoint, voice? This is the question we
will try to answer. The class sessions will
be mainly devoted to students' own work—
short stories, chapters of novels, novellas or
personal memoirs—which we will read and
comment on. If time permits I will also give
class exercises. In the first session we will
devote some time to a general discussion
of the craft of writing fiction and memoir
and also cover some publishing aspects of
writing—how to go about getting an agent,
writing a cover letter, what to expect from
the publishing world today. The criticism
will be constructive. We will point out
strengths as well as weaknesses and make
suggestions for improvement. Please bring: 15 double-spaced pages to the first class.
VICTORIA REDEL Much is made of finding voice on the page. But how is voice, in both first- and thirdperson, achieved in fiction? Is our voice in prose anything close to our voice in the world? In this workshop we'll look at our short stories, and do daily experiments in voice utilizing syntax, diction, acoustics, and image-making all as ways to sound more exorbitantly stanced on the page. These experiments invite us to explore sounds that we inhabit, or that are already part of our internal reservoir but seem too plain, too unliterary or just wrong. We'll explore sounds heard in the landscapes of childhood and the complex music heard daily around us. We'll also read the work of other writers with regard to how they achieve authority in their fiction.
MARTHA RHODES The writers best served by this workshop will be those who seek real guidance as far as revision is concerned and poets who feel stuck, or who want to revise their work but are reluctant, or timid, or just at a standstill. This will also be a productive workshop for writers who wish to generate new work. We will focus on looking at poems not only through the lens of "how do I make this better?" but also through the lens of "what other possible routes can I take with this poem?" We will look at revision in terms of cosmetic editing and also discover a more radical approach to revising poems. Participants will be encouraged to generate new work from the poems they already have. Indeed, we will discover that writing a new poem is often the same as revising an old poem.
LIZ ROSENBERG Obviously you cannot FINISH a novel in a week, but you certainly can get started on one. This workshop will give ideas on how to begin, and how to make it the rest of the way through—past terror, writer's block, plotting and other issues. We'll do in-class writing both to loosen up and generate material, and look at some of the ways other writers have begun their novels. On Becoming A Novelist by John Gardner is highly recommended. The structure of the workshop will be informal, friendly, and open to all kinds of definitions of "a novel." It is open to new and experienced writers.
CARLO ROTELLA
As a nonfiction writer, whether journalist,
essayist, memoirist, or historian, you have
a duty to both the facts and their literary
potential. You must tell a good story peopled
with compelling characters and enlivened by
vibrant prose, but you must also do justice to
your material—your reporting, your research,
your observations, all those notes that want to
add up to something meaningful. We'll explore
approaches to turning a mess of promising
material into a story that's both true and
beautiful, and has a coherent point. We will
read and discuss examples of published work
that engage this challenge in instructive ways,
and we'll workshop student prose. Please bring: one manuscript (12 doublespaced pages, 3000 words max.). The piece you select can be finished work, but it doesn't have to be; you may choose a work in progress, or one on which you are no longer making progress because you're stuck.
MICHAEL RYAN
When asked how he studied other poets'
work, Phillip Larkin responded, "Oh, for
Christ's sake, one doesn't study poets. You
read them, and think, That's marvelous,
how is it done, could I do it? and that's how
you learn." In this workshop, we'll look at
the marvelous to see how it's done. Writerly
reading is reading for usage: carnivorously,
closely and slowly, through prescribed
lenses of attention. A different lens makes
a different picture. If you can see it you
have a better chance of being able to do it
yourself. For the workshop, you may submit
previously composed work or poems-inprocess
triggered by our examples of the
marvelous. The purpose of the workshop
will be to describe your work back to you
and identify your strengths as well ways to
improve the piece under consideration. Please send: ten copies of your five best poems to FAWC by July 1st; we won’t talk about these poems in workshop but they will provide a larger context for discussing your work. I will email handouts after you enroll.
VIJAY SESHADRI The ways in which poets develop and distribute energy and movement in poems determine the success of those poems. In this workshop, we will do what amounts to energy work, examining—in student poems, exercises, and examples drawn from the canon and from contemporary poetry—the manipulation of syntax, rhetoric, metaphor, meaning, and revelation to both contain and liberate the energies of the self. There will be some in-class exercises. The only prerequisite is that those enrolled be eager to write, think, and talk poetry.
ALAN SHAPIRO
All writing is revision. And all revision is or
ought to be an opportunity for discovery
and surprise. In order to flourish as a
poet, you need to cultivate a love for play,
a willingness to go against the grain of
what you know and like, of everything
you've maybe learned to do too well. But
how do you break habits of composition?
How do you follow this or that suggestion
without betraying your original impulse?
And since I take it as axiomatic that all
poems are inexhaustibly revisable, at what
point do you say enough already and stop
fiddling, despite the imperfections you can't
eliminate? These are some of the questions
we will think about as we examine each
other's work over the course of the week.
While I will bring in examples of work by
other poets, the majority of class time will
be focused on the work you submit for
class discussion. Please bring: 11 copies of four or five poems to the Sunday night orientation session.
MARTHA SOUTHGATE
In this workshop, we will pay close attention
to how to make your fiction come alive on the
page and places where the writer can bring
the breath of life (through conflict, character
and other tools of the trade) to his or her work.
We will spend some time discussing how the
fiction one loves can help you with your own
work. We'll also talk about how serendipity
and openness are crucial in all forms of fiction
writing, especially longer works. You never
know what's going to come into a novel that
you never expected to find there. Please send: two copies of 15-20 pages of work in progress (either a story or the beginning of a novel) to FAWC by June 30 and bring 11 copies of the same piece to our Sunday orientation meeting. Also, please read The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, paying particular attention to the essay "Creating a Scene."
JEAN VALENTINE This will be a regular workshop, with some time set aside for each person to bring us one poem by another writer—a poem she or he feels closest to as a writer—and a short passage about writing/being which means something to him or her. What to bring: 11 copies of the poem and passage mentioned above. Also, please bring one writing assignment which you have found the most searching—and, as always, copies of your own poems, especially "unfinished" ones.
AFAA WEAVER When you put pen to paper, or keyboard to monitor, do you come from a place of memory or do you look out onto the vast void inside and outside of yourself for that first line? The question of what part of our imaginations and our memories we use to get at the poem raises many questions. We ask ourselves if the poem is a record of something we or someone else lived, or does the poem come from a place where poems themselves live. It is perhaps sometimes a blend, or it may always be a blend. The business of how narrative a poem is or is not arises. These are questions each poet must ask herself/ himself, and what I hope to do for you in this course is accompany you along the way of looking at how poems come into being as we write.
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BIOGRAPHY
Dean Albarelli is the author of Cheaters and
Other Stories (St. Martin's), a selection of the
Barnes & Noble series "Discover Great New
Writers." A chapter from his forthcoming
novel became a prizewinning short film with
Amanda Peet. Twice a Fellow at FAWC,
he is the recipient of a Michener Award, a
grant from the Vermont Arts Council, and
fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural
Council. He has been writer in residence at
Smith College, and visiting writer at Amherst
and Trinity colleges. At the University of
Virginia, a Student Association survey ranked
his fiction-writing course among the
"20 Most Popular Classes on Campus."
BIOGRAPHY
Gerry Albarelli is the author of Teacha!
Stories from a Yeshiva, and co-author of
two guides to oral history interviewing.
His stories, poems and essays have been
published in Global City Review, Fairleigh
Dickinson Review, Sarah Lawrence Literary
Review, Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories,
ItalianAmericana and The Breast: An
Anthology. He teaches creative writing at
Sarah Lawrence College and documentary
film production at Eugene Lang College
in New York City, and currently works
for the Columbia University Oral History
Research Office. His memoir, Mary, Queen of
Immigrants, will be published in 2008.
and is an associate Fellow at Yale.
BIOGRAPHY
Ralph Angel is the author of four collections
of poetry: Exceptions and Melancholies
(2007 PEN USA Award); Twice Removed;
Neither World (James Laughlin Award); and
Anxious Latitudes, as well as a translation
of Federico Garcia Lorca's Poema del
cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.
His most recent honors include a Willis
Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a
Pushcart Prize and awards from the
Fulbright Foundation, the Elgin Cox Trust
and The Modern Poetry Association. He is
Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of
English and Creative Writing at the University
of Redlands, and a member of the MFA
Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College.
BIOGRAPHY
Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker's
sixth collection of poetry, was published in
2006 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Her other books include The Horse Fair, All-
American Girl and Giacometti's Dog. Her
poems appear in numerous anthologies
and textbooks, including Making Literature
Matter and Poetry: An Introduction. In
2002, The Frick Art & Historical Center
(Pittsburgh) published a limited-edition fine
art chapbook of her poems, Venetian Blue.
Professor of English and Women's Studies
at the Pennsylvania State University, she
received the 2000 George W. Atherton
Award for Excellence in Teaching. Other
awards include a Bunting Fellowship, a
Massachusetts Cultural Council Award,
and a National Endowments for the Arts
Fellowship. She regularly reviews for The
American Poetry Review, and writes a
column on contemporary poetry called
"Field Notes" for the Women's Review of
Books, where she serves as Contributing
and Poetry Editor.
BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Blake is the author of the novel
Grange House (Picador, 2000), a chapbook
of poems Full Turn (Pennywhistle, 1989),
and has just completed her second novel,
Frankie's War. Her essays and reviews
have appeared in US News and World
Report, The Chicago Tribune, and Good
Housekeeping.
BIOGRAPHY
Amy Bloom is the author of two short story
collections, Come To Me and A Blind Man
Can See How Much I Love You; a non-
fiction book, Normal; and two novels, Love
Invents Us and Away. Her work has been
nominated for the National Book Award and
for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and she's received the National Magazine
Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared
in Best American Short Stories, in the O.
Henry Awards: Prize Stories and in various
anthologies here and abroad.
BIOGRAPHY
Brian Bouldrey is the author of Honorable
Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica. He has
written six books and edited six anthologies,
including three volumes of Best American
Gay Fiction. His edited collection, Wrestling
with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the
Lives of Gay Men won a Lambda Literary
Award and his memoir Monster: Adventures
in American Machismo was a Lambda
finalist. He is the author of the novel The
Boom Economy: Or, Scenes from Clerical
Life, also published by the University of
Wisconsin Press. He is a Senior Lecturer
and teaches creative writing at Northwestern
University, and also serves on the faculty of
Lesley University's MFA in Creative Writing
BIOGRAPHY
Catherine Bowman's most recent collection of
poems, Notarikon, was published by Four Way
Books. Her new collection The Plath Cabinet
will be published in Fall 2008. She is also the
author of Rock Farm and 1-800-HOT-RIBS,
and the editor of Word of Mouth, an anthology
of poems by poets she has reviewed and
featured on National Public Radio's "All Things
Considered." Her poems have appeared in six
editions of Best American Poetry as well as
many literary magazines and journals, including
The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon
Review, The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares
and Crazyhorse. Her writing has been awarded
the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, the Kate
Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, and a New
York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in
Poetry. She is currently the Ruth Lilly Professor
of Poetry and Director of the Creative Writing
Program at Indiana University.
BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Castellani is the author of two
novels, A Kiss From Maddalena, winner
of the Massachusetts Book Award for
Fiction, and The Saint of Lost Things,
both published by Algonquin. He has
taught writing at the Bread Loaf Writers
Conference (where he has been twice
a fellow) and as a visiting professor at
Swarthmore College. He currently works as
Executive Director of Grub Street, a Bostonbased
non-profit creative writing center.
BIOGRAPHY
Brock Clarke is the author of four books of
fiction including, most recently, the novel An
Arsonists' Guide to Writers' Homes in New
England (2007). His short stories and essays
have appeared in Virgina Quarterly Review,
Georgia Review, New England Review, One
Story, Missouri Review, The Believer, and
on NPR's "Selected Shorts," and have been
reprinted in the New Stories from the South
and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He's twice
been a National Magazine Award for Fiction
finalist. He teaches creative writing at the
University of Cincinnati.
BIOGRAPHY
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in
1956. He has published six collections of
poetry, most recently Blackbird and Wolf
and Middle Earth, which was a finalist for
the Pulitzer. He has received many awards
for his work, including the Rome Prize,
Berlin Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, and
Guggenheim Fellowship. Recently he has
collaborated with the visual artists, Jenny
Holzer and Kiki Smith. He lives in Boston.
BIOGRAPHY
Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of
the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf,
2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award
and an Ohioana Award, and was one of
the New York Public Library's "25 Books
to Remember from 2006." Other awards
include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting
Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation,
as well as the Laurence Goldstein Poetry
Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a Lannan
Residency Grant. Collins has also published
four collections of poems, two chapbooks,
and two collections of co-translations of
Vietnamese poetry. The founder of the
creative writing program at UMass-Boston,
she is currently editor-at-large for FIELD
magazine and the Oberlin College Press.
BIOGRAPHY
Mark Conway's book of poetry, Any Holy
City, won the Gerald Cable Book Award
and was short-listed for this year's PEN/
Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His work
has appeared in The Paris Review, Slate,
American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,
Bomb, Prairie Schooner, the Boston
Review, the Grolier Poetry Prize Annual
and elsewhere. He has been awarded
fellowships from the McKnight, Jerome and
Bush Foundations, the Corporation of Yaddo
and the MacDowell Colony. He's poetry
editor of Post Road.
BIOGRAPHY
Wyn Cooper's most recent book of poems
is Postcards from the Interior, published
by BOA Editions in 2005. His earlier books
are The Way Back (2000), and The Country
of Here Below (1987). His poems are
included in 25 anthologies of contemporary
poetry. He has taught at Bennington and
Marlboro colleges, as well as at the Frost
Place Festival of Poetry. A former editor of
Quarterly West, he helps run the Brattleboro
Literary Festival in Vermont. His poem "Fun,"
from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow's
Grammy-winning song, "All I Wanna Do."
BIOGRAPHY
Kathryn Davis's sixth novel, The Thin Place,
was published in January 2006. Her many
honors include the Kafka Prize for fiction by
an American woman, the Morton Dauwen
Zabel Award from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim
Fellowship. She is currently Fannie M. Hurst
Senior Writer-in-Residence at Washington
University in St. Louis. Her previous books
are Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,
Hell, The Walking Tour, and Versailles.
BIOGRAPHY
Daisy Fried is the author of two books of
poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
(University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle Award
and one of Library Journal's 10 Best Poetry
Books of 2006, and She Didn't Mean to Do
It (Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes
Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she
has received a Guggenheim Fellowship,
a Hodder Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize,
the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, a
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant, a
Leeway Award for Excellence and a Pew
Fellowship. She taught creative writing most
recently at Smith College, where she was
Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence.
She lives in Philadelphia.
BIOGRAPHY
Ross Gay's first book of poems is Against
Which. His poems have appeared in
American Poetry Review, Harvard Review,
Margie, The American Review of Poetry, and
Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating
Cave Canem's First Ten Years, among many
others. He has read his poems to audiences
in schools, on basketball courts, in prisons,
and on subways. He teaches in the
graduate MFA program at Indiana University
and a number of community and school
workshops around the country.
BIOGRAPHY
David Gessner is the author of six books,
including Return of the Osprey, Sick of
Nature, and Soaring with Fidel. His essay,
"Learning to Surf," won the John Burroughs
award for best nature essay of 2006. His
essays have appeared on NPR's "This I
Believe" series and in many magazines
and journals including The New York
Times, Georgia Review, American Scholar,
Orion, The Harvard Review, and the 2006
Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught
Environmental Writing as a Briggs-Copeland
Lecturer at Harvard, and is currently a
Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington,
where he also edits the literary journal of
place, Ecotone.
BIOGRAPHY
Julia Glass is the author of the novels Three
Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book
Award for Fiction, and The Whole World
Over (Pantheon). I See You Everywhere, her
third book, will be published this fall. Glass's
honors include three Nelson Algren Awards,
the Tobias Wolff Award, the Pirate's Alley
Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella
and the Ames Memorial Essay Award. She
has also received fellowships from the NEA,
the NY Foundation for the Arts, and the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
BIOGRAPHY
Elana Greenfield's book, At the Damascus
Gate: Short Hallucinations won the New
American Fiction Competition. She is a
recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award in
drama, and The Judith S. Pearson award
for her short story "Talent." Her work for the
stage has been seen both internationally
and nationally and has been presented in
NYC, at La Mama E.T.C., The Vineyard
Theatre and the New York Shakespeare
Festival/Public Theater, among others. Her
play, Nine Come, has recently been included
in New Downtown Now: An Anthology of
New Theater from Downtown New York.
Her articles have appeared in Yale's Theater
magazine, her plays excerpted in Bomb
Magazine and her radio plays heard on
WNYC, The Radio Stage and public radio
stations across the country. She currently
teaches playwriting at The New School
University's Eugene Lang College, and
at NYU Tisch Rita and Burton Goldberg
Department of Dramatic Writing.
BIOGRAPHY
Kimiko Hahn is the author seven books of
poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose
Press, 1992), which was awarded the
Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and
an Association of Asian American Studies
Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart
(Kaya, 1996), which received an American
Book Award; and, most recently, The Narrow
Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006),
whose title was stolen from Basho's famous
poetic journal. Hahn is a recipient of The
Shelley Memorial Prize and a Lila Wallace-
Reader's Digest Writers' Award as well as
fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the New York Foundation for
the Arts. She is a Distinguished Professor in
the MFA Program at Queens College/City
University of New York.
BIOGRAPHY
John Haskell is the author of a short-story
collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG,
2003) and the novel, American Purgatorio
(FSG, 2005). His stories and essays have
appeared on the radio ("The Next Big Thing,"
"Studio 360") and have been published in,
among other books, The Show You'll Never
Forget, The Best American Non-Required
Reading, Yours in Food, and All the More
Real. He has contributed to a number of
magazines including Black Clock, A Public
Space, n+1, Conjunctions, McSweeney's,
and The Believer. His work has been
translated into more than ten languages, and
in 2007-2008 he was visiting professor at
the University of Leipzig.
BIOGRAPHY
David Haynes directs the creative writing
program at SMU, and also teaches for the
MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson
College. In 2004 he served as fiction mentor
for Minnesota's Loft Mentor Series, joining
an exclusive group of writers who have both
participated in the program and later served
as mentors. During the spring of 2006 he
was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at the
University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the
author of six novels for adults and five books
for younger readers. In 2004 his most recent
adult novel, The Full Matilda, was published
by the Harlem Moon imprint of Broadway
Books. He has received a fellowship from
the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several
of his short stories have been read and
recorded for the National Public Radio series
"Selected Shorts."
BIOGRAPHY
Robin Hemley is the author of nine books
of fiction and nonfiction. He's published
stories and essays in The New York Times,
Southern Review, Prairie Schooner,
Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and many
other magazines and anthologies, including
Sudden Fiction, Continued. His fiction has
been heard on NPR's "Selected Shorts,"
performed on stage, and adapted into a
short film. Awards for his work include the
Nelson Algren Award, the George Garrett
Award, Story magazine's Humor Award, the
Independent Press Book Award, Foreword
magazine's Award for Nonfiction, the Walter
Rumsey Marvin Award, and two Pushcart
Prizes. His book, Invented Eden: The Elusive,
Disputed History of the Tasaday, was named
an Editor's Choice Book of 2003 by the
American Library Association. An anthology,
Extreme Fiction: Formalists and Fabulists,
co-edited with Michael Martone, was
published in 2004. A new book, Do Over:
A Middle-aged Man Takes a Second Shot
at Youth's Disappointments, is forthcoming
from Little, Brown in 2009. He is Director
of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the
University of Iowa.
BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Henley's first novel, Hummingbird
House, was a finalist for the 1999 National
Book Award and the New Yorker Fiction
Prize (2000). Her second novel, In the River
Sweet, was named a Best Fall Book by the
St. Louis Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune,
and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has
also published three collections of stories:
Friday Night at Silver Star, The Secret of
Cartwheels, and Worship of the Common
Heart. Friday Night at Silver Star won the
1985 Montana Arts Council First Book
Award. Her work has been anthologized
in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best
American Short Stories, Love Stories for the
Rest of Us, and Circle of Women. Patricia
has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue
University for twenty years.
BIOGRAPHY
Marcie Hershman is the author of the
novels Tales of the Master Race and Safe
in America, and the memoir, Speak to Me:
Grief, Love and What Endures. Her essays
and reviews have appeared widely: The
New York Times Magazine, The Boston
Globe, Poets & Writers, Tikkun, Agni,
Ms., ArchitectureBoston, Ploughshares,
in anthologies, and on NPR. Among
her awards are those from the Bunting
Institute/Harvard University, the L.L.Winship
Foundation, the St. Botolph Foundation,
and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
She teaches at Tufts University and in Lesley
University's low-residency MFA program.
BIOGRAPHY
Pam Houston is the Director of Creative
Writing at U.C. Davis. She is the author of
three books of fiction, Cowboys Are My
Weakness (winner of the Western States
Book Award), Waltzing the Cat (winner
of the WILLA Award for Contemporary
Fiction), and Sight Hound; a play, Tracking
the Pleiades; and a memoir titled A Little
More About Me. Her stories have appeared
in Best American Short Stories, The O.
Henry Awards Prize Collection, and Best
American Short Stories of the Century. She
is working on a book called Flight.
BIOGRAPHY
Marie Howe was a Fellow at the Fine Arts
Work Center in 1983. Her newest book of
poems is The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
(WW Norton). She is also the author of the
collections What the Living Do and The
Good Thief, winner of the 1988 National
Poetry Series award. She's received
grants and awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, NEA, The Massachusetts
Cultural Council, and the Bunting Institute.
With Michael Klein, she edited an anthology,
In the Company of my Solitude: American
Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1995). She
currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College
and NYU.
BIOGRAPHY
Cynthia Huntington is the author of three
books of poetry, most recently, The
Radiant, from Four Way Books, and a
prose memoir, The Salt House. She lives in
Vermont and teaches writing at Dartmouth
College and in the MFA in Writing Program
at Dartmouth College.
BIOGRAPHY
Major Jackson is the author of two collections
of poetry: Hoops, and Leaving Saturn,
recipient of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry
Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics
Circle Award. His poems have appeared
in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard,
Callaloo, Post Road, TriQuarterly, and The
New Yorker among other literary journals,
and on National Public Radio’s “All Things
Considered.” He is the recipient of fellowships
from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the
Fine Arts Work Center, and a Pew Fellowship
in the Arts; a commission from The Chamber
Orchestra of Philadelphia; and the recipient
of a Whiting Writers’ Award. A former Witter
Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress, he
currently teaches at the University of Vermont
and is a faculty member of the Bennington
Writers Seminar.
BIOGRAPHY
This year Matthew Klam's short fiction
has been anthologized in The New Granta
Book of the American Short Story, The Best
American Nonrequired Reading, and Secret
Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food
and Drink. His first book, Sam the Cat and
Other Stories (Vintage), was a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and
was selected as a New York Times Notable
Book of the Year. His work has been
featured in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's,
Nerve, and The New York Times Magazine.
He has taught creative writing at the
University of Michigan, American University
and Stockholm University in Sweden. He
is a recipient of a PEN/Robert Bingham
Award, a National Endowment for the Arts
grant, a Whiting Writers' Award, and an O.
Henry Award.
BIOGRAPHY
Maxine Kumin's most recent poetry
collection, Still to Mow, was published in
2007. She is the author of Jack and Other
New Poems, The Long Marriage and a
memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond:
Anatomy of a Recovery. Her awards include
the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the
Poets' Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the
Harvard Arts Medal and the Poetry Society
of America's Robert Frost Medal. Kumin
is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the
New England College low-residency MFA in
Poetry program. She and her husband live
on a farm in New Hampshire.
BIOGRAPHY
James Lecesne has created several oneperson
shows including Word of Mouth, which
won a Drama Desk Award and the Outer
Critics Circle Award. His short feature film,
Trevor, received an Academy Award for Best
Live Action Short Film and The Road Home,
which featured stories of children of war, was
presented at the Asia Society in NYC and
at the International Peace Initiative at The
Hague. He has adapted Armistead Maupin's
Further Tales of the City for Showtime, and
wrote one of the final episodes of Will &
Grace. His new novel, Absolute Brightness,
was published this year by HarperCollins.
An activist as well as an artist, Mr. Lecesne
founded the "Trevor Project," the only 24-
hour suicide prevention helpline for GLBTQ
teens, and "After The Storm," a non-profit arts
organization designed to benefit the youth of
New Orleans.
BIOGRAPHY
Sara London is the author of Firehorse Max
(HarperCollins), a selection of the Vermont
National Education Association and the
Missouri State Teachers Association; and
The Good Luck Glasses (Scholastic).
She has lectured on writing for children
at the University of Vermont and at public
libraries and schools across New England.
A former fiction editor at Seventeen, she
has also published poetry in various literary
magazines and anthologies. She teaches
creative writing and literature at Smith
College, and reviews children's books for
The New York Times Book Review.
BIOGRAPHY
Phillip Lopate is the author of three essay
collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de
Vivre, Portrait of My Body), a book of film
criticism (Totally Tenderly Tragically), and a
teaching memoir (Being With Children).
His most recent book of nonfiction is
the urbanistic meditation Waterfront: A
Journey Around Manhattan. His essays
have been collected in Getting Personal:
Selected Writings. He has also edited
several anthologies, including his acclaimed
Art of the Personal Essay and American
Movie Critics: From the Silent Era to the
Present. His work has been included
in The Best American Essays and the
Pushcart Prize series; his many awards
include a Guggenheim Fellowship and two
NEA grants. He holds the Adams Chair in
Humanities at Hofstra University, and also
teaches in the MFA programs of Columbia,
the New School and Bennington.
BIOGRAPHY
Cleopatra Mathis's sixth book of poems,
White Sea, was published by Sarabande
Books in 2005. Various prizes for her work
include two fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Jane Kenyon
Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, the
Peter Lavin Award from the Academy of
American Poets, the Robert Frost Award,
and two Pushcart Prizes. Since 1982 she
has taught at Dartmouth College, where she
directs the creative writing program. A 1981-
82 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, she
serves on the FAWC's Writing Committee.
BIOGRAPHY
Alice Mattison's new novel, Nothing Is Quite
Forgotten In Brooklyn, will appear in the
fall of 2008, and an excerpt from it was
recently published in The New Yorker. She
is the author of eight earlier books of fiction,
including the story collection In Case We're
Separated (a New York Times Notable
Book and the winner of the Connecticut
Book Award in Fiction) and the novels The
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, The
Book Borrower, and Hilda and Pearl. Her
stories, essays, and poems have appeared
in Best American Short Stories and The
Pushcart Prize, as well as Ploughshares,
Ms. Magazine, The Threepenny Review,
Agni, Shenandoah, Writer's Chronicle,
Glimmer Train, and many other journals. She
teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing
Seminars and has also taught at Yale.
BIOGRAPHY
Richard McCann is the author of Mother of
Sorrows (Vintage, 2006), winner of the 2005
Zacharis Award and named by Amazon
as one of the Top 50 Books of 2005, and
Ghost Letters (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award,
1994 Capricorn Poetry Award). His work
has appeared in many magazines and
anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize
Stories 2007, The Penguin Book of Gay
Short Stories, and Best American Essays
2000. Awards include fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the
FAWC, and the Fulbright and Rockefeller
foundations. He currently teaches at
American University, and serves on the
FAWC Board of Trustees and the Board of
Directors of the PEN Faulkner Foundation.
BIOGRAPHY
Pamela Painter is the author of two story
collections, Getting to Know the Weather,
winner of the GLCA Award for First Fiction,
and The Long and Short of It. She is also
co-author of the widely used textbook,
What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction
Writers. Her stories have appeared in
The Atlantic, Harper's, Kenyon Review,
Ploughshares, and Quick Fiction, among
others and in numerous anthologies,
such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction,
and MicroFiction. A short-short collection
is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon
University Press. Her stories have been
presented on stage by Word Theatre, Stage
Turner, Symphony Space, and Wellfleet
Harbor Actors Theatre. She currently
teaches in the Writing, Literature and
Publishing Program at Emerson College.
BIOGRAPHY
Carl Phillips is the author of nine books of
poems, most recently Quiver of Arrows:
Selected Poems 1986-2006. His awards
and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award, the Lambda Literary Award, an Award
in Literature from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of
Congress, and the Academy of American
Poets, to which he was named a Chancellor
in 2007. He teaches at Washington
University in St. Louis.
BIOGRAPHY
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two
widely anthologized collections of stories,
Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, and three
novels, Machine Dreams, Shelter, and
Motherkind (nominated for the UK's Orange
Prize). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship, two NEAs, a Bunting Fellowship,
a FAWC Fellowship, a National Book
Critics Circle Award nomination and a 2004
Howard Foundation Fellowship. She was
awarded The Sue Kaufman Prize (1980)
and an Academy Award in Literature (1997)
by the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters. Excerpts from her
forthcoming novel, Termite (Knopf, 2009),
have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, The
Southern Review, and Narrative Magazine.
She currently directs the MFA Program at
Rutgers Newark.
BIOGRAPHY
Marie Ponsot has published numerous
works, including Springing; The Bird
Catcher, winner of the National Book
Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the
1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The
Green Dark; Admit Impediment; and
True Minds. A translator of books from
the French, she has taught in graduate
programs at Queens College, Beijing
United University, the Poetry Center of the
YMHA, New York University and Columbia
University. Her awards include a grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and
the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern
Language Association.
BIOGRAPHY
Nahid Rachlin went to MFA programs at
Columbia University and Stanford University.
Among her publications are four novels,
Foreigner, Married to a Stranger, Heart's
Desire, and Jumping Over Fire; a short story
collection, Veils; and a memoir, Persian Girls.
Her individual stories have appeared in more
than fifty magazines and she has written
reviews for the New York Times. Among the
grants and awards she has received are a
National Endowment for the Arts grant and
a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford).
Presently she teaches at the New School
University and is an associate Fellow at Yale.
BIOGRAPHY
Victoria Redel is the author of two books
of poetry and three books of fiction. Her
most recent novel is the Border of Truth.
Her novel Loverboy won the Mariella Gable
Novel Award, and was a Borders Original
Voice and Paperback Book Club Featured
Selection. The film adaptation, directed by
Kevin Bacon, was nationally released in
April 2006. Her work has been in numerous
journals including BOMB, Antioch Review,
Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly and Epoch.
A recipient of the Tom and Stan Wick Poetry
Prize, poetry fellowships from the NEA and
FAWC, and a finalist for the James Laughlin
Award, she currently teaches at Sarah
Lawrence College and Columbia University.
BIOGRAPHY
Martha Rhodes is the author of three
collections of poetry: Mother Quiet (Zoo
Press, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (winner
of the 2000 Green Rose Prize), and At the
Gate (Provincetown Arts Press, 1995). Her
poems have appeared in Agni, American
Poetry Review, Fence, Ploughshares,
and TriQuarterly, among other journals
and in many anthologies including The
Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American
Women, and The New American Poets:
A Bread Loaf Anthology. She teaches at
Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA
Program for Writers at Warren Wilson
College. She is the director and founding
editor of Four Way Books, a literary press
based in New York City.
BIOGRAPHY
Liz Rosenberg has published two award-winning
novels, poetry, fiction, and books for
young readers. Her fiction and non-fiction
have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The
New Yorker, The Quarterly, Bellevue Review
and elsewhere. She teaches English and
Creative Writing at Binghamton University,
where she won the Chancellor's Award for
Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her
newest books are Demon Love and The Lily
Poems (USA), both out in 2008, and Bread &
Fire (Jerusalem, 2008), a collection of essays,
for which she served as contributing editor.
BIOGRAPHY
Carlo Rotella's third and most recent
book, Cut Time: An Education at the
Fights, received the L. L. Winship/PEN
New England Award and was a finalist for
the Lost Angeles Times Book Prize. His
articles and essays have appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, the Washington
Post Magazine, Harper's, The American
Scholar, DoubleTake, Boston, The Believer,
TriQuarterly, Raritan, Slate, and The Best
American Essays. He has received a
Whiting Writers' Award and Guggenheim,
Howard, and Du Bois fellowships, and
lectured in Bosnia on a U.S. Department
of State Speaker and Specialist Grant. He
teaches at Boston College.
BIOGRAPHY
Michael Ryan is Professor of English
and Creative Writing at the University of
California, Irvine. He has written four books
of poems, an autobiography, a memoir,
and a collection of essays about poetry
and writing. His New and Selected Poems
won the 2005 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
His work has also won the Lenore Marshall
Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, two NEA
Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and
the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award,
and his poems and essays have appeared
regularly in The American Poetry Review,
The Threepenny Review, The New Yorker,
and many other magazines and anthologies.
BIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
Alan Shapiro has written ten books of poetry,
most recently Old War; Tantalus in Love; The
Dead Alive and Busy, 2001 winner of the
Kingsley Tufts Award; and Song and Dance,
published in 2002. The recipient of a writer's
award from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, Shapiro has also published
three books of prose, and a translation
of Aeschylus's Oresteia, which Oxford
University Press published in 2003.
BIOGRAPHY
Martha Southgate is the author of Third
Girl From the Left, which was published in
paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September
2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award
from the Black Caucus of the American Library
Association and was shortlisted for the PEN/
Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/
Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel,
The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex
Award from the American Library Association
and was named one of the best novels of
2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington
Post. She is also the author of Another Way
to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King
Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She
received a 2002 New York Foundation for the
Arts grant and has received fellowships from
the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers
Conference. Her 2007 essay "Writers Like Me"
was published in the New York Times Book
Review.
BIOGRAPHY
Jean Valentine is the author of ten books of
poetry, most recently Little Boat (Wesleyan,
2007). Earlier books are Growing Darkness,
Growing Light (1997), The Cradle of the Real
Life (2000) and Door in the Mountain (2004).
She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, was
awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the
Poetry Society of America in 2000 and won
the National Book Award in 2004. She lives
and works in New York City.
BIOGRAPHY
Afaa Michael Weaver (born Michael S.
Weaver) is a poet, playwright, short fiction
writer, free lance journalist, and editor. He
has received NEA and Pew fellowships
and been a Fulbright scholar. In playwriting
Afaa has received the PDI Award from ETA
Theater in Chicago. An ongoing student of
Chinese language and culture, he translates
contemporary Chinese poetry and irregularly
convenes an international conference on
contemporary Chinese poetry at Simmons
College, where he is the Alumnae Professor
of English. In April 2005 in Beijing he received
a gold friendship medal from the Chinese
Writers Association. The Plum Flower Dance/
poems 1985 to 2005, (U of Pitt Press 2007)
is his 10th collection of poetry.