Kathleen Aguero — Poetry
© Debi Milligan
Kathleen Aguero has published four collections of poetry: Daughter Of, The Real Weather, Thirsty Day, and—most recently—Investigations, a collection of poems inspired by Nancy Drew. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry magazine, Massachusetts Review, and the Cincinnati Review. She is also co-editor of three collections of multicultural literature: A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare. Her creative nonfiction essay, “Marriage Koan,” appears in the anthology Why I’m Still Married. Recipient of a Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kathi also was awarded a writing grant from the Elgin/Cox Trust. She has taught at the Writers’ Center at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, as well as in the Poets in the Schools Programs of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In 2004, she held the position of Visiting Research Associate at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. In addition to teaching in the Solstice MFA program, Kathi is a professor of English in Pine Manor’s undergraduate program. She also teaches for “Changing Lives Through Literature,” an alternative sentencing program based on the power of books to change lives through reading and group discussion. She is a poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. Visit www.kathleenaguero.com
Read Kathi Aguero's interview by Tiara Marchando.
Venise Berry — Fiction
Venise Berry is the author of three national bestselling novels: So Good, An African American Love Story; All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale —recipient of a 2001 Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association— and Colored Sugar Water. Her fourth Novel, Pockets of Sanity, is expected in 2012, and she is currently at work on a memoir, Driven, in addition to a cultural critical analysis of the media, I Used to be a Rap Music Fan: Racialism and the Media and What do you believe? a spiritual anthology series. In 2003, she received the Creative Contribution to Literature Award from the Zora Neale Hurston Society; and in 2001, she was recognized with an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation in Des Moines. She has co-authored two nonfiction resource books with S. Torriano Berry, an associate professor in Film at Howard University: The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema and The 50 Most Influential Black Films. Her book Mediated Messages and African-American Culture: Contemporary Issues, a co-edited, nonfiction project, won the Meyers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997. She is an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and the Coordinator of the African American Studies program.
Visit www.veniseberry.com.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar — Poetry
Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium, where she worked for Belgian and Luxembourg Radio and Television. Her first poetry collection in English, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, the National Poetry Series, the Ohio State University Prize, and the Nicholas Roerich Prize. Her second book of poems, Small Gods of Grief, won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. Her third poetry collection, A New Hunger, was an ALA Notable Book in 2008. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she co-directed the Aspen Writers’ Conference from 1989 to 1992. Her other honors and awards include a Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference; Writer-in-Residence positions at Hamilton College and at the Vermont Studio Center; a Pushcart Prize; and the McEver Chair In Poetry at Georgia Tech. Garrison Keillor chose four of her poems to read on the Writers' Almanac. She is the editor of the anthologies Never Before: Poems About First Experiences; Outsiders: Poems About Rebels, Exiles, and Renegades; and Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City, and co-editor of Night Out: Poems About Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Bars. Fluent in four languages, she is currently translating French poetry into English, American poetry into French. She and her husband, the poet Kurt Brown published a book of translations from Flemish poet Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness. Laure-Anne has taught at Emerson College and Sarah Lawrence College and at writers’ conferences across the country.
Visit www.laureannebosselaar.com.
Read Laure-Anne Bosselaar's Interview by Tiara Marchando
M. Evelina Galang — Writer-in-Residence
Named one of the most influential Filipinas in the United States by Filipina Women's Network, M. Evelina Galang is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self (Coffee House Press) and the novel, One Tribe (New Issues Press). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in such publications as Melus: The Journal of the Society of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States; The Philippine Star; Calyx; Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity; and Ms. magazine. She is also editor of the nonfiction anthology Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press). The recipient of numerous awards, including the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights and the 2004 AWP Prize in the Novel, she has worked as an advocate of surviving Filipina "Comfort Women" of WWII since 1998. In addition to teaching at Solstice, Galang directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami.
Visit www.mevelinagalang.com
Amy Hoffman — Creative Nonfiction
A writer and community activist, Amy Hoffman is editor-in-chief of Women's Review of Books. Her third memoir, Lies About My Family, is forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Her second memoir, An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in fall 2007. It was short-listed for the New York Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her first memoir, Hospital Time, about taking care of friends with AIDS in the late 1980s, was short-listed for the American Library Association Gay Book Award and the Judy Grahn Award, and was a New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age selection. Amy's news stories, feature articles, essays, interviews, and book reviews have been published in Sojourner, Lambda Book Report, UU World, and MassHumanities, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities biannual newsletter. A former development director for Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the Women's Lunch Place, a daytime shelter for homeless women, she has also been an editor at Gay Community News, South End Press, and the Unitarian Universalist World magazine. She received her MFA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has taught for UMass Amherst and Emerson College.
Visit www.amyhoffman.net.
Steven Huff — Fiction, Poetry
© Joe Flaherty
Steven Huff is the author of a collection of stories, A Pig in Paris (2008), and two collections of poems, The Water We Came From (2003) and More Daring Escapes, published by Red Hen Press in 2008. His chapbook Proof was named Editor’s Choice in the 2004 Two Rivers Review Chapbook Competition. Steve’s poems and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Kestrel, The Chatauqua Literary Review, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and other journals and publications. Garrison Keillor has also read his poetry on “The Writer’s Almanac” public radio program. A Pushcart Prize winner in fiction, Steve teaches creative writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was creator and host of a weekly radio feature in Western New York, “Fiction in Shorts,” which aired on public radio stations WXXI-FM and WJSL-FM from 2002 through 2008. The former executive director of BOA Editions, Ltd., he is now director of adult education and programs at the Writers & Books community literary center in Rochester, New York. He is also the founder of Tiger Bark Press, which most recently published Gate at Visby by Deena Linett.
Read Steven Huff's Interview by Jiao Fu
Randall Kenan — Creative Nonfiction, Fiction
© Jill Krementz
In researching his nonfiction book, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Randall Kenan spent eight years traversing the United States, gathering more than 200 interviews that represent the wide range of experiences in black American life today. In Walking on Water, which was nominated for the Southern Book Award, Randall brings to his interviews, travels, and comments the deep heart, keen curiosity, and inquisitive imagination that make him one of America’s finest writers and commentators. A Visitation of Spirits was Randall’s first novel, published in 1989. His collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of the year. He is also the author of a young-adult biography of James Baldwin and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta. His most recent book is a work of nonfiction, The Fire This Time (2007), and he wrote the biographical essay in the forthcoming A New Historical Guide to James Baldwin, in addition to editing Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin (2010). Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award, Randall received the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in 1997. He was a member of the editorial staff at Alfred A. Knopf publishers in the mid 1980s. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Vassar College, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Memphis. He now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Read Randall Kenan's Interview with Tiara Marchando
Robert Lopez — Fiction
© Nola Lopez
Robert Lopez is the author of Asunder, a collection of short fiction; and two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in dozens of publications, including Bomb, The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, and the Norton Anthology of Sudden Fiction – Latino. He has taught at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, and was a fellow in fiction for the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and edits No News Today, a running anthology of newsworthy nonfiction.
Read Robert Lopez' Interview with Hareem Shafi.
Jaime Manrique — Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry
Jaime Manrique is a Colombian-born novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who has written both in English and Spanish, and whose work has been translated into ten languages. Among his publications in English are the novels Colombian Gold, Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, and Our Lives Are the Rivers; the volumes of poetry My Night with Federico García Lorca and Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus; and the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His honors include Colombia’s National Poetry Award, the 2007 International Latino Book Award (Best Novel, Historical Fiction), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jaime was associate professor in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Columbia University (2002-2009); he has also taught in the MFA in Creative Writing Programs at Long Island University and Rutgers University. His new novel, Cervantes Street, will be published in September 2012 by Akashic Books.
Laura Williams McCaffrey — Writing for Children & Young Adults
Laura Williams McCaffrey was born and raised in Vermont. She attended Barnard College of Columbia University, then returned to Vermont and eventually became a school librarian, answering to the names “Ms. Librarian,” “Library Lady,” and sometimes simply “Ms. Library.” A passionate advocate for the arts in education, she now mentors teens in creative writing, in addition to regularly contributing educational materials for children and teens to both HarperCollins and Penguin’s young readers divisions. Laura’s third young-adult speculative fiction novel, tentatively titled Lyla’s Flight, is forthcoming from Clarion Books. Lyla is a dystopic fantasy as well as a mixed-format novel that includes comics storylines integrated into prose text. Laura is the author of two other young-adult speculative fiction novels: Water Shaper (2006), selected for the 2007 New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age list; and Alia Waking (2003), named an International Reading Association Notable Book. Alia Waking was also a nominee for the annual Teens’ Top Ten Books list and for Vermont’s Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award. Laura is currently at work on a fourth speculative fiction young-adult novel, a story inspired by her research of WW I nurses.
Visit www.laurawilliamsmccaffrey.com.
Read Laura Williams McCaffrey's Interview by Tiara Marchando
Anne-Marie Oomen — Poetry, Creative Nonfiction
Anne-Marie Oomen is author of two memoirs, Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, both Michigan Notable Books, and An American Map: Essays (all Wayne State University Press);and a full-length collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman (Milkweed Editions). She is also represented in New Poems of the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, and edited Looking Over My Shoulder: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, an anthology of seniors' essays funded by the Michigan Humanities Council. She has written and produced seven plays, including the award-winning Northern Belles, inspired by oral histories of women farmers, and Whaddaya Give!, a regional musical. She is faculty editor for the Interlochen Review, founding editor of Dunes Review, former president of Michigan Writers, Inc., and also serves as instructor of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy. She and her husband, David Early, have built their own home in Empire, Michigan, where they live with a small, politically-opinionated cat named Bootros Bootros Kitty.
Read Anne-Marie Oomen's Interview by Carrie Margolis.
Dzvinia Orlowsky — Poetry
Pushcart-Prize winner Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, co-winner of the 2010 Sheila Motton Book Award. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as a Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classic in 2008. Dzvinia’s poetry and translations have appeared in numerous anthologies, including A Map of Hope: An International Literary Anthology; From Three Worlds: New Writing from the Ukraine; and A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry. Her translation (from Ukrainian) of Alexander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, was published by House Between Water press in 2006. A founding editor of Four Way Books, she is a contributing editor to Agni, The Marlboro Review, and Shade. She has taught poetry at the Mount Holyoke Writers’ Conference, The Boston Center for Adult Education, Emerson College, Gemini Ink, the Stonecoast Summer Writers’ Conference, the Stonecoast MFA Program, Writers in Paradise, and the Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference at Pine Manor College. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Columbia, Field, Diner, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Dzvinia was recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant as well as a the Council’s Professional Development Grant. Her new poetry collection, Silvertone, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. She lives in Massachusetts.
Read Dzvinia Orlowsky's interview by Carrie Margolis.
Iain Haley Pollock — Poetry
Iain Haley Pollock lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Chestnut Hill Academy. His first collection of poems, Spit Back a Boy (University of Georgia Press, 2011), earned the 2010 Cave Canem Prize. His work has appeared in several literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Callaloo. Iain received his undergraduate degree at Haverford College and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award. He held a Cave Canem Fellowship from 2006-2009. He was the Solstice MFA Program’s first Cave Canem Partner Poet and will join the MFA faculty in summer 2012.
Sandra Scofield — Fiction, Creative Nonfiction
Author of seven novels, Sandra Scofield won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction Award in 1997 and was a 1991 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Her titles include A Chance to See Egypt, Gringa, Plain Seeing, Walking Dunes, and Beyond Deserving, a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Occasions of Sin, and a craft book for writers titled The Scene Book. An experienced teacher with a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in Curriculum and Instruction, Sandra has served on the faculty of Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University), and has been a visiting writer at Macalaster College, the University of Arkansas, Miami University (Oxford, OH), and Old Dominion University. Through the National Book Foundation, she has twice served as writer-in-residence on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. She has taught in private and public elementary and secondary schools, and has extensive experience as an educational planner, having worked with the Northwest Educational Laboratory, the Montana Department of Public Instruction, and school districts in Oregon and Alaska. Sandra is a regular faculty member of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and has been on the faculty of several other summer writers’ workshops. Sandra was born in Texas and educated there. A longtime resident of Oregon, she now lives in Montana with her husband, a retired high school teacher. She is a besotted grandmother, a frequent flier, and a painter.
Kashmira Sheth — Writing for Children and Young Adults
© Larsen Portrait Design, Madison WI
Kashmira Sheth writes picture books, middle grade novels, and young-adult fiction. Her first novel, Blue Jasmine (Hyperion Books for Children), received the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Award and was selected by American Library Association’s Great Middle School Reads. Her historical fiction, Keeping Corner (Hyperion Books for Children), received the Parents’ Choice Gold Award and the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association Honor Award. It was also selected as an International Reading Association’s Notable Book for a Global Society and American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults. Her picture books, My Dadima Wears a Sari (Peachtree Publishers) and Monsoon Afternoon (Peachtree Publishers), were notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People. All six of her books have been selected for “Choices,” Cooperative Children’s Book Center's annual best-of-the-year list. Her latest novel, Boys Without Names (Balzer and Bray, HarperCollins), was a Junior Library Guild Selection and was on Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best List. Kashmira has a chapter book, The No Dogs Allowed Rule, due out in 2012 and a picture book, Tiger in My Soup, forthcoming in 2013. Kashmira was born and raised in India and comes from a family of storytellers. She grew up listening to stories her grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunts told her. As a teenager she came to the United States to attend college. She studied science at Iowa and Wisconsin but her enjoyment of reading and sharing stories nudged her into writing. Besides reading books written in English, she is a life long lover of Gujarati literature and Hindi poetry.
Visit: http://www.kashmirasheth.com/
Mark Turcotte — Poetry
© S. GreinerMark Turcotte spent his earliest years on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation and in the migrant camps of the western United States. Later, he grew up in Michigan, then traveled the country, working and living on the road for nearly fifteen years. Mark is author of four poetry collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His work has appeared in myriad journals, including Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Sentence and Ploughshares. Recipient of a Lannan Foundation Literary Completion Grant, he has also been awarded two Literary Fellowships by the Wisconsin Arts Board. He was writer-in-residence in the National Book Foundation’s “American Voices” program on the Wind River Indian Reservation of Wyoming, and completed a Lannan Writer’s Residency in Marfa, Texas. He was the 2008/09 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and now serves as Visiting Assistant Professor at DePaul University, where he teaches creative writing in the Department of English. Turcotte holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University.
Sterling Watson — Fiction
© John M. ClarkSterling Watson is the author of six novels, including Fighting in the Shade, (Akashic, 2011); Sweet Dream Baby; Deadly Sweet; Blind Tongues; The Calling; and Weep No More, My Brother. Sterling is the recipient of three Florida Fine Arts Council Awards for Fiction Writing. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Gulfstream Magazine, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Southern Review. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is the Peter Meinke Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he co-directs the Writers In Paradise Conference with Dennis Lehane. He was the recipient of both the John M. Bevan Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award and the Lloyd W. Chapin Award for Excellence in Scholarship and the Arts for the 2006-2007 academic year. Before Eckerd, he taught at the University of Florida and in the Prison School of the Florida State Penitentiary. He lives in Tierra Verde, Florida.
David Yoo — Writing for Young People
David Yoo is the author of the novels Girls for Breakfast (Delacorte), which was named a NYPL Best Book for Teens and a Booksense Pick, and Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before (Hyperion), a Chicago Best of the Best selection, of which author Jonathan Lethem wrote, “David Yoo's voice is so witty and charming it only seems fair to give warning: he’ll break the hearts of teenage readers of all ages with this bittersweet love story.” His first middle grade novel, The Detention Club, was published in June 2011, and a collection of essays, The Choke Artist (Grand Central), documenting the experience of growing up as a Korean American with characteristic humor, is forthcoming in spring 2012. He holds a B.A. from Skidmore College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder. David has a regular column in Koream Journal, and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. He resides in Massachusetts.
Visit www.daveyoo.com.
Read David Yoo's interview by Hareem Shafi.
Writers-in-Residence
Terrance Hayes — Poetry
Terrance Hayes is the author of four poetry collections, including Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Hip Logic, a National Poetry Series selection and finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; Muscular Music, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Wind in a Box. He has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Whiting Writers Award, two Pushcart Prizes, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family.
Helen Elaine Lee — Fiction
Helen Elaine Lee was educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent's Gift, was published by Atheneum in 1994 and her second novel,Water Marked, was published by Scribner in 1999. She recently finished A Life Without, a novel about the lives of ten people who are incarcerated in two neighboring U.S. prisons, and The Hard Loss, a novel about a DNA exoneree’s first week of freedom after 22 years of incarceration for a crime he did not commit. Stories from Life Without have appeared or been accepted in Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Hanging Loose, Best African American Fiction 2009 (Bantam Books), and solsticelitmag.com. She is Associate Professor of Fiction Writing in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. A member of the Board of Directors of PEN New England, she serves on its Freedom to Write Committee and teaches in its Prison Creative Writing Program.
Visit www.helenelainelee.com
Dennis Lehane — Fiction
Dennis Lehane is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including: The Given Day, Shutter Island, and Mystic River — winner of the Anthony Award for Best Novel, the Barry Award for Best Novel, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction — in addition to the popular Patrick Kenzie series of Boston detective novels: A Drink Before the War; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; and Moonlight Mile. His tenth novel, Live By Night, will be published in October, 2012. Three of Dennis’ novels have been adapted for film: the Academy Award-winning Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood; Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck; and Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorcese. His short story collection, Coronado, features the story “Until Gwen,” the basis of his play “Coronado,” which premiered in New York City in December 2005. “Until Gwen was also selected for The Best American Short Stories 2005, The Best American Mystery Short Stories 2005, and New Stories from the South 2005. Writer-in-Residence at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dennis is the co-director of the Writers in Paradise Conference and was a staff writer for HBO’s The Wire. He has taught fiction and literature at the Harvard Extension School, the Stonecoast MFA Program, and Tufts University.
Visit www.dennislehanebooks.com.
Grace Lin — Writing for Children & Young Adults
Grace Lin is the author and illustrator of picture books, early readers and middle grade novels. Her first book, The Ugly Vegetables, was published in 1999 and heralded as an American Booksellers Association's "Pick of the List" and a Bank's Street College Best Book of the Year. The Ugly Vegetables was also nominated for the California Young Reader Children's Choice Award and named a Growing Good Kids Book Award Classic. Grace followed that success with the publication of more than a dozen more books, including Dim Sum for Everyone!, Fortune Cookie Fortunes, and Olvina Flies. Grace's first middle-grade novel, The Year of the Dog, was released with glowing praise, as was her 2008 sequel, The Year of the Rat. Grace's 2010 Newbery Honor book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon was chosen for Al Roker's Today Show Kid's Book Club and was a New York Times Bestseller. Ling & Ting, Grace's first early reader, was honored with the Theodor Geisel Honor in 2011. An Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award nominee for the U.S., most of Grace's books are about the Asian-American experience because she believes, “Books erase bias, they make the uncommon everyday, and the mundane exotic. A book makes all cultures universal.”
Visit www.gracelin.com.
Read Grace Lin's Interview by Jiao Fu
Michael Steinberg — Creative Nonfiction
A native New Yorker, Michael Steinberg is a memoirist, personal essayist, and founding editor of the award-winning literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. In 2003, ForeWord Magazine chose his memoir, Still Pitching, as the Independent Press Memoir/Autobiography of the Year. Other books include Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan; The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (now in its sixth edition); Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching; and The Writer's Way. His essays and memoirs have appeared in many literary journals and have been cited several times in Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing. Mike taught writing and literature at Michigan State University for more than thirty years. Most recently he has been a guest writer/editor at several national and international writing conferences, including the Paris Writers' Workshop, the California State University Fine Arts Festival, the Geneva Writers' Conference, the Prague Summer Writing Program, the Chautauqua Writer's Center, and the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference in Alaska. He's currently working on a collection of essays and a mid-life memoir.
Consulting Writers
M.L. Liebler — Consulting Writer
© Photos by Alex Lumelsky
M. L. Liebler is an acclaimed poet, university professor, literary arts activist, arts organizer and an award winning educator. He was awarded the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, bestowed by the literary magazine Poets and Writers to honor authors who "have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community." He is author of thirteen books, including the award-winning Written In Rain: New & Selected Poems 1985-2000; The Moon In a Box (which includes a CD of his performance poetry); Greatest Hits 1984-2005; a bilingual edition (in Russian and English) of The Fragrant Benediction of Life, and Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (Wayne State University Press), featuring poems written in and about Russia, Israel, Germany, Alaska, and Detroit. His recent working class literary anthology, Working Words: Punching the Clock & Kicking Out the Jams (Coffee House Press), was selected as a Michigan Library Notable Book for 2011. On behalf of the U.S. State Department, he has read, performed, and taught poetry in such countries as China, Russia, Israel, Germany, Austria, France, Czech Republic, Britain, Wales, and elsewhere, including almost every state in the USA. In 2005, he was named the first Poet Laureate of his home town, St. Clair Shores, Michigan. He has taught English, Creative Writing, Labor Studies, and American Studies at Wayne State University since 1980. He is the founding director of both The National Writer’s Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization. He was recently selected at Best Detroit Poet by The Detroit Free Press and Detroit’s Metro Time, and he is the nation’s first-ever Artist in Residence for a Public Library, the Chelsea District Library (2008-2009). M.L. is available to consult with MFA students and prospective students who are interested in pursuing a third-semester, applied-track internship.
Visit www.mlliebler.com.
Jacqueline Woodson — Consulting Writer
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of a number of books for children and young adults, including the forthcoming Each Kindness (October, 2012), the recent Beneath a Meth Moon; Peace, Locomotion; the Newbery Honor books After Tupac & D Foster, Show Way, and Feathers; Miracle’s Boys, winner of the Coretta Scott King Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (made into a six-part television miniseries, directed by, among others, Spike Lee); Hush, a Finalist for the National Book Award and the American Library Association (ALA) “Best Book For Young Adults”; Locomotion, also a National Book Award finalist, a Horn Book Award Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book; and If You Come Softly, named a Best Book for Young Adults by the ALA. Her picture book The Other Side has won many awards, including the Texas Blue Bonnet Award and a Child Magazine Best Book Award; it was also named an ALA Notable Book. She also adapted Locomotion as a play, and the stage version premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in October, 2010. Jacqueline has received several additional honors, including two Jane Addams Peace Awards, three Lambda Literary Awards, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, a Granta Best Writer Under Forty Award, Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 1994, and a number of ALA Best Book Awards. A former drama therapist for runaways and homeless children in New York City, Jacqueline has taught fiction at the Vermont College MFA in Creative Writing Program; The City College, City University of New York; Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program; the National Book Foundation Summer Writing Camp; and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She resides with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit www.jacquelinewoodson.com.
Director and Staff
Meg Kearney — Director
Meg Kearney is Founding Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. For eleven years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards) in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Meg’s most recent collection of poems, Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009), was winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award; it was also a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. The title poem of Home By Now will be included in Garrison Keillor’s next Good Poems anthology, due out in fall 2011. Meg’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001, and is still in print. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher’s guide, came out in 2007. Its sequel, The Girl in the Mirror, will be published by Persea Books in 2012. Her story “Chalk” will also appear in Fresh Flash: Short Short Stories About Youth, forthcoming from Persea in spring 2011. Meg’s first picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012 and will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis.
Meg’s poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been featured in myriad anthologies, including The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007. Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” appears The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion (Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press, 2005).
A native New Yorker, Meg now lives in New Hampshire with her three-legged black Lab, Trooper.
Visit www.megkearney.com
Tanya Whiton — Assistant Director
Tanya Whiton has published stories and poems in literary journals including North Dakota Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Northwest Review and Crazyhorse 63. Her short story “Giving Her Away” was included in the 2006 anthology The Way Life Should Be: A Collection of Stories by Contemporary Maine Writers, and she collaborated on the adaptation of her story “The Deal” for an award-winning eponymous short film. A former contributor to Casco Bay Weekly, The Portland Phoenix, The Bollard, and Maine Public Radio, Tanya holds two New England Press Association awards and was recipient of the 2009 Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship for Poets, and the 2000 Martin Dibner Fellowship for Fiction Writers. A resident of Portland, Maine, she has taught for the Lesley Seminars, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, and the University of Southern Maine.
Visit www.tanyawhiton.com.
Hareem Shafi —MFA Program Intern
Hareem Shafi is a sophomore at Pine Manor College, majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing. Hareem can trace her "writer-ly" roots back to her childhood, when she (and her coerced younger sister) would act out elaborately-plotted games of pretend. She began writing as a hobby when she discovered Harry Potter fan fiction and wrote pieces on for the same on MuggleNet.com. She now keeps a blog on LiveJournal.com where she posts her stories. Hareem dreams of eventually becoming a novelist. Though she doesn't wish to box herself into a single genre, she would love to begin her career as an author for young adults.