Special Guests

Mira Bartók—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Mira Bartók is an artist, public radio commentator, and author of The Memory Palace, a New York Times bestselling memoir and winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of more than twenty-eight books for children. Her writing for adults has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, noted in The Best American Essays series and has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Mira has also received grants and awards from many organizations, including the United States Fulbright Program, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Vogelstein Foundation, and Pen-American. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she runs Mira’s List, a website that helps people in the arts find funding and residencies all over the world. She is also the literary advisor for TransCultural Exchange, an international arts organization dedicated to creating public art collaborations between countries, and is co-producer at North of Radio, a multimedia collaborative where she works on radio documentaries, music, sound, and video projects with her husband, musician/producer Doug Plavin. Mira is currently at work on a new memoir and an illustrated novel for teens. You can find her at: http://www.mirabartok.com.

Dr. Michelle M. Cromwell—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Dr. Michelle M. Cromwell is a Pine Manor College professor, dialogue facilitator, qualitative researcher, peace and conflict resolution practitioner, and Reiki healer. She holds a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution; and is the founder and president of Multicultural Village, a nonprofit focused on teaching creative, constructive, and compassionate peace and conflict skills to children, youths, and adults both locally and internationally. Cromwell is an associate professor of Social and Political Systems at Pine Manor, where she teaches in a hybrid sociology and political science department. She also serves as a part-time visiting professor of sociology at Regis College. Her current area of research interest is related to universalizing peace and conflict resolution education into the main stream K-12 curriculum. Her recent publications include “Promoting Cultural Democracy and Inclusion in Higher Education” (Journal of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, spring 2013).

Vievee Francis—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Vievee Francis is the author of Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State, 2006) and Horse in the Dark (2012), which won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent, A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry. She was the 2009/2010 Poet in Residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, where she earlier received her MFA. She is the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award as well as a 2010 Kresge Award. She makes her home in Michigan and is married to poet Matthew Olzmann.

Lee Hope—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Lee Hope is the recipient of the Theodore Goodman Award for Fiction, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship for Fiction. She has published stories in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Witness, The New Virginia Review, The North American Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and High Plains Literary Review. Her short story “Recreational Biting” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She founded a low-residency MFA program, and played an instrumental role in the creation of Pine Manor’s MFA program. For 10 years she was the director of a national writers’ conference, and she has taught creative writing at various universities for the past 19 years. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Solstice Writers’ Institute, a nonprofit organization in the service of creative writers, and is Executive Editor of the organization’s literary magazine, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. She also serves on the MFA Advisory Board of Pine Manor College. She is in the process of completing a novel.

Lita Judge—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Lita Judge is a writer and artist whose greatest passion is creating children’s books. She is the author/illustrator of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction picture books including Red Hat (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Red Sled (S&S, 2011), Bird Talk (Roaring Brook, 2012), One Thousand Tracings, and Pennies for Elephants (Disney-Hyperion). Her background in geology, paleontology, and biology inspires her nonfiction books. Lita spent several years working for the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Canada before turning to writing about dinosaurs and other natural history subjects. But her background with animals also inspires her whimsical fictional tales filled with characters who forge big dreams. Several of her books have been selected as Junior Library Guild picks and they have received numerous awards including the 2013 Sterling North Award, the Jane Addams Honor Book, ALA Notable Children's Book, the International Reading Association Children's Book Award, Michigan Notable Book, and Kirkus Best Children’s book of 2011. She enjoys teaching both writing and illustration to students of all ages and shares much about her creative process in classrooms and on her blog and Web site. Lita lives with her husband, two cats and a little green parrot named Beatrix Potter in Peterborough, New Hampshire. You can visit her online at LitaJudge.net.

Albert LaFarge—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Albert LaFarge founded the Albert LaFarge Literary Agency in 2003. The agency handles works of general interest, mainly nonfiction, in subject areas including art and photography, biography, design, essay, history, medicine, memoir, narrative journalism, popular science, sports, and travel. Before becoming an agent, LaFarge worked in New York at Ballantine Books, Harcourt, Henry Holt, and Alfred A. Knopf. He was deputy editor of DoubleTake magazine for three years. He is the editor of The Essential William H. Whyte (2000) and, with Robert Coles, Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now (2008). He has taught creative writing at Harvard College, where he was awarded a certificate of distinction from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in 2000, and he currently teaches a course in editing at Harvard Extension School and is on the faculty of the writing program at Harvard Medical School.

Philip Memmer—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Philip Memmer is the author of four books of poems, including The Storehouses of the Snow: Psalms, Parables and Dreams (Lost Horse Press, 2012); Lucifer: a Hagiography (2009), winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry from Lost Horse Press; Threat of Pleasure (Word Press, 2008), winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry; and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (Word Press, 2004). He is also the author of three chapbooks. His poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Epoch, Mid-American Review and Poetry London, and in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day and Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review. He lives near Syracuse, NY, and is Executive Director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse, home to the YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center.

Randy Ross—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

Randy Ross is a writer, SEO consultant, and former executive editor for PC World magazine. He publishes a popular blog about platform-building and self-promotion for writers. His fiction, humor, and erotica have appeared in The Drum, Black Heart Magazine, Side B Magazine, Sensexual: A Unique Anthology 2013, and other publications. He is completing a novel with working title, The Loneliest Planet, which he will circulate to agents in 2013. His one-man show, The Chronic Single's Handbook, based on the novel, was accepted for the Washington, D.C., and Portland, Maine, fringe theater festivals. He holds a masters in journalism from Northwestern University.

Deborah Wiles—Special Guest, Summer 2013 Residency

National Book Award Finalist Deborah Wiles was the first children’s book author to be named Writer-in-Residence at Thurber House, James Thurber’s boyhood home in Columbus, Ohio. Deborah is author of the Aurora County Trilogy, a fictional account of growing up in the south: Love, Ruby Lavender was an ALA Notable Children’s Book, a Children’s Book Sense 76 Pick, and a New York Public Library Book for Reading and Sharing; Each Little Bird That Sings won the Bank Street Fiction Award for 2005, a Golden Kite Honor Award, and the California Young Reader Medal; it was also a 2005 E.B. White Award winner and a 2005 National Book Award finalist. The Aurora County All-Stars, which completes the trilogy, was a SEBA Book Award finalist. Deborah has written two picture books: One Wide Sky (Harcourt, 2003), a Children’s Book of the Month Club selection, and Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster, 2001), winner of numerous awards including dual Ezra Jack Keats Award. A picture book about Robert Kennedy is forthcoming from Scholastic. Deborah’s newest project is called “The Sixties Trilogy: Three Novels of the 1960s for Young Readers.” Book one, Countdown, was published in May 2010 by Scholastic. Deborah lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she writes songs with her husband, jazz pianist Jim Pearce; climbs Stone Mountain; and grows the world’s most beautiful zinnias.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc—Special Guest, Winter 2013 Residency

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a writer and teacher. His first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published by the University of North Texas Press in 2012. His poems have appeared in magazines including 32 Poems, Maine Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, and Poetry Northwest, and in the anthologies Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. His articles and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, Pleiades, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out New York. He has received awards from the Bellevue Literary Review and UC Berkeley.With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing and literature in public and private middle schools, high schools, and colleges in California, Vermont, New York, and Maine. In 2011 he was named one of Maine’s “emerging leaders” by the Portland Press Herald and Maine Today Media for his work directing The Telling Room, where he still occasionally teaches writing. He lives in Portland, Maine with his family and is at work on a novel.

Julia Glass—Special Guest, Winter 2013 Residency

Julia Glass is the author of the novels Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award in Fiction; The Whole World Over; and The Widower’s Tale. Her collection of linked stories, I See You Everywhere, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Other awards for her fiction include the Sense of Place Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, the Nelson Algren Fiction Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Medal for Best Novella. For many years she wrote feature articles on pets, parenting, and medical topics for numerous magazines including Glamour, New York, 7 Days, Parenting, Cookie, Good Housekeeping, and More. Her essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning. Julia lives with her two sons and their father in Massachusetts.

Pablo Medina—Special Guest, Winter 2013 Residency

Pablo Medina is the author of 13 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation, among them the poetry collection The Man Who Wrote on Water (Hanging Loose, 2011), the novel Cubop City Blues (Grove, 2012) and—with Mark Statman—a translation of García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove, 2009). Pablo’s work has appeared in several languages, among them Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and in periodicals and magazines throughout the world. Winner of numerous awards, among them grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the NEA, the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and others, Pablo is currently professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston.

Amaranth Borsuk—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork, selected by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2011Slope Editions Prize;the chapbook Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and—together with programmer Brad Bouse—of Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012). She is the 2011 recipient of the Gulf Coast prize in poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. Her poems, collaborations, translations, and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Aufgabe, The Destroyer, The Offending Adam, and The Society for Curious Thought,among other journals. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is currently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT, where she teaches and works at the intersection of print and digital media. In addition to writing and studying poetry, Amaranth is a letterpress printer and book artist whose fascination with printed matter informs her work on digital poetry.

Joy Castro—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Joy Castro is the author of the literary thriller Hell or High Water (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, July 2012), which has been chosen as a book of the month by the National Latino Book Club; and the essay collection Island of Bones, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in September 2012. Her memoir The Truth Book was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association in 2005 and is forthcoming in a new paperback edition with an introduction by Dorothy Allison in 2012. She is editing the collection Family Trouble:
Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, and co-guest-editing a special issue of Brevity, devoted to women’s creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in anthologies and in journals such as Seneca Review, North American Review, Fourth Genre, Afro-Hispanic Review, Texas Review, Indiana Review, and the New York Times Magazine, and she teaches literature, Latino studies, and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is the associate director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies.

Stephen Dunn—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Pulitzer-prize winning poet Stephen Dunn is the author of sixteen books, the most recent of which is Here and Now. The Pulitzer was awarded to Different Hours in 2001; Loosestrife was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in 1996. Other books include Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs, and Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry, published in its new and expanded form by BOA Editions in 2001. His awards and honors include the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts & Letters, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Levinson and Oscar Blumenthal Prizes from Poetry magazine, and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, to name a few. In addition to his books, his work has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time these days in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.

Nicole Terez Dutton—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Nicole Terez Dutton's work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Indiana Review, and Salt Hill Journal. Nicole earned an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from the Fine Art Work Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for If One Of Us Should Fall; the judge was Patricia Smith, and the collection will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in fall 2012. Nicole, our 2012 Cave Canem Partner Poet, lives in Boston.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has mingled with the Russian Mafia, polished Chinese propaganda, and danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004), Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008), and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Texas Monthly, The Believer, The Wilson Quarterly, Poets and Writers, Latina Magazine, Bitch, and more than a dozen anthologies. She also edited Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 (Travelers’ Tales, 2010). As a national correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across the United States, documenting its history for a Web site for kids. Her awards include a Henry Luce Scholarship to China, a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, the Richard J. Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and the Gold Prize for Best Travel Book in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa, where she is a Dean’s Graduate Fellow, and lectures and performs worldwide. Visit her website at www.aroundthebloc.com./

Tracie Morris—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet, performer, and scholar, and works extensively as a sound artist, writer, bandleader, and actor. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial, Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and the New Museum. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, and has studied acting at the RADA. Tracie is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Her poetry book, TDL: To Do w/ John (2012) is published by Zasterle Press. Rhyme Scheme, a longer poetic manuscript, is published by Chax Press (2012). She is also developing two audio projects: The Tracie Morris Band and sharpmorris, a collaboration with composer Elliott Sharp.

Mitali Perkins—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Mitali Perkins was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India; by the time she was 11, she’d lived in Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York, and Mexico before settling in California just in time for middle school. After studying political science at Stanford and public policy at U.C. Berkeley, she taught in middle school, high school, and at the college level. When she began to write fiction, her protagonists were often—not surprisingly—strong female characters trying to bridge different cultures. Mitali has written several acclaimed books for young readers, including Bamboo People, a Junior Library Guild selection, ALA Top Ten YA Fiction pick, and an ABA Indie’s Choice Honor Book; Monsoon Summer, an ALA Quick Pick, a Bank Street Best Book, a New York Library Book for the Teen Age, and a Texas Library Association TAYSHAS Best Book for Young Adults; Rickshaw Girl, winner of a Jane Addams Honor Award, the Maine Lupine Honor Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Honor Award; Secret Keeper, an IRA Notable Book for a Global Society and on the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer list of great titles that empower girls; and the First Daughter books. She speaks frequently about the transforming power of stories as windows and mirrors, blogs about “books between cultures”(mitaliblog.com), tweets regularly (@mitaliperkins), and also connects with readers through Facebook (facebook.com/authormitaliperkins). She lives and writes in Newton, Massachusetts. Visit www.mitaliperkins.com.

Becky Tuch—Special Guest, Summer 2012 Residency

Becky Tuch has received awards from The Somerville Arts Council, Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and has been short-listed for The Pushcart Prize. Her stories and poetry have appeared and are forthcoming in Blueline, Eclipse, Folio, Night Train, Quarter After Eight, and elsewhere. She is one of the founding members of the literary blog Beyond the Margins, and has also reviewed art and literature for numerous commercial and literary magazines. In 2008, she founded The Review Review, a website that reviews literary magazines, interviews journal editors, and offers publishing tips to writers.

André Dubus III —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

André Dubus III’s most recent work is Townie: A Memoir (2011), which made it to #4 on the New York Times Bestseller List; it was also a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” and is now in feature film development. André is author of a collection of short fiction, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories; and the novels Bluesman; House of Sand and Fog; and The Garden of Last Days, another New York Times bestseller. His work has been included in The Best American Essays of 1994, The Best Spiritual Writing of 1999, and The Best of Hope Magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for fiction, The Pushcart Prize, and was a Finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel House of Sand and Fog —published in eighteen languages —was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Booksense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah Book Club Selection and #1 New York Times bestseller; in 2003, the novel was made into an Academy Award-nominated motion picture. A member of PEN American Center, André has served as a judge for The National Book Awards and a panelist for The National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell where he is a full-time faculty member. He is married to performer Fontaine Dollas Dubus. They live in Massachusetts with their three children.

Ann Angel —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Ann Angel is the author of the young adult biography, Janis Joplin Rise Up Singing, winner of the American Library Association’s 2011 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award, the 2010 Council for Wisconsin Writers Kingery/Derluth Nonfiction Book Length Award, and a 2011 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Crystal Kite Award. It was also named one of Booklist’s 2011 Top 10 Biographies for Youth. A contributing editor for the highly acclaimed Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories About Beauty, Ann also co-edited Silent Embrace: Perspectives on Birth and Adoption, a collection of literary essays addressed to birth parents. A writer of biographies and language arts series books for Enslow Books, including the recent Robert Cormier: Writer of The Chocolate War, and Amy Tan: Weaver of Asian-American Tales, Ann wrote A Reader’s Guide to Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. She is currently working on a memoir and a contemporary young-adult novel based on a classic myth. A graduate of Vermont College’s MFA in writing for children and young adults, Ann lives in Wisconsin with her family and is an associate professor of creative writing at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee. Visit www.annangelwriter.com.

Crystal King —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Crystal King is a freelance writer and Pushcart-nominated poet who is currently working on her first novel. She holds an M.A. in Critical & Creative Thinking from UMass Boston where she centered her thesis on developing a system to help fiction writers-in-progress. A seventeen-year marketing and communications veteran, Crystal has built social media, marketing, and communications programs for large and small high-tech firms. She has also taught classes in writing, creativity, and social media at Harvard Extension School, Boston University, Mass College of Art, and UMass Boston. Find her on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/crystallyn or on Google+ at http://gplus.to/crystallyn.

Lee Hope —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Nina Crews —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Nina Crews has written and illustrated seven books for children. Her first book, One Hot Summer Day, was hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “the debut of a welcome new voice and vision.” Her other titles include I’ll Catch the Moon, praised by Horn Book as “a knockout in both concept and execution”; Snowball, named a Bank Street College Best Book of the Year in 1998; The Neighborhood Mother Goose, named one of the Best Books of 2004 by Kirkus and School Library Journal as well as an ALA Notable Book. Her most recent book, Below, also an ALA Notable Book, was published in spring 2006. Nina has exhibited her fine art photography nationally, and illustrated with photographs When Will Sarah Come, a picture book written by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard. She also created photo collages for “We the People” by Bobbi Katz. An inveterate freelancer, Nina worked in animation production for ten years and created photo collage illustrations for book jackets and magazines, including Parenting and the Village Voice.

Pat Keogh —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Pat Keogh spent her career as an elementary school librarian. Children's books have been her long-time passion. After receiving a Master's Degree from the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College, Pat has taught children's literature at area colleges and talks to parents, teachers, and librarians about current books. She served as the President of the Foundation for Children’s Books for many years and now co-chairs its Program Advisory Committee.

Jen Cusack —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Jen Cusack has led the Foundation for Children’s Books as Executive Director since 2006. Her background is in program development and grant-writing for nonprofits, including the American Youth Policy Forum in Washington, D.C. and Jobs for the Future in Boston. She is a graduate of the Boston Public Schools and has degrees in Comparative Literature and Journalism. Her mother was a school librarian in Boston for 30 years and her father was a professor of American history. Needless to say, there were lots of books around the house growing up! The same is true in the house that she shares with her husband and three sons.

Roland Merullo —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Novelist and creative nonfiction writer Roland Merullo began his career as a self-employed carpenter and became an author in 1991 with the publication of his novel Leaving Losapas, which was named a B. Dalton Discovery Series choice and was called “the debut of the year” by Robert Stone and “the novel of the year” by Boston Magazine. He has published nine additional novels to date: A Russian Requiem (translated into Spanish and German and adopted by the Bertlesmann Book Club); Revere Beach Boulevard (a finalist for the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize); In Revere, In Those Days (a Booklist Editors’ Choice and winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award for best novel by a former Peace Corps volunteer); A Little Love Story (Crown, 2005); Golfing With God (Algonquin, 2005); Breakfast With Buddha (Algonquin 2007), now in its 11th printing; American Savior (Algonquin 2008); Fidel’s Last Days (Algonquin 2009); and The Talk-Funny Girl (Crown, 2011), a Finalist for the New England Book Award. His nonfiction work includes Passion for Golf: In Pursuit of the Innermost Game, chosen by Sports Illustrated as one of its 20 best golf gifts for Christmas in 2000; The Italian Summer (Simon & Schuster, 2009); and most recently Demons of the Blank Page, a book on the psychological and emotional aspects of the writing life. His memoir, Revere Beach Elegy, won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction in 2001. Fluent in Russian, he has written two serialized novels, The Boston Tangler (in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine) and The Addition (in the Chronicle of Higher Education). He has also written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Outside, Reader’s Digest, The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, Yankee Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Travel & Leisure Golf, and myriad other publications. Visit RolandMerullo.com.

Katherine Flynn —Special Guest, Winter 2012 Residency

Katherine Flynn joined the Kneerim & Williams Literary Agency in 2008. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Katherine worked at the literary agency of Nicholas Ellison/Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Inc. in New York. She then pursued her Ph.D. in History at Brown University, where she is now A.B.D. Prior to joining Kneerim & Williams, Katherine edited history books at the publishing company of Bedford/St. Martin’s. She has also taught English literature and composition to high school students and has worked in a rare book shop. Katherine represents history, biography, politics/current affairs, adventure, nature, pop culture, and the occasional health and fitness topic for nonfiction; she particularly loves exciting narrative nonfiction, where the truth is a story more fascinating than anything else. She also represents both literary and commercial fiction.

Previous Special Guests:

Winter 2013:

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Julia Glass, Pablo Medina

Summer 2012:

Amaranth Borsuk , Joy Castro, Stephen Dunn, Nicole Terez Dutton, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Tracie Morris, Mitali Perkins, Becky Tuch

Winter 2012:

André Dubus III, Ann Angel, Crystal King, Lee Hope, Nina Crews, Pat Keogh, Jen Cusack, Roland Merullo, Katherine Flynn

Summer 2011:

Bob Owczarek, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Jeffrey Harrison, Randy Susan Meyers, Iain Haley Pollock, Tad Richards

Winter 2011:

Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Kallet, Jacob Paul, Mimi Schwartz, James Scott

Summer 2010:

Patrick Donnelly, Lee Hope, Lesléa Newman, Josh Neufeld, Sari Wilson, Kevin McLellan, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank, Kim Dana Kupperman

Winter 2010:

Dorothy Allison, M.L. Liebler, Bob Owczarek, Ira Sadoff, Melissa Stewart

Summer 2009:

Bruce Bennett, Rebecca Givens, Albert LaFarge, Jeffrey Thomson

Winter 2009:

Naomi Shihab Nye, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank, Matt O'Donnell, William B. Patrick, Dawn Potter, Tad Richards, Mark Schafer, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Summer 2008:

Roland Merullo, Bob Owczarek, Elizabeth Peavey, Peter Wood

Winter 2008:

Wyn Cooper, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Michael Fleming, Marie Harris, Jessica Lipnack, Sheree R. Thomas

Summer 2007:

Kurt Andersen, Melanie Drane, Phyllis Karas, Alex Motyl

Winter 2007:

Nancy Willard, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Summer 2006:

Manette Ansay, Andrew Solomon, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, Franz Wright

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