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MFA in Creative Writing

SPECIAL GUESTS

January 2010
Dorothy Allison
January 2009
Donald Hall Commencement Speaker	Naomi Shihab Nye
July 2008
Nina Crews Commencement Speaker	Roland Merullo	Bob Owczarek
Elizabeth Peavey	Peter Wood	Publishing Panelists (PDF Version)
January 2008
Wyn Cooper	Gibson Fay-LeBlanc	Michael Fleming
Marie Harris	Jessica Lipnack	Sheree R. Thomas
July 2007
Kurt Andersen	Melanie Drane	Phyllis Karas
Alex Motyl
January 2007
Nancy Willard	Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
July 2006
Manette Ansay	Andrew Solomon	Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
Franz Wright

Core Faculty

Donald Hall — Commencement Speaker, January 2009 Residency

Donald Hall is one of America’s most respected writers. He has published fifteen books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946 – 2006. In addition to poetry, he has also written several collections of essays (among them Life Work and String Too Short to be Saved), children’s books (notably Ox-Cart Man, which won the Caldecott Medal), short stories, memoirs, biographies, textbooks, sports journalism, and a number of plays. He has also devoted time to editing: between 1983 and 1996 he oversaw publication of more than sixty titles for the University of Michigan Press alone. His many awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lamont Poetry Prize, inclusion on the Horn Book Honor List, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A three-time National Book Award Finalist, he also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Donald Hall served as Poet Laureate of his home state of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989, and in 2006 was named the 14th Poet Laureate of the United States, a position he held for one year.

Naomi Shihab Nye — Special Guest, January 2009 Residency Guest

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist, novelist, and teacher. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Middle East, Naomi uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Naomi is the author and/or editor of more than 20 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a National Book Award Finalist); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Red Suitcase; and You & Yours. She is also the author of Mint Snowball (paragraphs); Never in a Hurry (essays); Habibi and Going, Going (novels for young readers); and Baby Radar and Sitti’s Secrets (picture books). Other works include seven prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East. Her most recent book of essays is titled I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven. A book of poetry for young adults, Honeybee, is forthcoming in 2008. Naomi has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United States of Poetry,” and also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers.

Nina Crews — Commencement Speaker, July 2008 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 by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard and 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.

Roland Merullo — Special Guest, July 2008 Residency Guest

Novelist and creative nonfiction writer Roland Merullo began his career as an author in 1991 with the publication of his novel Leaving Losapas, which was named a B. Dalton Discovery Series choice, had a starred review in Kirkus, and was called “the debut of the year” by Robert Stone and “the novel of the year” by Boston Magazine. He has published five additional novels to date: Breakfast With Buddha, 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, published by Crown in August 2005, and Golfing With God, published by Algonquin Books in October 2005. His latest novel, American Savior, is forthcoming from Algonquin in August, 2008. His nonfiction work, Passion for Golf: In Pursuit of the Innermost Game, was published in 2000. His memoir, Revere Beach Elegy, won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction in 2002. He has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Outside, The Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, Reader’s Digest, The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, and a serialized novella and essays for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bob Owczarek — Special Guest , July 2008 Residency Guest

Bob Owczarek has taught theatre at Dean College, the Boston Conservatory, and Boston University, and is currently professor of drama at Pine Manor College. He has appeared on stage, film, radio and television. He is a member of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, the Screen Actors’ Guild and Actors’ Equity Association.

Elizabeth Peavey — Special Guest , July 2008 Residency Guest

While growing up in small-town Maine, Elizabeth Peavey wanted nothing more than to become a writer and see the world. But what she learned as she traipsed around the country and the globe was that there was only one place she wanted to park her typewriter (yes, she’s that ancient): home in Maine. She returned for good in 1990 and has stayed put ever since. Peavey is the author of a collection of humor columns, Outta My Way: An Odd Life Lived Loudly, and Maine & Me, a compilation of her travel writing for Down East magazine, where she has been a contributing editor since 1997. Her essays and articles have appeared in Yankee's Travel Guide to New England, Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors and Odyssey Travel, among other publications. She authored the Maine chapter of Fodor’s Road Guide U.S.A. (Random House, 2001) and has contributed essays to the Maine Public Broadcasting Network news program "Maine Things Considered." She teaches public speaking at the University of Southern Maine and has taught creative nonfiction at the University of Maine at Farmington, as well as numerous workshops for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Her current humor column, “Outta My Yard,” can be read online at thebollard.com, and her travel column, “Downtown, Maine,” appears quarterly in the print version of The Bollard. She is also a contributor to newengland.com, Yankee Magazine’s new travel/destination Web site. Maine & Me was awarded the Maine Literary Award for Best Maine-themed Book in 2006.

Peter Wood — Special Guest , July 2008 Residency Guest

Peter Wood’s poems have appeared in national poetry journals such as Antioch Review and Prairie Schooner as well as many regional journals and anthologies. He has participated in many of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry programs in New Jersey and the annual poetry festivals at The Frost Place in New Hampshire. Peter has published three illustrated chapbooks in collaboration with Demarais Studio Press. After nearly forty years of teaching poetry and writing, he retired from the English Department of The College of New Jersey in 2001. He lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where he and his wife Joan are active in issues involving open space and public trails.

July 2008 Publishing Panelists

Esmond Harmsworth is a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. Harmsworth’s nonfiction list includes serious nonfiction books on topics such as politics, psychology, culture, history, food and cooking, and politics. Recent highlights on his list include: Thanks! How The New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, by Dr. Robert Emmons and Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf. For fiction, Harmsworth represents literary fiction, mystery and crime, and popular (mainstream) fiction. His clients include Laura Dietz, author of In The Tenth House, Alicia Metcalf Miller, author of My Life on Mars, Donald Hays, author of Dying Light, and Sabina Murray, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Caprices.
For more information about the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency, go to: http://www.zshliterary.com/

The former executive director of BOA Editions, Ltd., Steven Huff is now director of adult education and programs at the Writers & Books Literary Center in Rochester, New York, and is founding a new publishing house, Tiger Bark Press. Steve is the author of a collection of stories, A Pig in Paris, and two collections of poems, More Daring Escapes and The Water We Came From. His 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 “A Writer’s Almanac” public radio program. A Pushcart Prize winner in fiction, Steve teaches creative writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is creator and host of the weekly radio feature in Western New York, “Fiction in Shorts,” aired on public radio stations WXXI-FM and WJSL-FM.

David Replogle began his publishing career at Doubleday in 1958, where he became a Regional Sales Manger, then National Sales Manager, Director of Sales and Marketing, and then by 1966, Vice President for Trade Publishing. In 1970 David was recruited by Encyclopaedia Britannica to be CEO of its encyclopedia companies—Merriam Webster, Praeger Publishers, and Phaidon. While there, he brought out a bestselling new edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary; sold Phaidon, a London based art book publisher; and added general publishing to Praeger’s academic list. In 1976 he joined Houghton Mifflin in Boston, where he eventually become Executive Vice President responsible for Trade, Reference, International, and Electronic publishing, as well as a member of the Board of Directors. He retired from Houghton in 1992 to work as a consultant to several publishers seeking to enlarge their book publishing operations. In 2000, in order to reduce his heavy domestic and overseas travel and to help worthy authors in need of getting their work published, David founded Hot House Press (We Grow Good Books). He closed the press in 2008.

Michael Steinberg is a memoirist, personal essayist, teacher, and founding editor of the award-winning literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. His books include Still Pitching: A Memoir; Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan; The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (now in its fourth edition); Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching; and The Writer's Way. In 2003, ForeWord Magazine chose Still Pitching as the Independent Press Memoir/Autobiography of the Year.In 2001, Peninsula was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and the ForeWord Magazine Anthology of the Year.
For more information about Mike, go to: http://www.mjsteinberg.net/, and to learn more about Fourth Genre, go to: http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/

Andrea Tompa is lucky enough to be an associate editor at Candlewick Press, where she works with authors such as Annette LeBlanc Cate (The Magic Rabbit), Clara Gillow Clark (Hill Hawk Hattie), Joan Carris (Welcome to the Bed & Biscuit), and Megan McDonald (The Sisters Club). She acquires books in all areas, including picture books, fiction, and nonfiction, but is particularly enthusiastic about expanding her middle-grade fiction and young YA list. When she's not editing, she can be found hiking, snowshoeing, swing dancing or — most often — reading.
To learn more about Candlewick Press, go to: http://www.candlewick.com/

Wyn Cooper — Special Guest, January 2008 Residency Guest

Wyn Cooper has published three books of poems: The Country of Here Below (Ahsahta Press, 1987), The Way Back (White Pine Press, 2000), and Postcards from the Interior (BOA Editions, 2005). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni, Verse, and more than 60 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry. In 1993, “Fun,” a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.” He has co-written songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released “Forty Words for Fear,” a cd of songs based on poems and lyrics by Wyn and set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. It has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and World Café, and has been written about in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, and elsewhere. Songs from the CD have been featured on four T.V. shows. He has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place, where he now serves on the advisory board. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. He lives in Halifax, Vermont, and helps run the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc — Special Guest, January 2008 Residency Guest

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is the executive director of The Telling Room, a nonprofit literary organization in Maine. His poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Guernica, The New Republic, Tin House and Verse Daily, among other places, and are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Poetry Northwest. His work is featured at fishousepoems.org, an audio archive of emerging poets, and he was awarded the Bellevue Literary Review’s annual poetry prize by Edward Hirsch. With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing and literature in public and private secondary schools throughout the country and, prior to his work with The Telling Room, taught at Fordham and the University of Southern Maine.

Michael Fleming — Special Guest, January 2008 Residency Guest

Born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, Michael Fleming decided early on that he was a writer and needed to see something of the world. He set out on a twenty-year odyssey: undergraduate work at Princeton; teaching English in refugee camps in Thailand; a graduate degree from Oxford; teaching high-school mathematics in Africa; work as a carpenter, hospice volunteer, and college composition teacher in California; and editing textbooks in New York City. Meanwhile, Fleming has written short stories, poetry, essays, and a rock & roll novel, The Del Ray Method. An award-winning teacher of composition and literature, he has extensive knowledge of English usage and prose style. He now works as a freelance editor; his projects include The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and The Norton Anthology of Drama. He lives in New Hampshire.

Marie Harris — Special Guest, January 2008 Residency Guest

New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2004, Marie Harris is a writer, teacher, editor, and businesswoman. In 2003, she produced the first-ever gathering of state poets laureate. She has served as writer-in-residence at elementary and secondary schools throughout New England, and written freelance articles for such publications as the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Marie is the author of four books of poetry for adults and two books for children; she is also editor of nearly a dozen anthologies, including The Party Train: North American Prose Poetry (New Rivers Press); The Broken Bed (HarperCollins), and The Book of Eulogies (Scribner). With poet and Solstice MFA faculty member Kathi Aguero, she is also editor of A Gift Of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry (University of Georgia Press) and An Ear to the Ground: Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, cited as one of ALA's Notable Books of 1989). She is currently working on a novel for young readers involving America's first female composer, Amy Beach. Visit www.marieharris.com.

Jessica Lipnack — Special Guest, January 2008 Residency Guest

Jessica Lipnack is co-author of six non-fiction books, including Networking, The Age of the Network, and Virtual Teams, which have been translated around the world. Beginning her career as a reporter at The Mercury (a daily in Pottstown, PA), she’s written for The New York Times, Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review, Mothering, The Futurist, Mother Earth News, and, recently, Global City Review, where her short story, “Endless Knots,” appears in the Fall, ’07 issue. Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Community cites her as a pioneer in electronic communication. She served as faculty in the first online global executive education program and has participated in many online experiments. Her blog, www.endlessknots.com, named for the short story and vice-versa, allows her to write about writing, writers, technology, books, food, yoga, collaboration, family, friends, the weather, and knitting, among other topics, without fear of rejection (and serves as a substitute for the newspaper she published in her neighborhood when she was ten years old). She earns her living as the CEO of NetAge, a consultancy that advises global enterprises.

Sheree R. Thomas — Special Guest, January 2008 Residency Guest

Sheree Renee Thomas was awarded the 2003 Ledig House/LEF Foundation Prize for Fiction for her novel Bonecarver. Her fiction and poetry have most recently appeared in Bronx Biannual, No. 2: The Literary Journal of Urbane Urban Literature; The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, edited by Nikky Finney; Colorlines: the National Magazine on Race and Politics. Her anthology, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, won the World Fantasy Award and the Gold Pen Award in 2001; it was also designated a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, received a Washington Post Editor’s “Rave,” and was named an Amazon.com “Essential Book.” Her second anthology, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for best anthology of the year in 2004. Co-publisher of the literary journal Anansi: Fiction of the African Diaspora, she is founder of Wanganegresse Press. A former Cave Canem Fellow and recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, she teaches fiction at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Manhattan.

Kurt Andersen — Special Guest, July 2007 Residency Guest

Novelist, columnist, screenwriter, playwright, and radio host Kurt Andersen was named “One of the 100 People Who Changed New York” by New York magazine in 2003. His first novel, Turn of the Century, was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (the Times called it “wickedly satirical” and “outrageously funny”). Publishers Weekly called his latest book, Heyday, “delightful, intelligent…rowdy, knowing — and wholly American.

Kurt, who is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning public radio show about the arts and culture, writes a column called “The Imperial City” for New York magazine. He has previously been a columnist for The New Yorker, and was for eight years Time’s architecture and design critic. As an editor, he co-founded the legendary Spy magazine; served as editor-in-chief of New York in the mid-90s; and in 1999 co-founded Inside, an online publication covering the publishing and entertainment industries.

In addition, Kurt has written for film, television and the stage. He adapted Turn of the Century as a screenplay with the director Curtis Hanson. During the 1990s he was executive producer and head writer of two prime-time specials for NBC starring Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He is co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles starring Bebe Neuwirth and Andy Richter.

He is a member of the boards of trustees of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Pratt Institute. He received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of the Lampoon. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

Melanie Drane - Special Guest, July 2007 Residency Guest

Melanie Drane is an alumna of Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, and the London School of Economics. During 17 years as an expatriate, she lived in Bonn, Vienna, London and Tokyo. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, The North American Review, Poetry Review (UK), Comstock Review, and Witness. She also reviews books for ForeWord, a journal specializing in independently-published books. Her nomadic history includes stints as newspaper wine columnist for The Japan Times and Daily Yomiuri; speechwriter for a former Berlin mayor near the end of the Cold War; and editor at a foreign-policy think tank in Tokyo.

She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine at Stonecoast. From 2002-2004, she served as writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan. Most recently, she became the first non-British winner in the history of the UK’s National Poetry Competition, and was invited to read at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2006. She currently makes her home in an old tobacco warehouse loft in Durham, NC and leads writing retreats and workshops at Basho’s Cabin (http://bashos-cabin.blogspot.com/).

Phyllis Karas - Special Guest, July 2007 Residency Guest

Phyllis Karas began her writing life as an author of young adult novels, including Cry Baby, For Lucky’s Sake, Spellbound, and The Hate Crime, which was named a Young Adult Choice by the International Reading Association in 1997. She is also the author of an adult novel, A Life Worth Living, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper pieces. Phyllis, who teaches writing at Boston University’s School of Journalism, has earned the New England Press Association’s award for the Best Feature Story (a four-part series about teenage pregnancy) and the Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Feature Writing (for an article in Moment Magazine about kosher slaughter). As a columnist, she wrote “Living the Life: Wit, Wisdom, and Woe” for the Boston Herald, and “In This Corner” for the Boston Globe.

A trip to Greece to celebrate her 30th wedding anniversary changed Phyllis’s writing life completely. There, she met Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, Aristotle Onassis’ private secretary during his six-year marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The Onassis Women: An Eyewitness Account, by Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos with Phyllis Karas, was published in 1998. The book was the subject of a Dateline NBC story and garnered interviews by such publications as the New York Times, People, Vogue, and Hard Copy. Even the National Enquirer has featured her book, albeit without her consent.

Phyllis went on to write Street Soldier (2001), the story of a minor Irish mobster named Edward McKenzie, working under Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger. Her latest book, Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s South Boston Mob, was published in 2006 and named to the New York Times Best Seller List in April 2006. Her coauthor on the book, Kevin Weeks, was Whitey Bulger’s top associate for 25 years.

Phyllis Karas has been married for 40 years to Jack Karas, a pulmonary physician, is a mother of two sons and the grandmother of two. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and balances her professional writing and teaching careers with her love of family and of sports.

Alexander J. Motyl — Special Guest, July 2007 Residency Guest

Alexander J. Motyl is professor of political science and deputy director of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University-Newark. He served as associate director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in 1992-1998. He is the author of six non-fiction books, including Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (Columbia University Press, 2001) and Revolutions, Nations, Empires (Columbia University Press, 1999). He is also editor of The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (Academic Press, 2001), as well as the author of two novels, Whiskey Priest (iUniverse, 2005) and Who Killed Andrei Warhol (Seven Locks, 2007). In addition, he is a painter, with shows scheduled in Toronto in April 2007 and in New York City in September 2007 (represented by The Tori Collection, www.toricollection.com).

Nancy Willard — Special Guest , January 2007 Residency Guest

Poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and picture-book author Nancy Willard is the author of two novels for adults, Things Invisible to See and Sister Water, several novels for young adults, including Island of the Grass King and Firebrat, as well as a dozen books of poetry, including Water Walker, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Swimming Lessons: New and Selected Poems, and — most recently — In the Salt Marsh. In addition to her graphic novels, she has written nearly 20 picture books including The Moon & Riddles Diner and the Sunnyside Café, Nightgown of the Sullen Moon, Sweep Dreams, The Well-Mannered Balloon, and A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, which was awarded the Newbery Medal.

Nancy lyrically adapted the traditional tale “East of the Sun & West of the Moon” into a play in 1989, which was published and illustrated in full color by Barry Moser. A documentary about Nancy and her work, “Uncommon Sense: The Art & Imagination of Nancy Willard,” was directed by Michael Mayhew and co-written with producer Ken Robinson in 2003. Awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and poetry, her work has been widely anthologized.

She teaches in the English department at Vassar College and lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with her husband, the photographer Eric Lindbloom.

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright — Spcial Guest — Translation, July 2006/January 2007 Residency Guest

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is the translator of Beauty and the Best: The Aesthetic Moment in Science, originally written in German by Ernst Peter Fischer. She has been translating Zafer Senocak and other contemporary German poets for years, and her work has been featured in such publications as the Seneca Review, Exchanges, Agni, and Another Chicago Magazine. Winner of the Gary Wilson Award from the University of Arkansas Press and Agni’s William J. Arrowsmith Translation Award, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Literary Translators Association, and the University of Arkansas Fulbright College.

Editor of German language poetry for New European Poets (to be published by Graywolf in 2006) and translation editor for the online poetry journal Perihelion, she has taught classes and workshops in translation at Boston University, Oberlin College, and the University of Arkansas. A selection of her translations of the work of Zafer Senocak will appear in the Anthology of World Literature of the 20th Century, forthcoming from Green Integer Books. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Franz Wright.

Manette Ansay — Special Guest — Fiction, July 2006 Residency Guest

Novelist, short-story writer, poet, and creative nonfiction writer A. Manette Ansay will publish her seventh book, Blue Water, in 2006. This novel is preceded by Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Book Club Selection and one of the Chicago Tribune’s Best Books of 1994; Midnight Champagne, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Great Lakes Book Award; River Angel, named a New York Times Notable Book; and Sister, winner of the 1997 Banta Prize and a New York Times Notable Book. Read This and Tell Me What It Says was the recipient of the 1994 AWP Short Fiction Series Prize and the Paterson Prize for Short Fiction. After its American debut, her memoir Limbo was released in the UK, Australia, and Germany. Her creative nonfiction has also been published in such magazines as Redbook, Real Simple, Gourmet Magazine, Victoria Magazine, and The Indiana Review. She has written reviews for The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chicago Tribune. Manette has also published poems in Prairie Schooner, The Northwest Review, New Letters, The Kansas Quarterly, and many other literary journals.

Her myriad awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the Nelson Algren Prize, a Centrum Foundation Fellowship, and two Great Lakes Book Awards. She has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA in Creative Writing Program; Marquette University, where she held the Women’s Chair in Humanistic Studies; the Stonecoast MFA Program of the University of Southern Maine; Vanderbilt University; the University of the South; Phillips Exeter Academy; and Cornell University. Manette currently lives with her husband and daughter in Florida, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Miami. www.amanetteansay.com

Andrew Solomon — Special Guest — Creative Nonfiction, July 2006 Residency Guest

In 1988, Andrew Solomon began his study of Russian artists, which culminated with the publication of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (Knopf, 1991). He was asked in 1993 to consult with members of the National Security Council on Russian affairs and wrote parts of President Clinton’s first Russia speeches; that year he was also named a Contributing Writer of The New York Times Magazine, a position he held until 2001. His recently reissued first novel, A Stone Boat (Faber, 1994), was a runner up for the LA Times First Fiction prize and was a national bestseller; it has now been published in five languages.

Mr. Solomon’s most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, earned fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award. It was named an American Library Association Notable Book of 2001 and a New York Times Notable Book, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Noonday Demon has been on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardback and paperback. Published in 22 languages, it has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries. Mr. Solomon has lectured on depression around the world, including recent stints at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge.

Andrew Solomon is a regular contributor to numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artforum. His writing on cystic fibrosis has won him the Angel of Awareness Award of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, as well as the Clarion Award for Journalism. He has written essays for many anthologies and books of criticism, including essays for Coach (Warner Books, 2005), Who Owns The Past: Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law (Rutgers University Press, 2005), The Proust Project (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks (Palace Editions, 2004), and Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). His work was also selected for Best American Travel Writing 2003.

He is currently writing a book, to be published in 2008, called A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Traumatic Children, which deals with how families accommodate children who are deaf, who are autistic, who are prodigies, who have committed crimes—in other words, children who pose great challenges to their families and to themselves. He is also working on a comic novel.

Andrew Solomon studied at Yale University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1985, and then at Jesus College Cambridge, where he received the University writing prize, as well as top first-class degree in his year, the only foreign student ever to be so-honored. He is now pursuing a PhD at Cambridge in Social and Political Studies (psychology), working on the relation between biological and psychosocial models of early attachment between mothers and infants.

He maintains residences in London and New York and is a dual national.

Franz Wright — Special Guest — Poetry, July 2006 Residency Guest

Franz Wright won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard, which was published by Knopf in October 2003. He is also the author of The Beforelife, Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems, Rorschach Test, The Night World and the Word Night, Midnight Postscript, and an expanded edition of translations titled The Unknown Rilke. In addition, he has translated the works of René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new book of poems, God’s Silence, will be released in March, 2006.

Wright was born in Vienna in 1953 and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and northern California. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

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