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Summer Writers' Conference
of Pine Manor College

2008 Solstice Conference Faculty

 

Francisco Aragón — Poetry

© Cheryl Kelly

Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press) and editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press). His poems have appeared in various print and web venues, including Poetry Daily, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Luna, Electronic Poetry Review, and Jacket. His anthology publications include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (Norton), American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa Press), and Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark), among others. He is the director of Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame where he oversees, among other projects, Momotombo Press, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and Latino Poetry Review—a new online journal of criticism. A native of San Francisco and former long-time resident of Spain, he resides in Arlington, VA and works out of the ILS’ office in Washington, D.C.
For more information, visit his website: http://franciscoaragon.net.

Marina Budhos — Adult & Young Adult Fiction

© Claudine Ohayon

Marina Budhos is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction. She has published two novels, The Professor of Light (Putnam, 1999) and House of Waiting (Global City Press, 1995). Her short stories, articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Ms., Travel & Leisure, Time Out, and the Los Angeles Times. She has received a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, an Emma (Exceptional Merit Media Award), and a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship; she has also been a Fulbright Scholar to India. In 1999, Marina published a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers (Henry Holt). Her first young-adult novel, Ask Me No Questions (Simon & Schuster, 2006), was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a Notable Book, and received the first James Cook Teen Book Award. She is currently a professor of English at William Paterson University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two sons.

Stephen Dunn — Poetry

© Karen Zealand

Pulitzer-prize winning poet Stephen Dunn is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Everything Else in the World. 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 Levinson and Oscar Blumenthal Prizes from Poetry magazine, and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, to name a few. Serving as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, he lives in Frostburg, Maryland.

Eric Gansworth — Fiction & Poetry

© Tom Wolf

Novelist, short-story writer, poet, and painter Eric Gansworth is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Indian Nation. He is the author of six books, all of which feature paintings as integral parts of their narratives. His three novels include Indian Summers, selected for the College Libraries’ America Reads 2000 project as well as for the “Readers & Writers on the Air” program on North Country Public Radio, and Mending Skins, winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award in 2006. He has published two collections of poems and paintings, Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon, and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function; as well as the multi-genre Breathing the Monster Alive. Eric is also the editor of Sovereign Bones, New Native American Writing. Born and raised at the Tuscarora Indian Nation in western New York, Eric is a Professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo. He is a member of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers and the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

Julia Glass — Fiction

© Dennis Cowley

An accomplished figurative-painter-turned-writer, Julia Glass is the author of the novel Three Junes, which won the 2002 National Book Award and was both a New York Times Notable Book and a selection of ABC/Good Morning America’s READ THIS! Book Club. Her latest novel, The Whole World Over, was published in June 2006. For her short fiction, Julie has won three Nelson Algren Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella; for nonfiction, she received the Ames Memorial Essay Award. She has also earned writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. From 2004 to 2005, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A former freelance journalist and editor, she lives with her family in Massachusetts. Empire Falls author Richard Russo has said, “Julia Glass’s talent just sends chills up my spine; her novel, Three Junes, is a marvel.”

Richard Hoffman — Creative Nonfiction

© Thom Harrigan

Richard Hoffman is author of the Half the House: a Memoir, named the1996 Book of the Year by The Boston Athenaeum Readers’ Group. He is also author of the poetry collections Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. His work, both verse and prose, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Witness, and other magazines. Richard has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, including two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships in fiction and The Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Prize. He has also been named a Gardner Fund Arts Fellow in nonfiction and received a Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction. In 2006, he represented the United States at the Fifth International Festival of Poetry in El Salvador. He teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and at the Bay State House of Correction in Norfolk, Massachusetts as a volunteer for PEN New England.

Lee Hope — Short Fiction

© Hugh Chatfield

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. 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 also founded a low-residency MFA program, and played an instrumental role in the creation of Pine Manor’s MFA program. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Solstice Writers’ Institute, a nonprofit organization in the service of creative writers, as well as the MFA Advisory Board of Pine Manor College. She is in the process of completing two novels.

Steven Huff — Poetry

© Joe Flaherty

Steven Huff is the author of a collection of stories, A Pig in Paris (Big Pencil Press, 2008), and two collections of poems, More Daring Escapes (Red Hen, 2008) and The Water We Came From (FootHills, 2003). 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. The former executive director of BOA Editions, Ltd., he 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.

Barbara Hurd — Creative Nonfiction

© Photography by Jeannine

Barbara Hurd is the author of Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (forthcoming, spring 2008); Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year(2003); The Singer's Temple (2003); Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001; and Objects in this Mirror (1994). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Best American Essays 1999, Best American Essays 2001, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion, Audubon, and others. The recipient of a 2002 NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, and recipient of Pushcart Prizes in 2004 and 2007, Barbara teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland, and in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

Patricia Spears Jones — Poetry

© Teri Slotkin

Patricia Spears Jones is an award-winning African American poet, arts writer, and performer. She has published two full-length poetry collections: Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House) as well as two chapbooks: Repuestas! (Belladonna Books) and Mythologizing Always (Telephone Books). Recent journal publications include Bomb, Hanging Loose, Ploughshares, Black Renaissance Noire, and TriQuarterly. Her poems are anthologized in  Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn; Bowery Women: Poems; Poetry After 911; bumrush, a defpoetryjam; Best American Poetry 2000, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. She is the co-editor of the ground breaking, multi-ethnic women’s poetry anthology, Ordinary Women: Anthology of New York City Women Poets and is a contributing editor to Heliotrope and Bomb. She has taught for The Poetry Project and for Cave Canem, a workshop for African American poets, as well as at the Parsons School of Design, Naropa University, Sarah Lawrence College, and at other colleges and universities across the country.

Cleopatra Mathis — Poetry

© Ted Rosenberg

Cleopatra Mathis is the author of several books of poetry, including What to Tip the Boatman?(Sheep Meadow Press), winner of the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001; and White Sea (Sarabande Books, 2005). Born and raised in Louisiana, Cleopatra is of Greek and Cherokee descent. Her work has appeared widely in textbooks and magazines, such as The New Yorker and Poetry, as well as several anthologies, including The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. Prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants; the Peter Lavin Award from the Academy of American Poets; two Pushcart Prizes; the Robert Frost Resident Poet Award; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. Cleopatra is a professor of English at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she is also directs the Creative Writing Program.

Tor Seidler — Writing for Children

© Charles Gold

At the age of 27, author and freelance writer Tor Seidler published his first book, The Dulcimer Boy, which won the Washington State Writer’s Day Fiction Award. He continues to receive recognition for his work, including the Outstanding Children’s Book Citation from the New York Times, the Parent’s Choice Gold and Silver Awards, the Silver Pencil Award, the Notable Book Citation from the American Library Association, and the Parent’s Choice Storybook Award. He has published 12 books for young readers, including Terpin, A Rat’s Tale, Toes, The Wainscott Weasel (Publisher’s Weekly Pick of the List), Mean Margaret (National Book Award Finalist, 1997), Brainboy and the Deathmaster, and Gully’s Travels (forthcoming, August 2008). Tor has published one adult novel, Take a Good Look, and is working on the second.  He was a contributor to the language arts program at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College and has taught creative writing at Hofstra University.  He has been teaching in the MFA program at the New School University since 2002. He lives in New York City.

Special Guest

Dennis Lehane — Fiction

© Sigrid Estrada

Dennis Lehane is the author of Mystic River, winner of the Anthony Award for Best Novel, the Barry Award for Best Novel, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; Mystic River was also a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and was released as an Academy Award-winning film directed by Clint Eastwood. A Massachusetts native, Dennis is the author of the Patrick Kenzie series of Boston detective novels: A Drink Before the War; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Prayers for Rain. His most recent novel is Shutter Island, which is being made into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and Ben Kinglsey in the starring roles. His short story “Until Gwen” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2005, The Best American Mystery Short Stories 2005, and New Stories from the South 2005, and is the basis of his play “Coronado,” which premiered in New York City in December 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. His newest novel is The Given Day (fall 2008). The Cleveland Plain Dealer called Dennis Lehane “one of the best writers of his generation, period.”
www.dennislehanebooks.com.

 

Publishing Panelists

Mary Bisbee-Beek has been a book publicist for almost 30 years, working on staff as the Director of Publicity with the University of Michigan Press. She has also owned and directed her own company, Beeksbee Books, where she worked with dozens and dozens of independent literary presses from 1992-2003. Presently she lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar Award recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of clients — the first-time author. Authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Darci Klein’s To Full Term, A Mother’s Triumph Over Miscarriage; and Edgar-winning mystery writer and host of “Anatomy Of A Mystery” Rex Burns, among others. For more information about Fairbank Literary Representation, click here

Lynne Potts lives in Boston and New York, working as a professional free lance writer for non-profit agencies and institutions.  From 2003-2005, Lynne was Poetry Editor of the Columbia Journal of Literature and Art in 2003-2005; she is currently a poetry editor at AGNI. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Magazine, Southern Poetry Review,  Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, 2River and several other journals. A resident at Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2006, Lynne was awarded a full fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2007, in addition to winning the 2007 Backwards City Review Poetry Contest. To learn more about Lynne Potts, click here

Joni Praded is editor-in-chief of Chelsea Green Publishing Company, whose books on progressive politics and sustainable living include national bestsellers, environmental classics, exposés, and practical advice on green living. Over her 25-plus years in publishing, Joni also worked at environmental book publisher Island Press, and was longtime director and editor of Animals Magazine — which covered wildlife, the environment, and animal issues. Her articles on national and international wildlife issues, emerging environmental concerns, and ecotravel have appeared in numerous national magazines. Early in her career she held editorial positions at Little, Brown and Company and Boston Magazine. For more information about Chelsea Green Publishing, click here

Ande Zellman is the editorial director of the Literary Ventures Fund, a not-for-profit, private foundation that supports fiction and narrative non-fiction using a philanthropic investment model. A former top editor (Newsweek and the Boston Globe) and publishing and media consultant, Ande is nationally recognized for her innovation and expertise across all media platforms. Dozens of awards have been won under her leadership, including a Pulitzer Prize and a George Foster Peabody Award. She served as editor of The Good City: Writers Explore 21st-Century Boston, a collection of essays; is a frequent speaker and panelist on writing and publishing; and writes “The Book Explorers Club,” a weekly blog about books and publishing for Barnes & Noble. To read posts from “The Book Explorers Club,” click here, and to learn more about the Literary Ventures Fund, click here

 

Director & Staff

Meg Kearney — Director

© Mel Rosenthal

Meg Kearney is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at PMC as well as Director of its Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation—sponsor of the National Book Awards and a number of educational outreach programs—based in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Meg is author of An Unkindness of Ravens (2001) and The Secret of Me, a novel in verse for teens, published in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005 and out in paperback in 2007. Her forthcoming collection of poems, Home By Now, will be published by Four Way Books in 2009. She also has a picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, coming out with Scholastic. Her work, featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, and Ploughshares, and many anthologies, including Urban Nature (2000), Poets Grimm (2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (2005), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (2007). She also has a creative nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” featured in the anthology The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion (2007). In addition, Meg is co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews (2005). A native New Yorker, she now resides in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Mike Fleming and their three-legged black Labrador named Trooper.

Tanya Whiton — Program Administrator

© Derek Jackson

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 2000 Martin Dibner Fellowship for Maine 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.
www.tanyawhiton.com

Brenda Sparks Prescott— Staff Associate

Brenda Sparks Prescott lives and writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has worked in auto insurance claims, survey research, and higher education administration, among other things. Her writing has appeared in The Louisville Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Portland Magazine. She serves on the advisory board of the MFA in creative writing program at Pine Manor College. She has an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine, and an AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. She is currently researching her second novel.