Director

Michael C. White is the author of five novels: Soul Catcher, A Brother's Blood, The Blind Side of the Heart, A Dream of Wolves, and The Garden of Martyrs. His sixth novel, Beautiful Assassin, with be published next April by William Morrow/Harper Collins. He is also the author of the story collection Marked Men. Selected as a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction twice, he has published fifty stories in national and literary magazines, and was the founding editor of the American Fiction series. He currently teaches at Fairfield University, and is the fiction editor of Dogwood.

Winter 2010

One of American poetry's longtime masters of the art, Philip Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. These poems give voice to failures of many kinds - yet they are full of tenderness, empathy, and heartbreaking honesty, giving praise to the joy of life as well. His other collections include Living in the Past, and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of Deep Within the Ravine, recipient of The Academy of American Poets Lamont Prize; Like Wings, winner of an American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters Award as well as a National Book Award nomination. The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems will be published next year. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, among other magazines. He is the recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1981), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1985), as well as the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine.

Summer 2009

Rick Moody, author of several books, short stories and a memoir, most famously, The Ice Storm, is the recipient of the Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir, and the 2994 Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review. His short fiction and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Stories 2001 and Best American Essays 2004. His latest book, three novellas called Right Livelihoods, was published last year. Moody is a member of the board of directors of the Corporation of Yaddo, an artistic community that nurtures the creative process. He is also the secretary of the PEN American Center, and he co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New School for Social Research. Born in New York City, Moody now lives in Brooklyn.

Sue William Silverman's memoir, Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction (W. W. Norton), is also a Lifetime television original movie. Her first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award series in creative nonfiction. One of her essays appears in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction, while others won contests with Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, and Water~Stone Review. Her poetry collection is Hieroglyphics in Neon and a craft book, Fearless Confessions: A Writers Guide to Memoir, is forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press (Spring, 2009). As a professional speaker, Sue has appeared on "The View," "Anderson Cooper 360," and "CNN-Headline News." Additionally, she was featured in a recent interview in The Writer's Chronicle; is associate editor of Fourth Genre; and teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts (www.suewilliamsilverman.com).

Winter 2008

Anita Shreve has published 13 novels, among them The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, The Last Time They Met, A Wedding in December, and Body Surfing. She has received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. In 1999, The Pilot's Wife became the 25th selection of Oprah's Book Club and an international bestseller. In April 2002, CBS aired the film version of The Pilot's Wife, starring Christine Lahti, and in fall 2002, The Weight of Water, starring Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn, was released in movie theaters.

Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poetry and four volumes of nonfiction prose; his newest book, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, was published by HarperCollins in 2008. His 2007 memoir Dog Years was a New York Times bestseller. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, and a Whiting Writers Award. He remains the only American poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize in the United Kingdom. He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, New York University, Cornell, and Stanford, and currently is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program in writing at the University of Houston, where he teaches one semester each year. The rest of the time, he lives in New York City. Congratulations to Mark Doty on winning the National Book Award in poetry for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems!

Rachel Basch is the author of two novels. The Passion of Reverend Nash (W.W. Norton) was named one of the five best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor. Degrees of Love (W.W. Norton, Harper Paperbacks) was translated into Dutch and German and was a selection of the Hartford Courant's Book Club. Basch's non-fiction has appeared in Parenting, and she has reviewed books for The Washington Post Book World. A dedicated teacher of creative writing for over 20 years, Basch is a contributor to Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises From Today's Best Writers & Teachers. Basch has been a Visiting Writer at Trinity College in Hartford. She currently teaches in Wesleyan University's Graduate Liberal Studies Program and leads a private master class.

Kim Bridgford is a professor of English at Fairfield University and editor of Dogwood and Mezzo Cammin. Her books include Undone, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Instead of Maps, nominated for the Poets' Prize; and In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, winner of the Donald Justice Prize. She is currently working on a three-book poetry/photography project with visual artist Jo Yarrington, focusing on journey and sacred space in Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan. She has held grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and is the 2007-08 Connecticut Touring Poet.

Sharon Bryan is the author of four collections of poetry: Salt Air and Objects of Affection from Wesleyan University Press, Flying Blind from Sarabande Books, and Sharp Stars from BOA in 2009. She is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, published by Norton, and co-editor (with William Olsen) of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life, published by Sarabande. She received a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Physical Anthropology, and an MFA in Poetry. Her awards include two NEA Fellowships in Poetry, an Artist Trust grant from the Washington State Arts Council, and numerous other prizes and awards. She was poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and a fellow at the Provincetown Artist Colony. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals. She has taught at universities around the country, most recently as Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Connecticut.

Lary Bloom is the author and co-author of several nonfiction books, including The Writer Within, Lary Bloom's Connecticut Notebook, and the memoirs Letters From Nuremberg (with Senator Christopher J. Dodd) and The Test of Our Times (with former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge). As one of America's leading Sunday magazine editors for 30 years, he nurtured writers such as Edna Buchanan, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Madeleine Blais, David Hays and Susan M. Dodd. He has taught memoir writing at Trinity College, Wesleyan University's Graduate Liberal Studies Program and has lectured on writing at Yale, the University of Miami, the University of New Hampshire, UConn, and many other institutions. He also writes a monthly column for the New York Times and Connecticut magazine.

Da Chen arrived in America at the age of 23 with $30 in his pocket, a bamboo flute, and a heart filled with hope. He attended Columbia University School of Law on a full scholarship, and upon graduating, worked for the Wall Street investment banking firm of Rothschilds, Inc. Colors of the Mountain, his first memoir, was compared to Angela's Ashes, was the object of an intense bidding war among 5 top New York publishing houses, and went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Published in 6 other languages, the memoir was a: New England Bookseller Association Discovery selection; BookSense '76 selection; Borders Original Voice selection: Barnes & Noble and Discover Great New Writers selection. China's Son, the children's adaptation of Da Chen's memoir, is a Borders 2002 Original Voices Award finalist and American Library Association 2002 Best Books for Young Adults final nominee. Sounds of the River, the sequel to his first memoir, was published this year to rave international reviews. His first adult fiction, Brothers, was awarded Washington Post Best Book of 2006, San Francisco Chronicle Notable Work of 2006, Miami Herald Notable Book of 2006 and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and 2007 Quills Book Award Fiction Finalist. His next fiction will be published by Crown in 2010.

Joan Connor is a full professor and former Director of Creative Writing at Ohio University and a professor in the Fairfield University low residency MFA Program. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Award, the John Gilgun award, a Pushcart Prize, the Ohio Writer award in fiction and nonfiction, the AWP award for her short story collection, History Lessons, and the Riverteeth Award for her collection of essays, The World Before Mirrors. Her two earlier story collections are: We Who Live Apart and Here On Old Route 7. Her work has appeared in: Glim mer Train, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Chelsea, Manoa, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Journal of Arts & Letters, and Black Warrior, among others. She lives in Athens, Ohio and Belmont, Vermont.

Pete Duval's short story collection Rear View (Houghton Mifflin) won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize, the Connecticut Book Award and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in a variety of journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Exquisite Corpse, and The Sonora Review. He recently completed a historical novel, Election Day, set along the coast of Buzzard's Bay where he grew up. Duval is a graduate of Boston University's Creative Writing Program.

Roya Hakakian is the author of two collections of poetry in Persian, the first of which, For the Sake of Water, was nominated as poetry book of the year by Iran News in 1993. She was listed among the leading new voices in Persian poetry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. Her memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown) was Publishers Weekly's Best Book of the Year and was named Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book in 2005. Roya is also a recipient of the 2008 Guggenheim fellowship in nonfiction, and is a fellow at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center. She has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units on network television, including 60 Minutes and on A&E's "Travels With Harry", and ABC Documentary Specials with the late Peter Jennings. Commissioned by UNICEF, Roya's most recent film, Armed and Innocent was a nominee for best short documentary at several festivals around the world. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in English language publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal among them. She is also a contributor to the Weekend Edition of NPR's All Things Considered. Roya is a member of the editorial board of the journal, World Affairs: A Journal Of Ideas And Debate, a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and serves on the board of Refugees International.

Nalini Jones was born in Rhode Island, graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her story collection, What You Call Winter, was published in August 2007 by Knopf. She is a Stanford Calderwood Fellow of the MacDowell Colony, and has recently taught at Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y in New York. She has also worked for several years in music, helping produce festivals and concert series in New York, Newport, and New Orleans.

Eugenia Kim is an MFA graduate of Bennington College, and a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow. She has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings. Her debut novel, The Calligrapher's Daughter (Holt), was a Borders Original Voices selection, a Washington Post Critic's Pick, a Denver Post Editor's Choice, and a Publishers Weekly First Fiction Pick for Fall. She lives in Washington DC, and therefore has no vote in Congress.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press. His work has appeared in Five Points, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Short Takes, Open House, Flash Fiction, Truth in Nonfiction, and in many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, and at many summer writing conferences. He currently lives in New York City and teaches at NYU. A novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming.

Sarah Manguso is the author of the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, and the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her honors include a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her writing has appeared in McSweeney's, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and three volumes of the Best American Poetry series. She has taught creative writing at Columbia, the New School, and the Pratt Institute, and she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA program at Penn State University.

William B. Patrick's works have been published or produced in several genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and drama. Saving Troy (2005) is a creative nonfiction chronicle of a year spent living with the professional firefighters and paramedics of the Troy, N.Y. Fire Department's 1st Platoon, and accompanying them to emergency medical calls, rescues, and fires. From that experience, Patrick has also written a screenplay, Fire Ground, as well as a radio play, Rescue. His Rescue was commissioned by the BBC for their Season of American Thirty Minute Plays, and aired world-wide on BBC 3 in 1997. An earlier teleplay, Rachel's Dinner, starring Olympia Dukakis and Peter Gerety, was aired nationally on ABC-TV in 1991, and his third feature-length screenplay, Brand New Me, was optioned by Force Ten Productions of Los Angeles. His book, We Didn't Come Here for This (1999), is a hybrid of creative nonfiction and poetry. Patrick has also published These Upraised Hands, a book of narrative poems and dramatic monologues. His novel, Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family, won the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for the best first work of fiction. Presently, he is a Visiting Writer at the College of St. Rose, and has taught fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and poetry at the University at Albany, Old Dominion University, and Salem State College. He is the recipient of several grants, including from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation.

Nicholas Rinaldi is the author of three novels and three collections of poetry. His stories and poems have appeared widely, both here and abroad. He earned a doctorate from Fordham University and currently teaches courses in literature and creative writing at Fairfield University. His poems and fiction have won numerous awards, and he was recently honored as the 2007 Artist of the Year by the Fairfield Arts Council. His poetry and fiction have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, and The International Herald Tribune, as well as in a broad range of magazines and journals, including People, Elle, Time, The Virginia Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Literary Review. He has read his work on radio and TV, as well as at universities, libraries, and museums across the country. Pulitzer-winner Richard Russo has described Rinaldi's latest novel, Between Two Rivers, as "a masterpiece ... a book that will take your breath away." And Richard Bernstein, in the New York Times, compared an earlier novel, The Jukebox Queen of Malta, to works by Heller, Styron, and Mailer, and concluded that "Rinaldi belongs in their company."

Mary Szybist's book Granted was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2003 by Library Journal; that year it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of both the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Best American Poetry 2008. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches at Lewis and Clark College.

Joan Wickersham's memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a 2008 National Book Award finalist, and was named one of the year's best books by the Boston Globe, Salon, New York Magazine, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and The Week. She is also the author of the novel The Paper Anniversary. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and has won the Ploughshares Cohen Award. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry and a poetry chapbook. He is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry and the author of a memoir and a collection of short stories. He teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005 and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005.