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, will be published on March 30, 2010 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.

Guest Faculty

Summer 2013

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and the novels Black & White and Family History. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Vogue, Ploughshares, One Story, The New York Times Book Review, and have been broadcast on NPR's "This American Life". She has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, and Brooklyn College. She is co-founder of The Sirenland Writers' Conference in Positano, Italy. Her new book, Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life, will be published in October, 2013.

Summer 2012

Carlos M. N. Eire was born in Havana, in 1950. In 1962 he fled to the United States as one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of communist Cuba by Operation Pedro Pan. After living in several foster homes, he was reunited with his mother in 1965, but his father was never able to leave the island. He is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1979. He is the author of War Against the Idols, From Madrid to Purgatory, A Very Brief History of Eternity, and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1450-1700 (forthcoming, Yale, 2012). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions. His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award in nonfiction for 2003, has been translated into thirteen languages, but is banned in Cuba, where he is considered an enemy of the state. The sequel to this memoir, Learning to Die in Miami, appeared in 2010.

Winter 2011

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of four novels, MotherKind, Shelter, Machine Dreams, and Lark and Termite for which she was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. Phillips is also the author of two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction at the age of 26 for Black Tickets, and has also received Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Shelter. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and has recently appeared in Granta, Harper's, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.

Summer 2011

Charles Simic, the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States (2007-2008) and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. A poet, essayist, and translator, he has been honored with the Wallace Stevens Award, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic has published numerous collections of poems, among them, That Little Something (2008); My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His newest book of poems, Master of Disguises was released in October 2010. Simic has also published a number of prose books: Memory Piano (2006); Metaphysician in the Dark (2003); A Fly in My Soup (2003); Orphan Factory (1998); The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs (1994); Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992); Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir (1990); and Renegade, a book of essays. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

Winter 2010

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. She is the author of Lit and the critically-acclaimed and New York Times best-selling memoirs The Liars' Club and Cherry. The Liars' Club won prizes for best first nonfiction from PEN (The Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction), the Texas Institute for Letters, and was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards. Of her poet's soul, Karr says, "From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet's burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight." Her poetry grants include The Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She has won prizes from Best American Poetry as well as Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and essays. Her four volumes of poetry are Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, 2006), Viper Rum (Penguin, 1998), The Devil's Tour (New Directions, 1993), and Abacus (Wesleyan, 1986). Her work appears in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and Parnassus. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and was the weekly poetry editor for the Washington Post Book World's "Poet's Choice" column, a position canonized by Bob Hass, Ed Hirsch, and Rita Dove. She lives in Syracuse, New York and New York City.

Summer 2010

Wally Lamb is the author of 3 New York Times best-selling novels - The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, and She's Come Undone - of which 2 were Oprah's Book Club selections. Lamb edited Couldn't Keep It to Myself and I'll Fly Away, 2 volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women's prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for the past 10 years. His new novel, Wishin' and Hopin': A Christmas Story was published in November of 2009. He is currently at work on his 5th novel, tentatively titled We Are Water. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine. The Lambs are the parents of three sons.

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 Fulbright 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.

Faculty

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 has reviewed books for The Washington Post Book World, and her nonfiction has appeared in n+1, Parenting, and The Huffington Post. In 2011 Basch received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and she recently won The William Van Wert Prize in fiction for the first chapter of her forthcoming novel, The Listener. 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.

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. Lary was honored with the 2010 award for Lifetime Achievement in Service to the Literary Community at the ninth annual Connecticut Book Awards on September 19, 2010.

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 latest book My Last Empress was published in the fall of 2012 to national and international acclaim.

Alan Davis, who has published 2 prize-winning collections of stories (Rumors from the Lost World and Alone with the Owl), was born in New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi, into a large Catholic family of Italian, French, and Irish ancestry. He now lives in Minnesota, near the Mississippi's headwaters among Garrison Keillor's Lutherans, where he teaches in the M.F.A. program at Minnesota State University, Moorhead (MSUM), and serves as Senior Editor at New Rivers Press. The press was founded in 1968 by C. W. "Bill" Truesdale and has published more than 330 titles. In 2001, after Truesdale's death, it was revived and relocated to MSUM, where its dual mission is to publish new and emerging writers and provide learning opportunities for students. The press honors Truesdale's progressive spirit by publishing work with a strong sense of place that speaks to our troubled times with satyagraha (the truthforce), empathy, and aesthetic courage. Davis has received 2 Fulbright awards (to Indonesia and Slovenia), a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Creative Prose. He recently completed a third collection a novel, and has won the Prize Americana for Fiction 2010 for So Bravely Vegetative, his third collection of stories, scheduled to be published in December 2010 or January 2011.

Carol Ann Davis is the author of Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), both from Tupelo Press. The recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the W. K. Rose Fellowship for the Creative Arts from Vassar College, her recent work has appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Volt, and on the ArtBeat website for PBS' Newshour. Carol Ann Davis served as editor of Crazyhorse from 2001-2012. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Fairfield University.

Marita Golden is the award-winning author of over a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel After won the Fiction Award from the Maryland Librarians Association, the Fiction Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Her most recent book is The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing. Many of Marita Golden's texts are used in literature and other courses at universities and colleges around the country and internationally. As a teacher of writing, she has been a member of the faculties of the Graduate Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University, and has worked with hundreds of writers in her private workshops which she has customized for varied constituencies. As a lecturer, in addition to reading from her work or speaking on topics as varied as African-American literature, women in literature, and colorism at colleges around the country, Marita Golden has been a Fulbright Senior Fellow in Creative Writing in Israel and served as a cultural ambassador through the State Department in Turkey and Spain. As a literary activist, she co-founded the Hurston/Wright Foundation which, since 1991, has offered a variety of programs that create opportunities for Black writers, including a summer writers workshop and the Hurston/Wright Award.

Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year, and Opa Nobody (2008), shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. She has also written a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration (2011), which offers exercises and approaches to exploratory life writing. Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Crab Orchard Review, Hotel Amerika, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post Magazine. She teaches in the Department of English at Fairfield University.

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. Her debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter (Holt), won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, was a Washington Post Critic’s Pick and Best Historical Novel, and a Publishers Weekly First Fiction Pick. She is the 2012 Eli Cantor Fellow at The Corporation of Yaddo, the 2011 Stanford Calderwood Fellow at The MacDowell Colony, and a fellow at Hedgebrook and VCCA. Her work has appeared in journals including Asia Literary Review, and anthologies including Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writing. She has presented at The Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum, and the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea.

Kim Dana Kupperman, is the author of a critically acclaimed essay collection, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings. Missives From The Other Side Of Silence (Graywolf, 2010), which received the 2009 Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is the founder of Welcome Table Press, dedicated to publishing and celebrating the essay in all its forms. Her honors include notable mentions in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2007; 2010) and Best American Essays (2007, 2008, and 2009); the 2003 Robert J. DeMott Prose Prize from Quarter after Eight; and first place in the 1996 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest. Ms. Kupperman is the recipient of fellowships at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop in 2010, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship in 2009, and a Center for Book Arts scholarship and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2008. Her work has appeared in many literary periodicals, including Best American Essays 2006, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Nightsun, and River Teeth. She works as managing editor of the award-winning quarterly literary journal, The Gettysburg Review.

Suzanne Matson is a 2012 fellow in fiction writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the author of three novels published by W. W. Norton (The Tree-Sitter, A Trick of Nature, and The Hunger Moon) and two books of poetry published by Alice James Books (Durable Goods and Sea Level). Her autobiographical, literary, and op-ed essays have appeared in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Child, The Seattle Times, The American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Mid-American Review. Originally from Portland, Oregon, she teaches at Boston College where she is a full professor and chairperson of the English department.

Pete Nelson has published 19 books of fiction, 6 non-fiction books, and over 150 short stories or articles in magazines including Esquire, Harpers, Playboy, the Iowa Review, the North American Review, Redbook, Seventeen, MS, Mother Jones, and Rolling Stone. He was the "His" columnist for Mademoiselle and a contributing editor and feature writer for Live and Wondertime magazines. Nelson has been the recipient of numerous grants and was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. He was named to the Esquire Magazine Register for Best American Writers Under 40, and his book Left For Dead won the Christopher Award in 2003 and was listed as one of the American Library Association's top 10 young adult books of the year. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His latest work of fiction, I Thought You Were Dead, has been chosen by independent booksellers as a recent No. 1 Book Sense Pick.

Karen Osborn is the author of Patchwork (HBJ), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Between Earth and Sky (William Morrow), and The River Road (William Morrow/ Harper Collins). Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals, anthologies, and magazines, including The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Kansas Quarterly, The Centennial Review, Wisconsin Review, and Tar River Poetry. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and teaches creative writing and fiction writing at Mt. Holyoke College.

William B. Patrick's works have been published or produced in a number of genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and drama. His latest book, The Call of Nursing: Voices from the Front Lines of Health Care, published in May of 2013, presents twenty-three occupational portraits that reveal a profession which often hides in plain sight. Saving Troy, published by SUNY Press in 2009, is a creative nonfiction chronicle of a year spent riding along with professional firefighters and paramedics. From that experience, Patrick also wrote a screenplay, Fire Ground, as well as a radio play, Rescue, which was commissioned by the BBC and aired on BBC 3. An earlier teleplay, Rachel's Dinner, starring Olympia Dukakis and Peter Gerety, was aired nationally on ABC-TV, and his third feature-length screenplay, Brand New Me, was optioned by Force Ten Productions of Los Angeles and used as the basis for the remake of The Nutty Professor. His memoir in poetry, We Didn't Come Here for This (1999), was published by BOA Editions, as was These Upraised Hands (1995), a book of narrative poems and dramatic monologues, and a novel, Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family, that won the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for fiction.

Hollis Seamon is the author of two short story collections, Corporeality (Able Muse Press 2013) and Body Work (Spring Harbor Press 2000), as well as two novels, Somebody Up There Hates You (Algonquin 2013) and Flesh (Avocet Press 2005). Her short stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, Greensboro Review, The Chicago Review, Calyx, Nebraska Review, Fiction International, and The Hudson Review. Her work has been anthologized in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review (Bellevue Literary Press), The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness (Feminist Press), A Line of Cutting Women (Calyx Books), Food and Other Enemies (Essex Press), Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers (Level Best Books) and Sacred Ground: Stories about Home (Milkweed Editions). She has received a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and won the 2009 Al Blanchard award for short fiction. Hollis lives in Kinderhook, NY and is Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where she teaches writing and literature.

Baron Wormser is the author of eight 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 is Director of Educational Outreach at the Frost Place 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. Recent essays and poems have appeared in Orion, New World Writing, Solstice Literary Journal, Grist and Brilliant Corners.