New York State Summer Writers Institute
2009 Faculty

FICTION

Elizabeth Benedict is the author of Almost (2001), a novel described by Edmund White as “a fast-paced, funny, and splendidly intelligent drama [with] a varied, unforgettable cast of characters.” Her earlier books include Slow Dancing (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Beginner’s Book of Dreams, Safe Conduct, and The Joy of Writing Sex (“Read it because it will teach you everything you need to know about writing good fiction,’’ suggests Peter Carey). Benedict has taught at Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  Her latest novel, The Practice of Deceit, was published in 2005.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of two novels and two books of short stories. Of her most recent novel, Veronica, Heidi Julavits has written in Publishers Weekly: “Gaitskill’s style is gorgeously caustic and penetrating, with a honing instinct towards the harrowing; her ability to capture abstract feeling and sensation with a precise and unexpected metaphor is a squirmy delight.” And Janet Maslin writes in The New York Times: “Gaitskill writes so radiantly about violent self-loathing that the very incongruousness of her language has shocking power.” Her earlier books include the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin and the story volumes Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To. (“Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect details, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real,” writes Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times.)

Mary Gordon is the author of many acclaimed novels including Spending, Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, and The Other Side. She has also written a book of short stories, Temporary Shelter; a book of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls; a collection of three novellas, The Rest of Life; and a widely praised memoir about her father, The Shadow Man. Gordon is McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Her recent works include Seeing Through Places, a memoir,  the novel Pearl and The Stories of Mary Gordon. (Publishers Weekly: “a gripping and memorable collection”; Booklist: “Brilliantly structured and psychologically acute.”) Her latest book is a  memoir entitled Circling My Mother. (“This knotty, deeply personal book is irradiated by flashes of lyric brilliance”: The New Yorker).

Amy Hempel is the author of five books of fiction, including Reasons To Live, At The Gates of the Animal Kingdom and Tumble Home (“The kind of book you can open anywhere and the prose wins your absolute trust,” writes Alice Munro). Her “inimitable resonance” is described by Richard Howard as “heartbreaking, hilarious, slightly uncanny” and, by The NY Times as evincing “an almost miraculous exactitude of observation and execution.” Her most recent books are The Dog of the Marriage and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, with an introduction by Rick Moody (2006).

Margot Livesey is author of Learning by Heart (stories) and of the novels Criminals, The Missing World, Homework and Eva Moves The Furniture, among others. “Not since Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” writes Andrea Barrett of Eva Moves The Furniture, “has there been such a beautiful novel about the bond between mother and daughter. Radiant, perfectly poised…[it] casts a powerful spell.” Criminals is described by Jayne Anne Phillips as “a stunning tour de force, suspenseful, beautifully observed…a wonderfully ironic meditation on the marriage of seemingly random trajectories known as fate.” Her latest novel is The House On Fortune Street (2007): “Livesey at her very best,” writes Ann Patchett.

Rick Moody is author of the novels The Ice Storm, Purple America and Garden State. He has also written two acclaimed volumes of short fiction, Demonology and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven. Newsday describes him as “our anthropologist of desolate landscapes;” John Hawkes as “a writer of meticulous originality.” He received the Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award. His recent memoir is The Black Veil (“Moody’s writing rants and raves and roars,” writes a reviewer for The NY Times. “He is an unrepressed quester after meaning,” writes Robert Boyers). Moody’s latest novel (2005) is The Diviners, and his latest collection of short fiction is Right Livelihoods (2007). “One of our best writers,” said the reviewer for the Washington Post.

Alix Ohlin is the author of two acclaimed books of fiction. Her debut novel, The Missing Person, was a Booklist Top Ten First Novel of 2005 and was received as follows by J.M. Coetzee: “an impressively assured debut novel…skillful, attractively quick-witted and wry.” Jay McInerney wrote of it: “A funny, quirky, and whip-smart debut. Ohlin has a great eye, a great ear, and all the other equipment auguring a very successful future.” Ohlin’s new book of short stories, Babylon, was published by Knopf in August of 2005 and received by Heidi Julavits as follows: “That rare find—a writer of emotionally intelligent (and intelligently emotional) fiction. Expect to hear her spoken of in the same reverent breath as Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams.” Ohlin’s short fiction has been selected for both Best New American Voices 2004 and Best American Short Stories 2005. She teaches at Lafayette College.

Victoria Redel is the author of the novels Loverboy and The Border of Truth, as well as a book of short stories (Where The Road Bottoms Out) and two volumes of poems (Already The World and Swoon). Loverboy was made into a successful feature film, directed by Kevin Bacon and starring Kyra Sedgwick, and the book was a Best Book of the Year at the LA TIMES. “Lyrical and chillingly realistic,” wrote the reviewer for Elle.  In Publishers Weekly, Redel’s 2007 novel The Border of Truth was described as “colorful, endearing…Redel offers a welcome and fresh perspective on the subject of the Holocaust.”

Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her novel Gilead, which also won the Pen/ Faulkner Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. Her previous novel, Housekeeping, is universally regarded as an American classic, and she also won the Pen/ Faulkner award in non-fiction for her book of essays, Adam’s Dream. A faculty member at the summer writers institute for eighteen summers, she also teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her most recent novel is Home (“a beautiful new novel,” says Publishers Weekly).

Danzy Senna is the author of two critically acclaimed novels. The first, Caucasia was a 1998 LA TIMES Best Book of the Year and was described there as “not a feel-good book about the brotherhood of man; it explores the centrality and the lunacy of racial identity in America.” The Washington Post Book World reviewer wrote: “a book as taut and fast-paced as a thriller” by “a hugely gifted writer.” Senna’s second novel, Symptomatic (2005), was described in Booklist as a “strung-tight and relentlessly creepy novel, as thematically and dramatically rich as fiction can be.”

Jim Shepard is the author of many novels and books of stories, including the recent National Book Award finalist volume, Like You’d Understand, Anyway. As Dave Eggers has written, Jim Shepard writes “uniformly bold and exhilarating stories….He’s the best we’ve got.” Shepard’s other books include Paper Doll, Kiss of the Wolf, Nosferatu In Love, Project X, Batting Against Castro and Love and Hydrogen. Amy Hempel says of his work: “Shepard’s writing is lean, assured, never canned; it is sometimes cinematic and often astringently funny.” And Kirkus reviews has called him “one of the most adventurous and enthralling American writers.”

POETRY

Frank Bidart is the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently Star Dust. His previous volumes were Desire-- winner of a Theodore Roethke Prize and a Lannan Foundation Prize—and a chapbook entitled Music Like Dirt (2002). His early volumes can be found in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990. Bidart, who teaches at Wellesley College, has received major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. Louise Glück wrote of him: “Certainly he is one of the crucial figures of our time. …More fiercely, more obsessively, more profoundly than any poet since Berryman (whom he in no other way resembles), Bidart explores individual guilt, the insoluble dilemma…the givens of human life.” Recently Bidart has won the Wallace Stevens Award and the Tanning Prize.

Peg Boyers is the author of two volumes of poems, both published by the University of Chicago Press. The first, Hard Bread (2002),  was described by Richard Howard as “the most original debut in my experience of contemporary American poetry.” With poems spoken in the invented voice of the late Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, the book “not only surpassed the notion of a merely good first book” but “soared beyond the conventional expectations of ‘persona’ and ‘dramatic monologue”: So wrote Robert Pinsky. “The creation of the voice in this book,” wrote Frank Bidart, “stoic, passionate, resigned, insistent on truth—is a brilliant achievement.” Boyers’ second book, Honey With Tobacco (2007), “has a rare power,” wrote George Steiner; the poems “match the private to the public, the intimate to the political, and the range is formidable, from lyric desolation to ‘funky irreverence.’” “A beautiful book,” wrote Henri Cole. Peg Boyers is Executive Editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and teaches creative writing at Skidmore College.

Henri Cole  is the author of six books of poems, including The Look of Things, The Marble Queen, The Visible Man and, in 2003, Middle Earth. (“Henri Cole has become a master poet, with few peers,” writes Harold Bloom. “Middle Earth is [his] epiphany, his Whitmanesque sunrise…[These] are the poems of our climate.”) Of his earlier books, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote in The New Yorker: “a poet not content to remain in the realm of the merely lapidary, the self-consciously coloratura…he produces lines of natural and nonchalant brio…in stanzas as shapely as topiary…; he can write about the soul stumbling against quotidian impediments…[approaching] a variety of subjects, from first love…to family history.” Henri Cole has taught at the Summer Writers Institute since 2004. His most recent book is Blackbird and Wolf.

Deborah Digges is the author of four books of poems. Her first book, Vesper Sparrows, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize from New York University. Late In The Millenium (1989) was followed by Rough Music (1995), which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and elicited the following from The New Yorker: “Many of the poems in this remarkable collection chart a course for letting go—of grown children and parents, of old lovers, and of a younger, passionate self…Digges’ new verse is at times rowdy and elemental—its music is that of a Bruegelesque romp, open to ecstasy and wild surrender.” “Rough Music,” wrote Mark Doty, “is a fierce, headlong book, so exhilarating that even its darkest notes shine with a strange joy.” Digges’ most recent book of poems is Trapeze (2004). She has also written two memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001). She is Professor of English at Tufts University.

Campbell McGrath teaches creative writing at Florida International University and has taught at the summer writers institute since 2007.  The winner of a MacArthur “Genius Award”, he is the author of many books of poetry, including American Noise, Pax Atomica, Spring Comes To Chicago, Seven Notebooks, Florida Poems and Capitalism. “A poet of formal eloquence and rhetorical power,” writes the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, “of vision and engagement….he descends into the maelstrom of American culture and emerges singing.” “He is our Whitman,” writes the reviewer for American Review.

Robert Pinsky served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is surely one of the most celebrated poets in the country. Among his many books are volumes of poetry, a best-selling translation of Dante and prose books that include The Sounds of Poetry and David. In a front-page NY Times Book Review piece on Pinsky’s Collected Poems (The Figured Wheel) Katha Pollitt wrote: “This is an extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume.” The reviewer for The Nation wrote: “This is the most scrupulously intelligent body of work produced by an American poet in the past 25 years.” And Louise Gluck wrote of Pinsky’s recent Gulf Music: “An art whose scope and complexity and grandeur are rarely equaled by any of his contemporaries.”

NONFICTION

Phillip Lopate is a central figure in the recent revival of interest in memoir writing and what has come to be called “the personal essay.” Lopate is the author of Portrait of My Body, Confessions of Summer, Against Joie de Vivre, The Rug Merchant, Being with Children, and Totally Tenderly Tragically. He is also the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and was the series editor of The Anchor Essay Annual. Lopate’s work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize series. His most recent books are Waterfront and Getting Personal: Selected Writings.

James Miller is the author of a controversial book about rock and roll, Flowers in the Dustbin (Simon & Schuster). His earlier books include two titles nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award: Democracy Is in the Streets (1987), a study of the American student left in the 1960s; and The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), a critical biography of the contemporary French thinker. Director of the graduate program in liberal studies at the New School, and editor of Daedalus (the magazine of the American Academy of Arts & Letters), Miller writes often for such publications as the New York Times, The LA TIMES, and The New Republic. He has also written extensively about popular culture, reviewing for Rolling Stone and, for 12 years, serving as book and music critic for Newsweek. Of Miller’s best-selling book Democracy Is in the Streets, critics wrote, “brings the sixties alive in its passion, in its idealism, in its follies” (Ronald Steel); and “an outstanding work” (Hendrick Hertzberg).