New York State Summer Writers Institute
2008 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 most recent works are 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).

Neil Gordon is the author of three acclaimed novels and literary editor of Boston Review. Born in South Africa in 1958, he was for some years on the staff of the New York Review of Books. Of his first novel, Sacrifice of Isaac, the reviewer for the Washington Post Book World wrote: “One of the most intellectually sophisticated thrillers this reviewer has ever read.” And Entertainment Weekly said: “Brilliantly narrated, psychologically acute, spellbinding and provocative.” Of Gordon’s second novel, The Gun Runner’s Daughter, Publishers Weekly wrote: “A chilling, richly intelligent novel with an intricate page-turning plot, three-dimensional characters, unflagging suspense and intrigue.” Gordon’s most recent novel, The Company You Keep, was described in the New York Times Book Review as “rousing…..it bids well to enter the company of our best fiction about the Vietnam era….a combination of thriller, mystery story, romance, political novel and high-wire act.”

Kathryn Harrison is probably best known as the author of a memoir entitled The Kiss (1997), and of another memoir entitled The Mother Knot, but she is also the author of several acclaimed novels, including Envy (2005), The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, Poison and Thicker Than Water. Her essays are collected in Seeking Rapture. “A high-wire memoirist and a probing and inventive novelist,” writes Donna Seaman in Booklist. “A writer of sinuous, sensitive and often funny prose” who gives us books “juicy and intelligent,” says the starred review of Envy in a 2005 Publishers Weekly.

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.” Margot Livesey last taught at the summer writers institute in 2005.

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 a reviewer for the Washington Post.

Howard Norman is the author of six novels, including National Book Award finalists Northern Lights and The Bird Artist (“one of the most perfect and original novels that I have read in years,” wrote Richard Eder in The LA Times.). His other novels include The Museum Guard (described by John Banville in the Washington Post as “an impressive and admirable achievement”), The Haunting of L, and the recent Devotion. “Norman’s writing glows like a night light in the reader’s mind,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times.

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.

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 seventeen previous summers, she also teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

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.”

Julia Slavin worked for a decade as an ABC television producer in NY before moving to Washington, D.C. The winner of a Pushcart Prize and of GQ’s coveted Frederick Exley Fiction Competition, she is the author of an acclaimed recent novel, Carnivore Diet (Norton, 2005) and of a book of short stories entitled The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club. (“This is the most singular and arresting collection of short fiction I’ve read in years,” wrote Rick Moody. “Based on the reading experience…you’d think Slavin injected DNA from Bruno Schulz’s mouldering skeleton…” “Slavin eviscerates us for our narcissism and self-absorption, but with great generosity and humor…[she is] wildly funny,” wrote George Saunders.)

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.

Henri Cole  is the author of five 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, who taught poetry at Harvard for several years, has taught at the summer writers institute since 2004.

Campbell McGrath teaches creative writing at Florida International University and taught at the summer writers institute for the first time in July 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.

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).