VISITING WRITERS

Russell Banks is the author of Cloudsplitter, Continental Drift, The Book of Jamaica, and many other works of fiction. Banks’ novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter (three Cannes Film Festival awards) have been made into successful feature films. His novel Rule of the Bone was praised by Cornel West as the work of “a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.” The Darling is Banks’ most recent book. (“Russell Banks’s twentieth-century Liberia is as hellish a place as Joseph Conrad’s nineteenth-century Congo. The only creatures that behave with humanity are the apes. A dark and disturbing book.”) His new novel (2008) is The Reserve.

Ann Beattie is the author of many books, including Picturing Will, Chilly Scenes of Winter, Love Always, Another You, and My Life, Starring Dara Falcon. Her stories were  collected in Park City (1998), prompting praise from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: “To say that Ann Beattie is a good writer would be an understatement. Her ear is faultless, her eye…ruthless as a hawk’s.” Beattie has taught at Harvard College and the University of Virginia. Her recent book of stories, Perfect Recall, inspired the following from Lorrie Moore (NYT Book Review): “One feels amazed at the confidence, steadiness and quality of her writing.” Her latest book is Follies, and her latest award is the Rea Award for Short Fiction.

Louise Gluck has won the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award and many other prizes for her work. Among her many books of poetry are The Wild Iris, Vita Nova, Meadowlands, The Seven Ages, Descending Figure, The House on Marshland and The Triumph of Achilles. Her essays are collected in Proofs and Theories. She teaches at Yale University.

Richard Howard was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1970 and a MacArthur Award in 1996. He is the author of numerous books of poems, including Untitled Subjects, Two-Part Inventions, and Like Most Revelations. Howard, whose critical essays are collected in Alone with America, is a professor in Columbia University’s graduate writing program. A distinguished translator, he has translated into English more than 150 books from the original French. His latest books of poems are Trappings, Talking Cures and Selected Poems (2004).    

Gish Jen is the author of a book of stories entitled Who’s Irish? and of the novels Typical American, The Love Wife and Mona in the Promised Land. Cynthia Ozick writes: “Jen’s characters are so alive that one can hardly call them characters…I didn’t want to part from them….[or from] the ingenuity of the narration, the tenderness, the all-observing comedy, the perfect pitch dialogue, the domestic exactitude.”

William Kennedy is the author of Ironweed (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award), Quinn's Book, Legs, The Ink Truck, Very Old Bones, and The Flaming Corsage. Kennedy, who also wrote the film version of Ironweed (1987) and co-scripted The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola (1986), is the winner of a MacArthur Award, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, and a New York Arts Award. He is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute at Albany. His latest novel is Roscoe.

Jamaica Kincaid is the author of many books, including Mr. Potter (described by Robert Boyers as “a perfect, perfectly heartbreaking novel”), Lucy, At The Bottom of the River, Annie John, My Brother, A Small Place, Autobiography of My Mother, and other books. She teaches at Harvard and was for some years a staff writer for the New Yorker.

Joyce Carol Oates is a National Book Award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic, who has produced  more than 30 novels and many books of stories, among them Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, Zombie, Foxfire, American Appetites, Bellefleur, The Wheel of Love, and A Garden of Earthly Delights. Walter Clemons wrote of her in Newsweek, “Like the most important writers…she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.” Oates, who has had two national bestsellers (Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys), is the Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Her recent books include I Am No One You Know, Missing Mom and High Lonesome.

Michael Ondaatje was the recipient of the 1993 Booker Prize (best English novel) for The English Patient. His work is described by Toni Morrison as “profound, beautiful and heart-quickening.” Twice the recipient of the Canadian Governor General’s Award, Ondaatje is the author of 11 books of poetry—most recently Handwriting—and of the novels In The Skin of a Lion, The Collected Works of Billy The Kid, and Coming Through Slaughter. His novel, Anil’s Ghost, is “an intensely theatrical tour de force…spun of dreams and verbal magic,” according to the New York Review of Books. His most recent novel, Divisadero (2007), has been acclaimed by writers as various as Pico Ayer, Russell Banks and John Banville.

Caryl Phillips teaches at Yale University and is the author of many books of fiction and non-fiction. Dancing In The Dark (2005) was a finalist for the National Book Award (“a devastating novel,” wrote Donna Seaman in a starred review for Booklist:” Given the drama and beauty of his writing and the freshness of his insights into both personal and social conundrums regarding race and identity, Phillips is in a league with Toni Morrison and V.S. Naipaul.”). Winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Phillips is the author of such works as Cambridge, The Nature of Blood, The Final Passage, a Distant Shore and The Atlantic Sound.

Robert Pinsky was Poet Laureate of the United States and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. In 1994, he propelled Dante on to the bestseller lists with an acclaimed verse translation of Dante’s Inferno. His own poems are collected in The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, a book Katha Pollitt described in the New York Times as  “an extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume.” His non-fiction book, The Sounds of Poetry, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. Recent books include Jersey Rain and a book on the biblical David. His new book of poems (2007) is entitled  Gulf Music.

Francine Prose is the author of ten acclaimed works of fiction, including Guided Tours of Hell, Primitive People, and Bigfoot Dreams. Her recent novel, Blue Angel, was hailed in Publishers Weekly as “a peerlessly accomplished performance…timelessly funny,” and in Mademoiselle as a “funny yet devastating novel that will rock literary and academic worlds alike.” Prose is a contributing editor of Harper’s and writes for the New Yorker, GQ, and Atlantic Monthly. Her latest books are The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio and the novel A Changed Man.

Charles Simic, the new Poet Laureate of the United States, won the Pulitzer prize in poetry for The World Doesn’t End, and is the author of many books, including Jackstraws, Night Picnic, Hotel Insomnia, A Wedding in Hell, Walking The Black Cat, Unending Blues and Dismantling The Silence. His non- fiction books include The Uncertain Certainty, Orphan Factory and a memoir entitled A Fly In The Soup. He is the poetry editor of Paris Review.

Robert Stone won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers and The Pen/Faulkner Award for A Hall of Mirrors. His other novels include Outerbridge Reach, A Flag for Sunrise and Damascus Gate (“a work of murderous power” says the NY Times). His stories are collected in Bear and his Daughters. “Stone’s stories, like his novels, are harrowing, exhilarating and impossible to forget,” says TIME magazine. His most recent book is a memoir entitled Prime Green: Remembering The Sixties.

Chase Twichell is the author of many volumes of poetry, including Perdido, The Snow Watcher, The Ghost of Eden, The Odds and, most recently, Dog Language. (Publishers Weekly: “A major voice in contemporary American poetry….Dog Language is impressive in its scrutiny, grim in its overtones.”). Chase Twichell is also the Publisher of Ausable Press.

WRITERS-IN-RESIDENCE
(read book-length manuscripts for individual tutorials)

Kirsten Bakis is the author of the novel Lives of the Monster Dogs and of a forthcoming second novel. She has beenVisiting Writer in Residence at Skidmore, and in 2007 she taught fiction writing in the St. Petersburg Literary Seminars.

Adam Braver is author of the novels Divine Sarah and Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, as well as a recent novel entitled Crows Over The Wheatfield. (“Brilliant and inventive work,” wrote the reviewer for The LA Times Book Review. “A novelist whose works are richly imagined,” says the Washington Post.)

Rochelle Gurstein is the author of The Repeal of Reticence and a frequent contributor to such periodicals as the New Republic, Raritan and Salmagundi. For several years she contributed a weekly column to the New Republic on-line edition. She has taught at Barnard College and was a writer in residence at the summer writers institute in 2005.

Barry Goldensohn is the author of three volumes of poetry, including The Marrano and Uncarving the Block. His recent poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Salmagundi, Poetry and the Yale Review.

Darin Strauss is the author of two acclaimed novels: Chang and Eng (“Strauss has made a spirited—and promising—debut,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times) and The Real McCoy (“This is a bold new voice in literature,” wrote the reviewer for the Wall Street Journal).

Greg Hrbek teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. Winner of the James Jones first novel prize for his novel The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, he has published short fiction in Harper’s and in Salmagundi, among other periodicals.

Amy Wallen is the author of the novel Moon Pies and Movie Stars (“a delightful and exhilarating journey, kind of like being on a tour bus guided by Eudora Welty on speed,” writes Mary Gordon). She teaches creative writing at University of California-San Diego.