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’ recent political novel. (“Russell Banks’s twentieth-century Liberia is as hellish a place as Joseph Conrad’s nineteenth-century Congo. A dark and disturbing book, wrote Michael Ondaatje.") His latest novel (2008) is The Reserve.

Nicholas Delbanco is the author of many novels, books of short stories and non-fiction works. Stanley Elkin described him as “a virtuoso”; John Gardner wrote that “he is one of our greatest writers”; and John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that “Delbanco wrestles with the abundance of his gifts the way others wrestle with their deficiencies.” Delbanco is the University Professor at UMichigan-Ann Arbor. Among his best-known books are What Remains, Old Scores, The Sincerest Form and Spring and Fall.

Carolyn Forche is the author of four books of poems, including Gathering The Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize), The Country Between Us (Lamont Poetry Prize), The Angel of History (LA Times Book Award) and Blue Hour. She is the Editor of the anthology Against Forgetting and at present the Lannan Professor at Georgetown University. Margaret Atwood has written of her work, “Here is a poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major voice.”

Carl Dennis won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his book of poems Practical Gods. Of his ten books taken together, Anthony Hecht wrote in The Wilson Quarterly : “Dennis’s poems are uniform in their excellence, if in nothing else. This poet is distinguished by the variety as well as the originality of his imagination.” Of Dennis’s New and Selected Poems 1974-2004, Steven Dobyns wrote in The NY Times Book Review: “Each poem gives the sense that Dennis has been struck by an exciting idea or emotion or metaphor and is eager to share it…he creates an elaborate structure that convinces by its very authority, intelligence, deep feeling, and humor.”

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).

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 CottonClub 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.

Howard Norman is the author of five novels, including The Northern Lights (a National Book Award finalist) and a book of stories entitled Kiss In The Hotel Joseph Conrad. His books have been translated into twelve languages. Of his novel The Bird Artist, a National Book Award finalist, Richard Eder wrote in The LA Times Book Review, “One of the most perfect and original novels that I have read in years.” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The NY Times, “Bewitching…glows like a night light in the reader’s mind.” Norman’s novel The Museum Guard was described by John Banville in The Washington Post Book World as “an impressive and admirable achievement.”

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.

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 Publisher’s 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, Caravaggio and the novels A Changed Man and Goldengrove.

Charles Simic, the recent 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.

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.”).

Writers-In-Residence

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.) Braver’s new novel is 1963, which revolves around the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

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.

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.

Honor Moore is the author of the recent controversial memoir The Bishop’s Daughter and of three volumes of poems, including Darling, The Red Shoes and Memoir. Jorie Graham: “Honor Moore has written a searing exploration of exposure.” Boston Review: “Moore has a unique ability to infuse her poems with real body heat, emotional electricity, and the divine grief at the center of desire.”

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.