2012 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.) Her latest book is Don't Cry.

Allan Gurganus is an award-winning novelist and short story writer whose work includes White People, Plays Well With Others, The Practical Heart and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.  Gurganus is at work on a new novel entitled The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church, and often writes op-ed pieces for the New York Times and other newspapers.  Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, calls him "the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty," and a recent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review writes that he is "a story-teller in the grand tradition who can tell his stories as well as anyone alive." Library Journal, in a review of Plays Well, describes it as "rich, protean, profligate, gorgeously written...Gurganus' fiction runs rampant with sexual and creative energy." Gurganus' short fiction appears in the New Yorker and has been included in the O'Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  In the spring of 2010 he was on the faculty of the writing program at the University of Iowa.

Amy Hempel is the author of several acclaimed volumes of short fiction, including Reasons To Live, At The Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, The Dog of the Marriage, and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, the last of which was described in the Village Voice as “the literary event of the year.” the Atlantic Monthly noted that “few fiction writers are as intensely admired by her peers,” while a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune described her “word by word virtuosity” as “off the charts.” In his “Introduction” to Hempel’s Collected Stories Rick Moody speaks of her “bladelike” prose and her “besieged consciousness.” Until recently she directed the creative writing program at Brooklyn College and now teaches at Harvard University

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.

Claire Messud is the author of several works of fiction, whose most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children (2007), was a best-selling work with a first printing of 100,000 copies. Described by a reviewer for the New Yorker as “a witty examination of New York’s chattering classes,” the book was praised in the following terms in Publishers Weekly: “Her writing is so fluid, her plot so cleverly constructed, that events seem inevitable, yet the narrative is ultimately surprising and masterful as a comedy of manners…The intimacies of Messud’s portraits do not soften the judgments behind them.” Messud’s first two novels were finalists for the Pen/Faulkner award. About When The World Was Steady: “Messud is a novelist of unnerving talent,” according to the New York Times Book Review “This author has daring and assurance,” says the New Yorker. Messud’s The Last Life was an “Editor’s Choice Book” at the Village Voice and a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” Recently Messud was awarded the Straus Living Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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 New York Times. “He is an unrepressed quester after meaning,” writes Robert Boyers). Moody’s latest novel is The Diviners (2005) and The Four Fingers of Death (2010), and his latest collection of short fiction is Right Livelihoods (2007). “One of our best writers,” said a reviewer for the Washington Post.

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 named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles 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.”

Joanna Scott won the MacArthur “genius” award upon publication of her second novel, Arrogance, but since then has gone on to publish many works of fiction, including Various Antidotes (a collection of short stories) and the novels Tourmaline, The Manikin, Follow Me and Liberation. The reviewer for Kirkus Reviews recently wrote that “Scott remains one of contemporary fiction’s most eloquent and essential writers,” and the Washington Post Book World reviewer noted that her work is “always exquisitely constructed and fascinating.” Of the novel Liberation, the LA Times wrote: “Scott’s range is quite simply astonishing, and the new book is both hugely ambitious and deeply moving…Captures war as seen through the innocence of a child.” And the reviewer for Publishers Weekly writes: “Scott demonstrates a depth of vision possessed only by the great writers.”

Danzy Senna is the author of two critically acclaimed novels. The first, Caucasia, was a 1998 Los Angeles 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.” A 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.” Her recent memoir, published to great acclaim in 2008, is titled Where Did You Sleep Last Night? It is described in Publishers Weekly as “a courageous portrait of the tumultuous union between Senna’s Boston Brahman mother and her enigmatic black father….a powerfully personal take on the progress of American race relations.” A reviewer for Elle wrote, “A masterful work of seeking and telling.” Senna’s latest book is You Are Free (2010), a collection of short stories. Jonathan Lethem: “The tales are seductive, lucid dispatches from contemporary life, with under currents electric and strange.”

Darin Strauss won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2011 for his memoir, Half A Life. But for some time he has been best known as one of the most admired younger fiction writers in the country whose first book, Chang & Eng, was composed when he was a student at the Summer Writers Institute and went on to become a national best-seller. His later, equally acclaimed novels are The Real McCoy and More Than It Hurts You (2009). Of this recent book the Washington Post says: “Strauss’s Josh is every bit as arresting as Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom.” And Bookmarks says: “This is a sensitive treatment of racism and anti-semitism…Strauss has a discerning eye for the banalities of popular culture and constructs a suspenseful and moving novel.” Strauss’s Half A Life: A Memoir, which begins: “Half my life ago I killed a girl,” is described by the New York Times Book Review as follows: “elegant, painful, stunningly honest….heart-breaking.”

POETRY

Frank Bidart is the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently Watching The Spring Festival and Star Dust. Previous volumes include Desire—winner of a Theodore Roethke Prize and a Lannan Foundation Prize—and a chapbook titled 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 won the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen 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 says Robert Pinsky, “not only surpasses the notion of a merely good first book” but “soars beyond the conventional expectations of ‘persona’ and ‘dramatic monologue.'”  “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.” Cole has taught at the Summer Writers Institute since 2004 and is also Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio State. His most recent books are Blackbird & Wolf and Pierce The Skin a volume of "Selected Poems: 1982-2007."

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.

Rosanna Warren has won the Lamont Poetry Prize and many other awards for her poetry. She is the author of five books of poems, including Departure, Stained Glass, Each Leaf Shines Separate and Ghost In A Red Hat. Harold Bloom writes: “Warren is an important poet, beyond the achievement of all but a handful of living American poets.” And Charles Simic writes in the NY Review of Books: “Her work has become stronger and stronger…The new book explores intimacy and separation in poems of difficult love….Masterful and ambitious.” Rosanna Warren is University Professor at Boston University and is also the author of critical books and essays.

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, Getting Personal: Selected Writings and Notes On Sontag. In 2008 he published a volume of fiction entitled Two Marriages. He teaches at Columbia University.

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, until recently, editor of Daedalus (the magazine of the American Academy of Arts & Letters), Miller writes often for such publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles 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). His new book, entitled Philosophical Lives, received a rave review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.