2012 Visiting Writers and Writers-in-Residence

VISITING WRITERS

Paul Auster is one of the most celebrated writers in the country, author of many novels, including The New York Trilogy, Invisible, The Invention of Solitude, Sunset Park, and Man In The Dark, several of these translated into thirty-five languages. His work is described in the London Sunday Times as follows: “Always riveting…The combination of scrupulous style, psychological depth, story value, and parable like undertones is masterly.” A reviewer for the Washington Post Book World writes: “A philosophical novelist but also one of our most playful, a lover of narrative labyrinths on par with Borges.”

Russell Banks is the author of Cloudsplitter, Continental Drift, The Book of Jamaica, and many other works of fiction. Banks’s 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’s recent political novel. (“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,” writes Michael Ondaatje.) His latest novel (2011) is Lost Memory of Skin. Janet Maslin in the New York Times: “Destined to be a canonical novel of our time…delivers another of Banks’s wrenching, panoramic visions of American life.”

Ann Beattie, recent winner of the Rea Award for Short Fiction, is the author of many novels, including Picturing Will, Love Always, and Another You. Her stories are collected in Park City, Perfect Recall, and Follies. (“Her ear is faultless, her eye ruthless as a hawk’s,” says the New York Times.)

Mary Gordon is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Final Payments, Spending, Pearl, Men and Angels, and The Other Side. A recent volume of her Collected Stories won the STORY Award in short fiction. Her memoirs include The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother.  She has also written many other works of non-fiction, from a recent book on Joan of Arc to Seeing Through Places and Good Boys & Dead Girls. She is the McIntosh Professor at Barnard College and taught for a dozen summers at the Summer Writers Institute.

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 the poetry editor of the Western Humanities Review and 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, Selected Poems (2004) and Without Saying (2008).

Siri Hustvedt is the author of five novels, including The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and What I Loved. She is also the author of several works of non-fiction, including The Shaking Woman (Or A History of My Nerves). Of her work Oliver Sacks has written: “Siri Hustvedt, one of our finest novelists, has long been a brilliant explorer of brain and mind,” while Salmon Rushdie describes her as “a rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word is wisdom.” Of the novel What I Loved, Janet Burroway wrote in the New York Times: “a page turner written at full intellectual stretch, serious but witty, large minded and morally engaged.” Siri Hustvedt has taught at Columbia University, Yale University and NYU, and in the spring of 2011 delivered the 39th annual Sigmund Freud Lecture in Vienna.

William Kennedy is the author of Ironweed (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award), Quinn’s Book, Legs, The Ink Truck, Very Old Bones, Roscoe and The Flaming Corsage. Kennedy, who also wrote the film version of IronweedThe 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 Chango’s Beads And 2-Tone Shoes. New York Times Book Review, front page: “Proves he can play with both hands and improvise on a theme without losing the beat…a masterwork.”

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.

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 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 2007 novel, Divisadero, was acclaimed by writers as various as Pico Ayer, Russell Banks and John Banville. His latest novel is Cat’s Table (2011).

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 the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. 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 New York Times Book Review, Katha Pollitt wrote of Pinsky’s collected poems (The Figured Wheel): “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 Glück wrote of Pinsky’s Gulf Music: “An art whose scope and complexity and grandeur are rarely equaled by any of his contemporaries.”

Katha Pollitt is perhaps best known for her Nation magazine  column “Subject to Debate,” which she has written for the last fifteen years. Titles of recent columns include “Grisly Mamas,” “Let Us (Not) Pray,” and “Love Me, I’m A Conservative.” Many of her essays, from The Nation, The New Yorker and other magazines, are collected in such books as Learning To Drive, Virginity Or Death!, Reasonable Creatures, and Subject To Debate. Recently she won the Lifetime Achievement Award from American Review, and in 2009 she brought out her second book of poems, entitled The Mind-Body Problem. She has been hailed as “a national treasure” by Susan Sontag and as “the gin and campari of the women’s movement” by Mary Gordon.

Francine Prose is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Guided Tours of Hell, Primitive People, and Bigfoot Dreams. Her 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, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Atlantic Monthly. Recent books include The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio, and A Changed Man. Other recent titles include a novel (Goldengrove) and two non-fiction books entitled Reading Like A Writer, and Anne Frank.

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 titled A Fly In The Soup. He is the poetry editor of Paris Review and writes regularly on poetry and other matters for the New York Review of Books.

Mark Strand was Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990-91 and has been the winner of many major awards, from the Pulitzer Prize (for the volume Blizzard of One) to the Bollingen Prize and the MacArthur Award. He is the author of many volumes, including Reasons for Moving, The Continuous Life, and the recent New Selected Poems. Of that most recent volume, Dan Chiasson wrote in the New Yorker: “a necessary book…Among the best work by any living poet.” The reviewer for Publishers Weekly added: “A poet who has mattered deeply to poets and readers alike.” Mark Strand currently teaches in the writing program at Columbia University.

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.”) In 2011 she won the Kingsley Tufts Prize.

WRITERS-IN-RESIDENCE

Adam Braver is author of the novels Divine Sarah and Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, as well as a recent novel titled Crows Over The Wheatfield. (“Brilliant and inventive work,” wrote a reviewer for the Los Angeles 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.

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.

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 the University of California at San Diego.