FACULTY 2010

SHORT FICTION

Steve Almond is the author the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction books Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked). His new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, will be out in Spring 2010. He is also, crazily, self-publishing a book called This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, which is composed of 30 short short stories, and 30 brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing.

Robert Boswell has published six novels, three story collections, and two books of nonfiction. His most recent book is a collection of stories, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, published by Graywolf in 2009. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O’Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Ploughshares, Epoch, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. His sci-fi novel Virtual Death (written under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Charles D'Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories; Orphans, a collection of essays; and The Dead Fish Museum.  He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Anthony Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho. He's the author of a collection of short stories titled The Shell Collector, a novel titled About Grace, and a memoir titled Four Seasons in Rome. Scribner will publish his fourth book, a collection of five stories called Memory Wall, in the summer of 2010. Doerr's fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. He also writes the "On Science" for the Boston Globe.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (forthcoming in 2010; Bloomsbury) and six short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.

Karen Russell's collection of stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was named a Best Book of 2006 by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times; in 2007 Russell was included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Her novel, Swamplandia!, is forthcoming from Knopf next year.

Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me, which was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway award, a New York Times Notable book, and an L.A. Times Best Book of the Year selection, and the forthcoming collection Blueprints For Building Better Girls. She is co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as The Paris Review, BOMB, The New York Times Book Review, GQ, and SPIN, and anthologies such as Bitch in the House, Sex and Sensibility (Simon & Schuster) and The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (Harcourt). She is co-founder and editor-at-large of Tin House magazine, and teaches creative writing at NYU and in the the low-residency MFA program at Queens in Charlotte, NC.

Joy Williams is the author of four novels–the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001–and two earlier collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the short story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Key West, Florida, and Tucson, Arizona.

NOVEL WRITING

David Leavitt's novels and story collections include Family Dancing, The Lost Language of Cranes, Arkansas, The Body of Jonah Boyd, and The Indian Clerk, shortlisted for both the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC/Dublin Prize. He is also the author of the non-fiction books Florence, A Delicate Case and The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he co-directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Florida and edits the literary journal Subtropics.

Whitney Otto is the bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt (which was made into a feature film), Now You See Her, Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity and The Passion Dream Book. A native of California, she lives with her husband and son in Portland, Oregon.

MEMOIR

Ann Hood is the author of the novel, The Knitting Circle and the memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice and chosen as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train and many other publications. She has won a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction and two Pushcart Prizes. Her new novel, The Red Thread, will be published in May 2010.

David Shields is the author of ten books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (forthcoming from Knopf in February 2010); The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be DeadNew York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, he is a contributing editor of Conjunctions magazine and lives with is wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Shields’s work has been translated into ten languages.

POETRY

Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether and Blind Huber, for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year elsewhere.

D. A. Powell's most recent book is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, and he is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, Boston Review, the James Michener Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Powell has taught at the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop, New England College, and Columbia University. For three years, he was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He is currently on the faculty of the English Department at University of San Francisco.

Mary Szybist is Assistant Professor of English at Lewis & Clark College, and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  She is the author of Granted (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is one of two recipients of the 2009 Witter Bynner Award, selected by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan for the Library of Congress.

GUESTS

Matthew Dickman lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of "All-American Poem" which recieved the 2008 Honickman/APR First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from The American Acadamy of Arts and Science, The 2009 Kate Tufts Award, and a 2009 Oregon Book Award. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Boston Review, and The New Yorker among others.

Tom Grimes directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University. He is the author of five novels, including Season’s End, City of God,and Redemption Song, and the editor of The Workshop: Seven Decades of Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has twice been a finalist for the PEN/Nelson Algren Award.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux's fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions, as well as Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Recent poems appear in Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and The Valparaiso Review and her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Laux teaches in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

Jon Raymond is the author of The Half-Life, a novel, and Livability, a collection of stories, and winner of the 2009 Oregon Book Award. Two of of his stories were made into the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. He's also the writer of Meek's Cutoff, a forthcoming film by Kelly Reichardt, and co-adaptor, with Todd Haynes, of Mildred Pierce, a forthcoming miniseries for HBO.

Amy Williams began her publishing career as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. A literary agent since 1996, she has worked at The Gernert Company and ICM and is the co-founder of McCormick & Williams.  She represents a wide-range of projects, including literary and commercial fiction, memoir, and narrative non-fiction

Renée Zuckerbrot worked as an editor for Putnam and Doubleday before becoming an agent. Her clients include Kelly Link, Keith Lee Morris, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, Harley Jane Kozak, and Pauls Toutonghi. In 2008, Poets & Writers included her on their list of "Twenty-One Agents You Should Know."