Visiting Writers Lecture Series

Claire Vaye Watkins was born and raised in the Mojave Desert. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, One Story, Glimmer Train, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The New York Times and many others. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” She is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Pal

Visiting Writers Series: Nathaniel MackeyNathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.He has been editor and publisher of Hambone since 1982 and he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. In 2014, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and in 2015 he won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.He has been editor and publisher of Hambone since 1982 and he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. In 2014, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and in 2015 he won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, both from Small Beer Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in Lightspeed, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere, and her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches in the English Department at James Madison University, where her interests include African and Arabic literature, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction.

Dao Strom is a writer and musician whose work melds disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003), a collection of novellas, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006), and an image-text memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People (2015), accompanied by a music album, East/West (2015). She is a 2016 Creative Capital Award Artist. Her work has also received support from the Regional Arts Culture & Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award. Strom is a contributing writer and editor to diacritics.org, the leading blog on Vietnamese diasporic arts and culture, and a co-curator of INHERITORS, a Portland-based hybrid forms literary series exploring the inheritance of violence. Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in northern California.

Mark Levine is the author of three books of poems: Debt (1993), Enola Gay (2000), and The Wilds (2006). A new collection, Travels of Marco, will be published in early 2016. His poems have been widely anthologized, and have been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, Princeton University, and the Canada Council for the Arts. He has also published a nonfiction book, F5, and numerous articles for magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Magazine Writing, and Best American Sportswriting. He has taught poetry writing at University of Montana and, since 1999, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Martine Syms is a conceptual entrepreneur based in Los Angeles who uses publishing, video, and performance to look at the making and reception of meaning in contemporary America. In 2012 she founded Dominica, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness as a topic, reference, marker, and audience in visual culture. From 2007-11, Syms directed Golden Age a project space focused on printed matter. She has lectured at Project Row Houses, the Houston Museum of African American Art, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and MoMA P.S.1, among other venues. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MCA Chicago, Green Gallery (Milwaukee), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), White Flag Projects (St. Louis), and Bridget Donahue (New York).

Amy Leach is the author of Things That Are, published by Milkweed Editions. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and her work has appeared in Best American Essays, A Public Space, Orion, and The Gettysburg Review, among other journals. She has been recognized with the Whiting Writers' Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Karen Russell is the author of the story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, the novella Sleep Donation, and the novel Swamplandia!, which was named one of the five best fiction books of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review and honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program (SOA '06), a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of seven books of poems: Apology for Want, Louise in Love, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, The Bride of E, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle award. Her most recent collection is The Last Two Seconds. She has also published a translation of Dante's Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher. She's been the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program.Picture of

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney's Books), and The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). Stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and elsewhere, and her work is included in the forthcoming New American Stories anthology from Vintage. She was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and currently directs the Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis.

Emily Hunt is the author of the poetry collection Dark Green (The Song Cave, 2015), named a "standout debut" by Publishers Weekly. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, the PEN Poetry Series, TYPO, The Volta, and Diagram, among others. In 2013, Brave Men Press published This Always Happens, a book of her drawings, and she has provided cover art for several poetry collections. She lives in San Francisco, where she is currently working on a second book of poems.

Tom Barbash is the author of the award winning novel, The Last Good Chance, and the New York Times Bestselling nonfiction book, On Top of the World. His stories and articles have been published in The Best American Non-Required Reading, Tin House, McSweeney's, OneStory, Narrative, The Missouri Review, VQR, Men's Journal, ESPN the Magazine, the Observer, The New York Times, Bookforum, Salon, The Believer, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio for their Selected Shorts Series. His short story collection, Stay Up With Me, was selected last year as a Book of the Year by NPR, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Independent of London, and will be published this year in France.

The Reed English department welcomes you to a presentation by Randa Jarrar, an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator, who grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the U.S. after the Gulf War. Her book A Map of Home was published in half a dozen languages and received a Hopwood Award and an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. Jarrar’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, Caravansarai, and Eastern Frontier, and in 2010 was named one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40. She runs RAWI (the Radius of Arab-American Writers) and loves coordinating events and strengthening communities. Her book Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is due for publication in 2016.

Jen Bervin’s work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist's books, and large-scale art works. She has published four books with Granary Books and three others with Ugly Duckling Presse. The recent trade release of her artist's book first published as a limited edition by Granary, The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, co-edited with Marta Werner (with a preface by Susan Howe) from Christine Burgin / New Directions, made "Best Books of 2013" lists in The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement and Hyperallergic. Current research for her next project, The Silk Poems, an experimental book nanoimprinted on silk film, includes consulting nanotechnology and biomedical labs, medical libraries, and over fifty international textile archives and sericulture museums. Jen Bervin has received fellowships and residencies in art and writing from the Bogliasco Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital,

Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. She directed the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University before coming to the University of Pittsburgh where she is currently an assistant professor in the writing program.

Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. According to judge Kay Ryan, Syzbist's "lovely musical touch is light and exact enough to catch the weight and grind of love. This is a hard paradox to master as she does." Her first collection of poetry, Granted (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the 2004 Great Lakes Colleges Associations New Writers Award. Szybist is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize in 2012. She has been awarded residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review and Denver Quarterly and was featured in Best American Poetry (2008). In 2009, she was awarded a Witter Bynner Fellowship and a literature fellowship from the NEA. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland,

Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for her short story collection At-Risk (University of Georgia Press). Over sixty-five of Gautier's stories have been published, appearing in Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ucross Residency, and Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been awarded the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Gautier teaches at DePaul University.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. Her most recent novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2006 and cited as one of the best books of the millennium (so far) by the Millions. Tillman's other novels are Haunted Houses (1987), Motion Sickness (1991), Cast in Doubt (1992), and No Lease on Life (1998), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fourth collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny (2011), was published by Red Lemonade Press. Her other story collections are This Is Not It (2002), stories and novellas written in response to the work of twenty-two contemporary artists; The Madame Realism Complex (1992); and Absence Makes the Heart (1990). She has published four works of nonfiction: The Broad Picture, an essay collection (1997); The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965–67, based on photographs by Stephen Shore (1995); Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeanne

Evenson's novel Last Days (Underland Press, 2009) won the American Library Association's RUSA award for Best Horror Novel of the year. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches in Brown University's Literary Arts Department. Other books include Fugue State, The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann's Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.