Visiting Writers Lecture Series

Clark’s work has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, The Granta Book of the African Short Story, Tin House, Ecotone, Zoetrope: All Story, Glimmer Train, Transition, the Georgia Review, the Massachusetts Review, Southern Review, Witness, the Chelsea Review, the Cream City Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Clark was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship and named a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing. He teaches fiction writing and African literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, Diaz completed an MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She was awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency, as well as a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. She currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City) and the novel The Listeners (Tin House), which was a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Open City, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, New York Tyrant, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and other magazines. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Zumas is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University. She lives in Portland with the artist Luca Dipierro and their baby son.

Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Culture of One and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many prizes and awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Silverchest (FSG, 2013) and Double Shadow (FSG, 2011), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Other honors include the 2013 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the Lambda Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Eileen Myles moved to New York City from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Snowflake/different streets, a double volume (of poems) came out in 2012 from Wave Books. Eileen's Inferno: a poet's novel (2010) won the Lambda Book Award in 2011 for lesbian fiction. Her more than twenty publications include Sorry Tree (2007), Cool for You (2000), Skies (2001) Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (1994). The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writing grant in 2007. In 2010 she received the Shelley Prize for her poetry. Eileen writes about books, art and culture for Art Forum, Parkett and Vice and many other publications and she has written catalogue essays on Cathy Opie, Emily Roydson, K8 Hardy, Oscar Tuazon. She’s teaching NYU's graduate program this spring. In 2012 Eileen Myles got a Guggenheim for nonfiction to write “Afterglow” a fantastic dog memoir. [photo by David Shankbone]

Maggie Nelson is the author of four books of nonfiction, including The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (WW Norton, 2011), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007; winner of the Susanne M. Glascock Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship), and The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007; named a Notable Book of the Year by the State of Michigan), as well as four books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull Press, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation. Currently she teaches writing, art, theory, and literature in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.

Natalie Serber is the author of the story collection Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Inkwell, Hunger Mountain, and others, as well as in the collection Airfare: Stories, Poems and Essays on Flight. Awards and grants include the Barbara Deming Grant for Women Artists, Tobias Wolff Award, H.E. Francis Award, John Steinbeck Award, all for fiction, and finalist mentions for the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, and The Third Coast Fiction Award. Natalie received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She teaches writing at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, and she is currently working on a novel set in Boring, Oregon.

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, DC, Farmington, Connecticut and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best Black Women’s Erotica, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund and Poets and Writers, and she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Erica is also a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers. Her first book, proxy is forthcoming from Belladonna* Books in 2013 and has been performed as a chamber piece in collaboration with composer Joshua Fried at the Composers Collaborative, and as a multimedia performance piece with painter and digital media artist Torkwase Dyson at the Transmodern Age Festival.

Born in San Diego on July 4th, 1970, Philip Metres grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated from Holy Cross College in 1992, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, pursuing an independent project called "Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Response to Historical Change." After stints as a temp in sundry offices in Boston and Philadelphia, Metres went to Indiana University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, both in 2001. Since then, his writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. He is the author of a number of books, including To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007), Instants (a chapbook, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling 2004)

D. A. Powell’s books include Tea, Lunch, Cocktails and Chronic. Chronic was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and Publishers Weekly. A finalist for both the Publishers Triangle and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the volume of political and personal poems went on to receive the Northern California Book Award and the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Commonwealth Club. Additionally, Chronic received the Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry from Claremont College and was Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.Critic Stephen Burt, writing in the New York Times, said of D. A. Powell “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.”Powell’s work appears in numerous anthologies, including Norton’s American Hybrid, Legitimate Dangers: Poets of the New Century and two volumes of Best American Poetry. His recent poems appear in The New Republic, Granta, American Poetry Review and A Public

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the story collection, Monstress. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in the Philippines, he currently lives in San Francisco, and is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California

Rick Bass is the author of 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, a travelogue, In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda (McSweeney’s Press) and A Thousand Deer (University of Texas Press). His short stories and articles have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative, Ecotone, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Esquire, and numerous other publications. He has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing, and Best Spiritual Writing, among others, and has received a PEN/Nelson Algren Special Citation from Robert Penn Warren, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters, in addition to a Montana Artist’s Innovation Award. He has just co-published a spoken word and music album, The Road to the Ryman, recorded at Adam SelzerR

Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and of the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Collins has also published four earlier collections of poems, two collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, and two chapbooks. Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship. Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, Collins served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. Another collection of her poems, Day Unto Day, is forthcoming from Milkweed in 2014.

Ander Monson is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website (http://otherelectricities.com), and five books, most recently The Available World (poetry, Sarabande, 2010) and Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (nonfiction, Graywolf, 2010). He lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona, where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.

Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina. She is the author of four collections of poetry, On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, recipient of a PEN America Open Book Award, and The World is Round, recipient of the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry, and her most recent work, Head Off & Split published by Northwestern University Press in 2011, recipient of the 2011 National Book Award in Poetry. In 1998 she authored a collection of short stories, Heartwood, written especially for literacy students. Finney has also written the script for the PBS documentary “For Posterity’s Sake: Lexington, Kentucky photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith,” the liner notes for folksinger Toshi Reagon’s compact disc “Kindness,” and the introduction to photographer Bill Gaskins’ collection, Good and Bad Hair. She has been awarded the Kentucky Foundation for Women “Artists Fellowship Award” and The Governor’s Award in the Arts.” She has taught at Smith Coll

Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This, a memoir published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, and a finalist for the National Books Critics Award and the National Books for a Better Life Award. Her book was also short-listed for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award and Oregon Book Award. Debra is the co-editor, with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She is on the nonfiction faculty for the Pacific University low-residency MFA in writing and publishes in many journals and magazines. She is currently working on a book about growing up in the West, a chapter of which appeared in the summer 2011 issue of The American Scholar.

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue and Astoria. She has translated several Swedish poets and is editing the anthology, Swedish Writers on Writing. She is an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Core Faculty in The Low-Residency MFA Program at New England College and a Research Associate at the School For Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and in 2010 she received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.

Madeline DeFrees has published two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), which was awarded the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. DeFrees spent 38 years as a nun with the Catholic Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. She entered the community after high school and later requested release because, in her words, “religious life and poetry both demand an absolute commitment.” As Sister Mary Gilbert, Ms. DeFrees earned a BA in English from Marylhurst College (1948) and an MA in Journalism from the University of Oregon (1951). She studied poetry briefly with Karl Shapiro, Robert Fitzgerald, and John Berryman. She taught at Holy Names College, the University of Montana, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since she retired in 1985, she’s held residencies at Bucknell University, Eastern Washington University, and Wichita State University. Madeline DeFrees has received

Elyse Fenton’s first book, Clamor, released in 2010, received the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30, as well as Cleveland State University Press' First Book award. A Reed graduate, she received her MFA from the University of Oregon and has published poetry and nonfiction in The New York Times, Best New Poets, and The Massachusetts Review, among other places. In the past few years, she's lived somewhat itinerantly in Austin, Philadelphia and Portland.