Adina Hoffman (Wesleyan ‘89) writes often of the Middle East, approaching it from unusual angles. She is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and the acclaimed biography My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. She is the co-author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (the American Library Association’s outstanding Jewish Book of 2011). A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she is currently a visiting writer in Wesleyan’s English Department.

Siddhartha Deb isthe author of the novels The Point of Return (a New York Times Notable Book) and An Outline of the Republic. His nonfiction book The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India won the PEN Open award. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Nation, n+1, London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He has received grants from the Society of Authors and the Nation Institute and a fellowship fromthe Radcli!e Institute of Advanced Studies.

Louis Menand has maintained distinguished careers in academia and journalism. A staffwriter at The New Yorker since 2001, he is well known for his articles about literature, the arts, intellectual history, language, and American culture. He is the author and editor of several books including The Metaphysical Club, awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize. He teaches at Harvard University, where he is Bass Professor of English and American Language and Literature.

A.J. Verdelle’s debut novel, The Good Negress, won numerous prizes—including awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Bunting Institute at Harvard University—and was a "finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,  the PEN/Faulkner Award, and  the IMPAC/Dublin International Award. Verdelle also has received a Whiting Writers’Award. Her essays on subjects ranging from slavery to art to motherhood have been published widely. She teaches in the MFA program at Lesley College.

Nikky Finney’s most recent book of poetry, Head Off & Split, received the 2011 National Book Award. Her other books of poetry include The World Is Round and Rice. She is also the author of Heartwood, a story collection, and the editor of The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She has received a PEN America Open Book Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry, and numerous other prizes. She is Provost’s Distinguished Professor of English atthe University of Kentucky.

Tom Perrotta’s most recent novels are The Leftovers and The Abstinence Teacher. His novels Election and Little Children were both made into acclaimed movies, and Perrotta received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Little Children, which he wrote with director Todd Field. He is currently adapting The Leftovers into an HBO series along with Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost. Perrotta has taught writing at Yale University and Harvard University and has published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, GQ, and The New York Times. He also edited the 2012 edition of The Best American Short Stories.

Colum McCann’s most recent book, Let The Great World Spin,was described by Esquire as the first major post-9/11 novel. The book received awards in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including the 2009 National Book Award in the United States, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2011 IMPAC/Dublin International Award. McCann’s other novels include Zoli, Dancer, and This Side of Brightness. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other publications, and he writes often for newspapers and periodicals in the United States and Europe.

Heidi Lynn Staples is the author of four collections, including Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake: A Memoir (Caketrain 2012) and the forthcoming Noise Event (Ahsahta 2013). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize, she is also the co-founder and co-editor of Poets for Living Waters, an international poetry response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lydia Davis is the author of, most recently, The Collected Stories, a new translation of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, and a chapbook entitled The Cows. She is currently putting together a new volume of stories, translating the very short stories of the Dutch writer A. L. Snijders, and adapting an 1898 English children’s classic for contemporary readers. She has received many awards, among them a 1997 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship.

Since she came to New York in 1974 to be a poet, Eileen Myles has produced more than 20 collections of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and libretti, including most recently: Snowflake/differentstreets; Inferno: (a Poet’s Novel), for which she won a Lambda award for lesbian fiction; and The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, which was supported by a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. She has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Societyof America and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York and is teaching poetry this semester at New York University.

Alison Bechdel, originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, won critical acclaim for her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Fun Home was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by The New York Times, The Times of London, Publishers Weekly, Time, and New York Magazine. It was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and also won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. Her most recent book, released in May 2012,  is a graphic novel called Are You My Mother? 

The MFA in Creative Writing: Where, When, What, Why, How

A discussion with Michelle Herman

Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, Ohio State University and Author of Dog, a novel, and The Middle of Everything, a collection of linked personal essays.

Tom Perrotta's most recent novels are The Leftovers and The Abstinence Teacher. His novels Election and Little Children were both made into acclaimed movies, and Perrotta received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Little Children, which he wrote with director Todd Field. He is currently adapting The Leftovers into an HBO series along with Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost. Perrotta has taught writing at Yale and Harvard, and published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, GQ, and The New York Times. He also edited the 2012 edition of Best American Short Stories. 

Lisa Jarnot's books of poetry include Night Scenes (2008), Black Dog Songs (2003), Ring of Fire (2001), and Some Other Kind of Mission (1996). Her acclaimed biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was published by the University of California Press this year, and her Selected Poems is forthcoming from City Lights Books in 2013. She teaches poetry and works as a freelance gardener in Queens, New York.

Peg Tyre is the author of the New York Times best-seller, The Trouble with Boys. She was awarded the Spencer Research Fellowship at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she began work on her recent book, The Good School. Her writing about education has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, iVillage, and elsewhere. This event is sponsored by Wesleyan's Koeppel Journalism program.

Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton (2009), was selected for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award. Kearney is also the author of Fear, Some (2006) and a new chapbook, SkinMag (2012). He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger Award, and fellowships at Idyllwild and Cave Canem. He teaches at CalArts and Antioch University.

Bernard Cooper’s many honors include the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of three memoirs- The Bill from My Father, Truth Serum, and Maps to Anywhere- as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of stories, Guess Again. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and five volumes of The Best American Essays. In addition, his work has been read on public radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Amy Tan describes Cooper as “a master of the language of memory and truth,” and Michael Cunningham calls him “one of the most compelling, ambitious writers at work today.”  He was for six years the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine and is currently at work on a book about his devotion to avant-garde art.

A reading featuring poets whose work appears in Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776, including Dennis Barone, Dick Allen, Sophie Cabot Black, Marilyn Nelson, and Lewis Turco.

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996. He has written three books: The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). His visit is part of the University's series, Music and Public Life.

Padre Spencer Reece has a BA from Wesleyan University, MTS from Harvard and a MDiv from Berkeley Divinity School, Yale. His first book of poems, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize, selected by Louise Gluck, in 2003. James Franco made a short film from the title poem. His second book of poems The Road to Emmaus will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2013.
Reece has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, the Wytter Bynner Prize from the Library Congress, the Whiting Writers Award and the Amy Lowell Traveling Grant. He will be working in Honduras in 2012-13 with support from a Fulbright grant. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar and The New Republic.
 
He is currently the chaplain to the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Espanol Reformada Episcopal. 

Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Krik? Krak! (a National Book Award finalist), The Farming of Bones (an American Book Award winner), and the novel-in-stories, The Dew Breaker. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Create Dangerously, her most recent book, is a collection of essays. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the Langston Hughes medal.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was 2010 winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and other periodicals and in Best American Short Stories 2008 (selected by Salman Rushdie) and PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law in New York for a number of years. He now lives on a farm in Pakistan’s southern Punjab.

Korean-born and Brooklyn-based playwright and director, Young Jean Lee, deals with issues such as gender, identity, and race in unpredictable, inventive and humorous ways. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, she founded her own theater company in 2003, swiftly becoming one of this country's most influential voices in experimental theater. The American Academy of Arts and Letters says of her work, "Young Jean Lee's plays are fierce, challenging, brazenly theatrical, and then transcendentally lyrical."

Robert Sullivan is the author of Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City, How Not To Get Rich, and The Thoreau You Don’t Know. His history of the American Revolution in New York, My American Revolution, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has written for many periodicals, including The New Yorker and Vogue, where he is a contributing editor.

Colum McCann’s most recent book, Let the Great World Spin, was described by Esquire as the first major post-9/11 novel, and received the 2009 National Book Award, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2011 IMPAC International Prize. “Leave it to an Irishman,” said Dave Eggers, ”to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York.”  McCann’s six other books include Zoli, Dancer, and This Side of Brightness. He teaches in the creative writing program at Hunter College.

The interplay of history and fiction marks Amitav Ghosh’s work, and reflects his early life in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. His well-known books include In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Glass Palace, and Sea of Poppies. His new novel, River of Smoke, is a narrative of the nineteenth-century heroin trade in India to Canton and is an international best-seller. He recently received an honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne.

Dorothy Wickenden is the author of Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, an acclaimed biography, family memoir, and portrait of the settling of the American West. She has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since 1996 and prior to that was an editor at Newsweek and at The New Republic. She edited The New Republic Reader: 80 Years of Opinion and Debate and is on the faculty of The Writers’ Institute at CUNY’s Graduate Center.

A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collection Venus Drive and three novels: The Ask, a New York Times Notable book for 2010, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. Lipsyte's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, The Quarterly, Tin House, NOON, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009).  He is also the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics(Wave Books, 2012),  Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), and Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006).

Winners of Wesleyan's 2012 Writing Prizes: Student winners of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction awards will read from their work.

Charles Bernstein is the author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays & Inventions (Chicago 2011), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School 2008), Girly Man (Chicago 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago 1999). He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs PennSound.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and four collections of short stories. His novel Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award, and his 2010 collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has been a columnist on film for The Believer and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.  He teaches at Williams College. 

Sara Marcus, a writer and musician, is the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, a critically acclaimed account of that feminist and musical movement. She has also written for Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Salon, and Heeb magazine, where she was politics editor for five years. She lives in Brooklyn.

A member of the Mvskoke Nation, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, tenor saxophonist Joy Harjo combines storytelling, poetry, and indigenous song in her musical duo with Grammy Award-winning producer/guitarist Larry Mitchell. Harjo's works blend traditional rhythms and singing with jazz, rock, blues, hip hop, and her award-winning heartfelt poems, which have been recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Sponsored by the Center for the Arts, the English Department, the Office of Diversity and Institutional Partnership's Making Excellence Inclusive Initiative, Wesleyan University Press, and Writing at Wesleyan.

Richard Deming is a poet and theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. He is the author of Let's Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman Books), winner of the 2009 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, The Nation, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Susan Howe has written that Deming "restlessly calculates the split between promised and actual experience. The poems in his impressive new collection balance at an edge of danger syntax can only shadow."

Internationally acclaimed, award-winning Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist Amoz Oz has published numerous prestigious works of fiction and nonfiction since his first story collection, Where the Jackals Howl, was published in 1965. A full professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, he has devoted much of his life to writing, teaching, and actively campaigning for the Israeli Peace Movement. Among his publications are My Michael, Black Box, Don’t Call It Night, The Same Sea, A Tale of Love and Darkness, and most recently, Scenes from Village Life. Professor Oz has received many accolades for his work over the years, including the Prix Femina (1998), the German Friedenspreis (1992), the Israel Prize for Literature (1998), the Goethe Prize (2005), the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (2007), the Primo Levi Prize (2008), and the Heinrich Heine Prize (2008).

Celebration of Wesleyan Writing: Issues in Broadcasting and Journalism Today
A panel featuring 2011 Koeppel Journalism speakers Laura R. Walker ’79, Robert King ’84, and Jane Eisner ’77 P ’06 P’12. 

Laura R. Walker ’79 is President and CEO of New York Public Radio, America’s premier public radio franchise. Walker’s many new programming initiatives include the expansion of WNYC’s news and documentary units, the extension of live music programming, and creation of new national programs. She began her professional career as a journalist and producer at National Public Radio, where she received a Peabody Award for Broadcast Excellence. Robert King ’84, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of ESPN Digital Media, is a national leader in sports journalism. He has been responsible for ESPN’s award-winning NBA programming: coverage of major golf events, including the Masters and U.S. Open; and ESPNEWS, twenty-four hour sports news television. He began his career in print journalism at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jane Eisner ’77 is editor of The Forward, the influential Jewish national weekly newspaper. Under her leadership, The Forward has won numerous national and regional awards for its journalism, in print and online. She is a senior fellow in media leadership programs at the University of Pennsylvania and the Columbia School of Journalism. Her book, Taking Back The Vote: Getting American Youth Involved In Our Democracy, was published by Beacon Press. 
Moderator: Anne Greene, director of writing programs, and a 2006 recipient of the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching

Tracie Morris is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University.  Her newest poetry collection, TDJ: To Do w/ John, will be released in November 2011 by Zasterle Press.

James Kaplan has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, and also writing fiction, for over three decades.  His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures, ranging from Madonna to Helen Gurly Brown, Calvin Klein to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Esquire.  In November 2010, Doubleday published Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan's biography of Frank Sinatra.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner award and Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days. His latest novel is By Nightfall.

*Cunningham will also work with students in master classes on the mornings of February 17 and 18. Details to be announced. We hope many students will participate.

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, and she has been a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her new collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, was published in 2010. She has taught at Yale University for the last decade. She is currently Wesleyan University's Kim-Frank Family Writer-In-Residence.

Wayne Koestenbaum is recognized as an important American poet, as one of the founders of queer studies, and as a wide-ranging cultural critic who crosses boundaries of literature, art, music, and popular culture. His book The Queen′s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, published in 1993, had a significant impact on the emerging fields of gender and sexuality studies, as have his groundbreaking essays in influential anthologies.

Jane Eisner, a pioneer in journalism, is editor of the Forward, the influential Jewish national weekly newspaper. Under her leadership, the Forward has won numerous regional and national awards for its original journalism, in print and online. Eisner previously held executive editorial and news positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years, including stints as editorial page editor, syndicated columnist, City Hall bureau chief and foreign correspondent. In 2006, she joined the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where she served as vice president for national programs. Eisner has been a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania′s Robert A. Fox Leadership Program as well as an adjunct professor in the school′s political science department. In 2009, she was selected to be one of 20 fellows in the Punch Sulzberger Executive News Media Leadership Program at the Columbia School of Journalism. Her book, Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in our Democracy, was published by Beacon Press.

Linda Schlossberg received her PhD in English literature from Harvard University, where she is the Assistant Director of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. In her debut novel, Life in Miniature, published by Kensington in December 2010, Schlossberg emerges as a powerful new literary voice with this wholly original coming-of-age story. Life in Miniature reveals the compelling drama that unfolds as the delicate bond between mother and daughter begins to fray.

Dinaw Mengestu's debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical acclaim for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. He was selected as a winner of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" Award, the 2008 Lannan Literary Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K., and France's Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. His second novel, How to Read the Air, was published this fall and has earned him further critical praise. In June 2010, Mengestu was given a highly coveted spot on The New Yorker's "20 under 40" Writers to Watch list.

Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Talking Dirty to the Gods, Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City, Dien Cai Dau, which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize, and I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Yusef Komunyakaa is the Senior Distinguished Poet in the Graduate Writing Program at NYU.