Faculty and Guest Speakers

Teaching Faculty:
 
Roxana Robinson Alexander Chee Ravi Shankar
Lis Harris Alexandra Peers  
and teaching fellows to be announced    

Guest Speakers:
 
Andre Aciman Amy Bloom Katha Pollitt
Peter Cole Sadia Shepard Kit Reed
Josh Henkin Paul Vidich and others

Editors and Agents:
 
Julie Barer Johnny Temple
Michael Rosovsky Lexy Bloom
and others        

The publishing panels will feature an expanded group of editors and agents and members of the new publishing world.

Contact Anne Greene, conference director, if you have questions: agreene@wesleyan.edu
 

FACULTY

The Short Story

ROXANA ROBINSON's novel Cost was selected as one of the five best fiction books of 2008 by the Washington Post and as a best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. She is the author of Sweetwater and two other novels, of short story collections, and a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe.  Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Daedalus, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
Photo of Alexander Chee

The Novel

ALEXANDER CHEE's first novel, Edinburgh, won the Michener/Copernicus Prize, the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award, the Lambda Editor's Choice prize, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. His stories and personal essays have been anthologized in Best American Erotica 2006, A Fictional History of the US (With Huge Chunks Missing), Boys Like Us, The Man I Might Become, and From Boys to Men. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writer's Award, a 2004 NEA Literature fellowship, and a 2005 MacDowell Colony fellowship. He teaches fiction as the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, was published in 2008.

Poetry

RAVI SHANKAR is the producer/founding editor of Drunken Boat, International Online Journal of Arts and Literature. His first volume of poetry, Instrumentality, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry in 2005. He has read his work in many venues, including the National Arts Club, the Asia Society, and Columbia University and has served as a commentator on National Public Radio. He has received the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and a New York State Council for the Arts grant. He recently co-edited an anthology, Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and Beyond (2008),, featuring 400 poets writing in 40 different languages.

Literary Journalism and Memoir

LIS HARRIS is now at work on a book about three generations of a Palestinian family and three generations of an Israeli family.  Her previous books include Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family, Rules of Engagement, and Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Squeeze, the story of an eight-year struggle to build a paper mill in the South Bronx. As a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, she wrote on a wide range of social and cultural matters, and she has received awards from the Woodrow Wilson, Rockefeller, and J. M. Kaplan foundations.  She teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University.

Literary Journalism

ALEXANDRA PEERS, a freelance writer for New York Magazine, Conde Nast Portfolio and The New York Times, has been news editor, features editor, and Leisure and Arts columnist at the Wall Street Journal, where she helped found its popular Weekend section.  She began at the paper as a reporter covering Wall Street, insider trading and personal finance.  She was a member of the White House Council on Culture and Diplomacy.  Recipient, as editor, of a University of Missouri School of Journalism Award and a Front Page Award, she teaches writing at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

Teaching Fellows in Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction

Our 2009 Fellows:

Irina Reyn

Jeff Jones

Miranda Kennedy

Fellows provide informal manuscript readings and offer their own short workshops. We are very proud of our previous fellows achievements.

2009 Fellows Bio's- Click Here

Fellows in previous years: Steve Almond, Amy Bloom, Amanda Davis, Paul LaFarge, Suji Kwok Kim, Bruce Bond, Judy Jordan, G.E.Patterson, Tom Hallman (Pulitzer winner), John D'Agata, Beverly D'Onofrio, Jennifer Haigh, Daniel Handler (author of Lemony Snicket), Wendy Rawlings, Jess Row, Jim Tomlinson, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Ravi Shankar, Alexandra Peers, and Roya Hakakian.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Reading of Fiction and Non-Fiction
 

ANDRE ACIMAN is the author of the novel Call Me by Your Name, of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, and of False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. He has also co-authored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University and Bard College and is currently the chair of The CUNY Graduate Center's Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature and the director of The Writers' Institute at The Graduate Center. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from The New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of Best American Essays

New Fiction

AMY BLOOM'S latest novel, Away, an epic story about a Russian immigrant,  was on the New York Times best-seller list.  She is author of four other books, including two collections of short stories.  Her work has been nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award.  She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

http://www.amybloom.com
Photo of Katha Pollitt

Journalism and Poetry: A Writer's Life

KATHA POLLITT is a poet, essayist, and columnist/blogger for The Nation.  She is the author of four collections of essays including Virginity or Death! and Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, and a new collection of personal essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories.   The title essay from that collection was chosen for Best American Essays 2003.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and she has received two National Magazine Awards for essays and criticism, a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim fellowship.  Her new book of poems, The Mind-Body Problem, is forthcoming in Spring 2009.

Poetry and Translation

PETER COLE is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, Aharon Shabtai’s J’accuse, So What: New & Selected Poems, by Taha Muhammad Ali, and Hebrew Writers on Writing. Cole, who lives in Jerusalem and co-edits Ibis Editions, has received numerous honors for his work, among them the PEN Translation Prize, and fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Poets on Publishing

CYNTHIA CRUZ has had poems published in the American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Boston Review, AGNI, FIELD, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, and others. Her first book, RUIN, was published by Alice James Books. Her work has been anthologized in “Isn’t it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets” and “The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.” She has received fellowships to YADDO and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

  JONATHAN THIRKIELD received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of The Waker’s Corridor: Poems, for which he received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has served as an editor at Four Way Books, and co-directed the series Reading Between A and B. He is a freelance website developer and designer, and is the executive producer of the award-winning short film, A Nursery Tale.
JEFFREY THOMSON is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime (CMU Press, 2009), and Renovation (CMU Press, 2005). He has also published a collection of poems translated from the Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, Many Ways to Dig a Tunnel (Green Integer, 2009). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Arts Commission, and was named the 2008 Individual Arts Fellow in the Literary Arts by the Maine Arts Commission. He is an Associate Professor of creative writing at the University of Maine, Farmington.
  MATT O'DONNELL graduated from Holy Cross and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is founding Editor and Executive Director of From the Fishouse, the online audio archive of emerging poets; Associate Editor of Bowdoin magazine at Bowdoin College, where he produces From the Fishouse Reading Series; and an assistant editor fo Poets on Poets, and audio archive of contemporary poets reading Romantic-period poems. His poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Greensboro Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.

 Documentary Film and Family History

SADIA SHEPARD is Wesleyan alumna, class of 1997. She is a writer and documentary filmmaker with a forthcoming memoir, The Girl From Foreign, which documents her time as Fulbright Scholar in India. Her short films, produced in three countries, have been screened at Sundance, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco International Film Festivals. She has held teaching positions in film, communications, and writing in both the U.S. and India.

http://www.sadiashepard.com

Blogs and Digital Media

KIT REED:  Called "One of our brightest cultural commentators" by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed is a novelist whose new novel, Enclave, is out this year. Others include The Baby Merchant and Thinner Than Thou, a winner of the ALA Alex award. Often anthologized, her short stories appear in venues ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Omni to The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review and the Norton Anthology. Her collections include Thief of Lives and Dogs of Truth. Weird Women, Wired Women; and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the
Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan.
 

http://www.kitreed.net
 

RON HOGAN is editor/publisher of Beatrice.com, a respected literary Web site that includes extensive author interviews.  He also co-edits GalleyCat.com, mediabistro.com's publishing industry news blog.  A former book editor for the nonfiction and history pages of Amazon.com, he is a writer and critic, and the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!: American Films of the 1970s.
Photo of Alexander Chee ALEXANDER CHEE: 

See bio in faculty section above.

Working With Your Editor: A Fiction Writers View

JOSH HENKIN is the author most recently of the novel MATRIMONY, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. His first novel, SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON, was named a Los Angeles Times Notable Book. His short stories have been performed on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and have been published in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, Glimmer Train, DoubleTake, The North American Review, The New England Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College.

http://www.joshuahenkin.com

Selecting an MFA Program

PAUL VIDICH  is a recent graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program. He was a senior executive in the Warner Music and AOL divisions of Time Warner for nineteen years. His short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Narrative Magazine, wordriot.org and! mrbellersneighborhood.com; his stories have been short- listed for the Glimmer Train and Raymond Carver awards for new writers. He is a board member of Poets and Writers and The New School For School Research. In June 2008, he was an invited panelist at the International Short Story Conference in Cork, Ireland and in February 2009 he was an invited reader at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

New Publishing/Multimedia Forms

JOHNNY TEMPLE is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. Temple won the American Association of Publishers' 2005 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. He plays bass guitar in the band Girls Against Boys, which has toured extensively and released numerous albums.

Publishing: Agents and Editors

Agent

JULIE BARER, after working for six years at the literary agency Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, started her own agency, Barer Literary.  She represents a wide range of fiction writers, including debut novelist Joshua Ferris, and short story writer Gina Ochsner, author of the collection People I Wanted to Be, stories from which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American NonRequired Reading.  Barer also represents nonfiction clients whose specialties include biography, memoir, narrative nonfiction, history, and popular culture.
 

Editor

LEXY BLOOM is a senior editor at Vintage and Anchor Books, imprints of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. She has edited such authors as Natsuo Kirino, Mia Kirshner, Hanan al-Shaykh, Joshua Henkin, Danit Brown, >Daphne Beal, Tod Wodicka and many others for Knopf, Pantheon and Vintage/Anchor. She has overseen the backlist publications of the works of Irène Némirovsky, as well as the paperback editions of award-winning writers such as Claire Messud, Mary Gaitskill, Edwidge Danticat, Nathan Englander, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jennifer Egan and numerous others. Before coming to Vintage/Anchor in 2004, she was US Books Editor for Granta Books in New York. She graduated from Wesleyan in 1999.
 

Editor-in-residence

MICHAEL ROSOVSKY is the fiction editor of Post Road magazine and a writing instructor at Boston College and Emerson College. He has also lectured and participated in panels at Stone Coast, Bennington and other MFA programs. His short stories have appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, and Hobart.