WRITERS AT CORNELL. - J. Robert Lennon

Brenda Shaughnessy's most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, from Copper Canyon Press. She’s also the author of Human Dark with Sugar and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate and elsewhere. She is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, and is Assistant Professor of English in the M.F.A. Program at Rutgers-Newark. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.Shaughnessy read from her work on September 26, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Alison Lurie is the author of ten novels, including The Truth About Lorin Jones, Truth and Consequences, and the Pulitzer-prizewinning Foreign Affairs. She has also published two collections of essays on children's literature and edited three books of traditional folktales for children, as well as a nonfiction book on the semiotics of dress, The Language of Clothes, and a forthcoming nonfiction book, The Language of Houses. She was one of the first women hired by the Cornell English Department and is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita there. Lurie read from her work on September 19, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Dana Spiotta is the author of three novels: Lightning Field, Eat the Document (which was nominated for the National Book Award), and Stone Arabia. She teaches writing at Syracuse University.Spiotta read from her work on February 21, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of seven books: the novels The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections (which won the National Book Award), and Freedom; and the nonfiction books How to Be Alone, The Discomfort Zone, and Farther Away. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and has been featured on Oprah’s Book Club. He lives in New York and California.Franzen read from his work on November 1, 2012, in Cornell’s Sage Chapel. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine. His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), and most recently a new book of poems, Wishbone (Black Sparrow Books), a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems (Faber and Faber), and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions). His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books) were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the PEN/New England Discovery Award; they will appear in a new edition from NYRB Classics. He co-hosts a monthly podcast with Poetry editor Christian Wiman, with whom he has co-edited The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press). He blogs at Squandermania and Other Foibles, and can be found on twitter here.Share read from his work on October 18, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Claudia Emerson’s books include Late Wife and Figure Studies. Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, she studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for Late Wife, she has also earned two additional Pulitzer nominations, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also served as poet laureate of Virginia. Her new book is Secure the Shadow.Emerson read from her work on September 20, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Poet David St. John was born in Fresno, California. He received his bachelor’s degree at California State in Fresno and went to the University of Iowa for an M.F.A. His works of poetry include Hush (1976), Terraces of Rain (1991) The Red Leaves of Night (1999), The Face: A Novella in Verse (2004), and The Auroras (2012). He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, the James D. Phelan Award, the Academy Award in Literature, and various grants and fellowships. St. John has taught at Oberlin College and John Hopkins University, and currently teaches at the University of Southern California.The interview was conducted by Cornell professor and poet Joanie Mackowski, author of the collections The Zoo (2002) and View From A Temporary Window (2010).St. John read from his work on April 5, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Fiction writer and essayist Edwidge Danticat is best known for her work chronicling the Haitian immigrant experience. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Brown University, and has published or edited more than a dozen books for adult and young readers, including the novel The Farming of Bones, the story collections Krik? Krak! And The Dew Breaker, and the nonfiction books Brother, I’m Dying and Create Dangerously. She has earned many awards, among them a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and, most recently, the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York. Danticat has been a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami, and divides her time bewteen the United States and her native Haiti.Danticat read from her work on February 23, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, attended college in Chicago, and studied fiction writing at Cornell University, where she earned an MFA; for some years after she lived the life of an itinerant writer, attending conferences and retreats and working on what would become her debut novel, Forgotten Country. That book is to be published in March 2012 by Riverhead. She is also one of Granta’s “New Voices,” a Pushcart nominee, and winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She is a member of the birdsong collective, an indepdent ‘zine publisher in New York, and is on the advisory board of Paris Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn.Chung read from her work on February 16, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Alexi Zentner is the author of the novel Touch, which was shortlisted for The 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award and The Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new book, The Lobster Kings, is coming out next year. He has also published short fiction in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Walrus, and many other publications. He studied writing at Cornell and presently lives in Ithaca, New York.Zentner read from his work on February 16, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Robert Hass is the author of many books of poetry, including The Apple Trees at Olema; Time and Materials, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood; Human Wishes; Praise; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River, and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, whom you may find in our podcast archive, and he teaches at UC Berkeley.Hass read from his work on October 20, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Ron Hansen is the author of ten works of fiction and a collection of essays. He is particularly known for his meticulous examinations of religious experience, and of the lives of historical figures. Among his best known books are the novels Desperadoes; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Mariette in Ecstasy; Atticus, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner; the short story collection Nebraska; and his latest novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion. Hansen is presently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is also an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church.Hansen read from his work on September 22, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Writer and editor Laura Furman was born in New York and educated at Hunter College High School and Bennington College. For many years, she taught in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing. While at UT Austin, she founded the literary journal American Short Fiction. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976, and since then fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Mademoiselle, Preservation, Mirabella, and House & Garden, among others. Her books include four collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir, and she is the ninth series editor of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, published annually by Anchor Books. Each year, she picks the twenty winning stories and writes an introduction for the volume. Her new book is The Mother Who Stayed: Stories.Furman read from her work on April 21, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Composer Joseph Klein holds a Doctor of Music degree in Composition from Indiana University. He is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of North Texas College of Music, where he has served as Chair of Composition Studies since 1999.Klein’s catalogue ranges from solo pieces to works for large ensemble, including instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music, often incorporating intermedia or theatrical elements, and reflecting his interest in systems and musical processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry and chaos theory. His compositions have been performed and broadcast throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and have been featured at national and international music venues. He has been a featured guest composer at many institutions worldwide, has won numerous awards, and has released many recordings on the Innova, Centaur, Crystal, and Mark labels.Klein visited Cornell having written short musical settings for poems written by Cornell’s second-year MFA poets, who performed the pieces with the composer on Friday, April 15, 2011 in McGraw Hall. This interview took place the previous day, and includes recordings of the four pieces.

Peter Balakian was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and studied at Bucknell, NYU and Brown; he has taught English and Creative Writing at Colgate University since 1980. His many books include June-tree: New and Selected Poems and the new collection Ziggurat; he is also the author of Black Dog Of Fate, a memoir about his childhood and Armenian family history. He co-founded and co-edited, with Bruce Smith, the poetry magazine Graham House Review. His prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.Balakian read from his work on March 3, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Nicholson Baker is a novelist and essayist, the author of the acclaimed novels The Mezzanine, Room Temperature and Vox, among others; his most recent book, The Anthologist, has been praised as “startlingly perceptive and ardent” by the New York Times Book Review. Baker earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and the Los Angeles Times called his pacifist manifesto Human Smoke “one of the most important books you will ever read.” For his activist work surrounding issues of text preservation he was honored with the James Madison Freedom of Information Award. He lives in Maine.Baker read from his work on February 24, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Stewart O’Nan is the author of ten novels, including Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying, as well as the recent Songs For The Missing and the forthcoming Emily, Alone, a sequel to his novel Wish You Were Here. He has also written nonfiction, including the bestselling book with Stephen King on the Boston Red Sox, Faithful. Granta named him one of the twenty Best Young American Novelists in 1995, he’s a graduate of the Cornell MFA program in fiction writing, and is a visiting writer here this semester.O’Nan read from his work on February 17, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. He is a visiting lecturer this semester at Cornell.Murillo read from his work on November 4, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

A New York native, Michael Silverblatt graduated from the State University of New York in Buffalo and later took advanced courses at Johns Hopkins. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, and in 1989 created the literary talk show “Bookworm” for KCRW-FM. The show continues to air today.Norman Mailer has called Michael Silverblatt “the best reader in America.” Susan Sontag called him “a national treasure.” Joyce Carol Oates once called him the “reader writers dream about,” and his podcasts are so popular that New York’s independent bookstores describe a “Silverblatt ripple effect” on book sales.As a student, he came under the influence of such cutting-edge author-teachers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth; as a radio talk-show host, he learned to appreciate a much wider range of writing—making him, he hopes, “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.”Silverblatt gave a talk on October 26, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Speak Low and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006. His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. He teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis.Phillips read from his work on October 14, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Lydia Davis is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collections Almost No Memory, Varieties of Disturbance, and Collected Stories, and a novel, The End of the Story; she has also published a number of chapbooks and a large body of French translations, most notably Proust’s Swann’s Way and, just this year, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She is a Macarthur Fellow, has won a Whiting Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pen/Hemingway Award. She teaches writing at SUNY Albany, where she is also Writer-In-Residence.Davis read from her work on September 30, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Nonfiction writer Bonnie McEneaney holds a BA from Brown University and an MPS from Cornell. She had a long, successful career as a senior executive in the financial services industry and, more recently, has changed her focus to writing. After losing her husband, Eamon, on 9/11, she published A Bend in the Road, which is a compilation of his poetry. Her new book is Messages: Signs, Visits, and Premonitions from Loved Ones Lost on 9/11. McEneaney lives with her four children in New England and is a board member of Voices of September 11th, a group dedicated to serving the needs of 9/11 families, survivors, and rescue and recovery workers.McEneaney read from her work on September 16, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez was born in New York, then spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father’s involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country. Her novels include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and ¡Yo!; she is also author of the poetry collections The Housekeeping Book, The Woman I Kept to Myself, The Other Side, and Homecoming. Her many other books include essays and fiction for young people. Many commentators regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers; Alvarez is the current writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.Alvarez read from her work on September 9, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her M.F.A. in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, will be published by Random House in 2011. Her fiction debut—-an excerpt of The Tiger’s Wife in The New Yorker-—was selected for the 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her second publication, the short story “The Laugh,” was published in the summer 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic, and will be anthologized in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York.Obreht read from her work on April 22, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place two months later.

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark ‘21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.Paul Muldoon’s main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010).A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. He has also received the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and many others. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”Muldoon read from his work on April 8, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Billy Collins is the author of ten collections of poetry, including the recent Ballistics and Sailing Alone Around The Room: Selected Poems; He has also edited several anthologies, including two collections of 180 poems for everyday reading, and, most recently, Bright Wings, an anthology of bird poems. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and has taught at Lehman College in New York for more than thirty years. His many awards and honors include the Mark Twain Prize, Poetry magazine’s Poet Of The Year, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition, he has appeared on the radio program “A Prairie Home Companion.”Collins read from his work on March 11, 2010, in Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Philipp Meyer grew up in working-class Baltimore, where he developed the literary ambitions that would lead him to Cornell University, and a BA in English. Some years, several jobs, and an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers later, Meyer published his first book, the acclaimed novel American Rust. He now divides his time between Texas and upstate New York.Meyer read from his work on February 18, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Martha Collins is the author of five books and two chapbooks of poetry, and has translated two volumes of poems from the Vietnamese, one in collaboration with Thuy Dinh. Her most recent book is Blue Front, published by Graywolf Press; it is a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. The book won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Her most recent publication is a chapbook, Sheer.Collins has also been the recipient of many other awards and honors; they include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant. A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005; other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. She read from his work on February 11, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following week.

Kenneth McClane is the author of eight books of poetry, including a volume of collected poems entitled Take Five; he has also written two collections of essays, the second of which, Color, came out earlier this year from University of Notre Dame Press. The recipient of numerous awards for teaching and writing, McClane received his B.A., M.A. and M.F.A. from Cornell, and has taught there since 1976. He earned a Clark Teaching Award in 1983 and become a full professor in 1989. He now lives in Ithaca, NY, and plans to start a non-fiction publishing series, focusing on the works of the disenfranchised.McClane read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Poet, novelist, short story writer, and historian Robert Morgan was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He is the author of many books; highlights include the novels Gap Creek, Brave Enemies and This Rock, the poetry collections The Strange Attractor and October Crossing, and the nonfiction book Boone: A Biography. Morgan has taught at Cornell since 1971, and presently lives in Ithaca, NY.Morgan read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is a recipient of a 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award for his story “Tell Him About Brother John.”Muñoz is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review, and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. A native of Dinuba, California, he graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell. He has joined the faculty of the University of Arizona’s creative writing program as an assistant professor, and currently lives in Tucson.Muñoz read from his work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Lydia Peelle is the author of a collection of short stories, Reasons For And Advantages Of Breathing. Peelle was born in Boston; her fiction has appeared in Granta, One Story, Orion, Epoch, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and two Pushcart Prizes, and her stories have twice appeared in Best New American Voices. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a graduate of Cornell University and the MFA program at the University of Virginia, she now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.Peelle read from her work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Sharon Bryan is a nationally recognized award-winning poet and editor. Her newest collection, Sharp Stars (BOA, 2009), was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009. She is also the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Prize awarded by The Nation, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as other literary prizes. She has published three previous poetry collections, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, both with Wesleyan University Press, and Flying Blind with Sarabande Books. She is the co-editor of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande), and the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton). Additionally, she has held positions as poet-in-residence and visiting professor at more than 20 colleges and universities, and is currently the Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, in Storrs, Connecticut.Bryan read from her work on September 24, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Gina Franco received a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. in poetry writing, and an M.A. in English from Cornell University. Her collection of poems, The Keepsake Storm, was published by the University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol Latina/o Literary Series in 2004. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. She received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Chasen Poetry Prize, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry. She divides her time between Galesburg, Illinois, where she teaches English and creative writing at Knox College; the Arizona desert where she grew up; and the Texas border, her mother’s home.Franco read from their work on September 24, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Susan Choi is the author of the celebrated novel A Person of Interest. Her previous novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She is also the author of The Foreign Student, winner of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and is co-editor with David Remnick of the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she was born in 1969 and lives in Brooklyn.David Friedman was born and raised in Washington, D.C, and educated at Cornell (B.A., English) and Columbia (M.A., English Literature) Universities. Friedman won the 2004 National Poetry Series open competition, selected by Pulitzer Prizewinner Stephen Dunn; his book of prose poems, The Welcome, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He presently lives and teaches in New York.Charity Ketz was born in Roanoke, Virginia and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from Penn State University, an M.F.A. from Cornell University, and has held lectureships at both universities. Her first book of poems, The Narcoleptic Yard, was published this year by Black Lawrence press; she has also published a chapbook, Locust in Bloom. A former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ketz is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.The three read from their work on September 10, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Lisa M. Steinman’s fifth volume of poetry is Carslaw’s Sequences, from the University of Tampa Press. Steinman teaches at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and for twenty years has co-edited the poetry magazine Hubbub. She has received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships and has also published two books about poetry, Made in America (1987), and Masters of Repetition (1998). Her poems have been published in The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and elsewhere.Steinman read from her work on February 26, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day At The Beach, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P.S. was also made into a feature film starring Laura Linney, with a script co-written by Schulman. She co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child, and her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review. She is presently the Fiction Coordinator at The Writing Program at The New School, and she lives in New York.Schulman read from her work on February 26, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Julie Schumacher is the author of many works of fiction, novels and stories for adults young and old; these include The Body is Water, An Explanation for Chaos, Grass Angel, and her newest novel, Black Box. Her stories have appeared in both the O. Henry Awards anthology and Best American Short Stories. She’s a graduate of Oberlin College and of Cornell’s MFA program, and currently lives in St. Paul, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota.Schumacher read from her work on February 20, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Melissa Bank is the author of the international bestseller The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) and The Wonder Spot (2005). Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Epoch, Glamour, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Seventeen, and The Washington Post, and has been broadcast on NPR, PRI and the BBC. She is the 1993 recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for the Short Story, and her work has been translated into 30 languages. Bank is a graduate of Cornell’s MFA program in creative writing, and is also Visiting Writer in that program during the spring semester of 2009.Bank read from her work on February 20, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous week.

Alice Fulton is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including her first story collection, The Nightingales of Troy (2008). Her most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her collection Felt was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, and Palladium. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, and she’s been included both in Best American Poetry and Best American Short Stories. She is presently the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), all from Wesleyan University Press, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). She teaches poetry at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California.Hillman read from her work on November 6, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

Terrance Hayes is the author of three books of poetry: Muscular Music, Hip Logic, and Wind in A Box. He has received a Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship; he has also been selected for the Best American Poetry anthology. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.Hayes read from his work on October 30, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Charles Simic is the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. He was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New Hampshire, where until his retirement he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. A poet, essayist and translator, he has been honored with Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. His nearly thirty books include The World Doesn’t End, Walking the Black Cat, and the recent The Monster Loves His Labyrinth.Simic read from his work on October 2, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day. (Note: the audio contains a few accidental clicks and pops—sorry about that.)

Patrick Somerville grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later earned his MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. He has taught writing at Cornell University, Auburn State Correctional Facility, and The Graham School in Chicago. His work has appeared in One Story, Epoch, GQ, Esquire, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his book of short stories, Trouble, was named by Time Out Chicago, as 2006’s Best Book. His first novel, The Cradle, will be published by Little, Brown in March of 2009, when he will also be serving as the Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.Somerville read from his work on September 18, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Shauna Seliy is the author of the novel When We Get There (Bloomsbury 2007). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; she has also received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. From 2003 to 2004 she was the Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in Other Voices, Meridian, the New Orleans Review, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.Seliy read from her work on September 11, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous day.

Georgian writer, poet, and playwright Irakli Kakabadze has published more than 50 short stories since 1990 in Georgian, Russian and English publications; he’s also published five books. His celebrated play “Candidate Jokola,” which was published in 2005, is a story of love between a Georgian man and Abkhaz woman. In his country, he is also known as a political activist; he was one of the first writers in Georgia to write about drugs and violence. In 1990 Kakabadze was awarded an award by “Tsiskari” magazine for his novel Allegro, and he is presently living in Ithaca as part of the Ithaca City of Asylum Writers Project.Kakabadze read from his work on September 4, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

Sarah Mkhonza was forced to leave her native Swaziland in 2003 following a campaign of harassment against herself and her family. An outspoken voice for women’s rights under the monarchical Swazi regime, Dr. Mkhonza wrote newspaper columns for The Observer and The Swazi Sun that told of the daily struggles of Swazi women and children ejected from their land. In her columns, she employed a “journalistic fiction” style intended to foster a writing culture among Swazi women. As her popularity as a critic of the government’s repressive policies grew, she was told to stop writing. Her refusal resulted in threats, assaults, and hospitalization. At the University of Swaziland, where she was professor of inguistics and English, her office was robbed and vandalized on two occasions — her computer and diskettes destroyed and tossed in the mud.Dr. Mkhonza has published two novels, What the Future Holds and Pains of a Maid, and is currently working on a third. She has also published several chapbooks of fiction and poetry with Ithaca’s Vista Periodista press. She co-founded the Association of African Women, and the African Book Fund Group at Michigan State University, which has sent over 1000 books to the University of Swaziland and other African institutions, and she is presently living in Ithaca through the Ithaca City of Asylum program.Sarah Mkhonza read from her work on February 28, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following May.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, and is the author of many books of poetry, including The Lost Land, Code, Against Love Poetry, Domestic Violence, and the new New Collected Poems. Her other work includes a collection of prose writings, Object Lessons; and she has edited two poetry anthologies. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters, she is currently Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, and divides her time between California and Dublin.Eavan Boland read from her work on April 25, 2008, in Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following day.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For. A countercultural institution, the strip is syndicated in dozens of newspapers, translated into several languages and collected in a series of award-winning books. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.” And Comics Journal says, “Bechdel’s art distills the pleasures of Friends and The Nation; we recognize our world in it, with its sorrows and ironies.” In 2006, Houghton Mifflin published Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The bestselling coming-of-age tale has been called a “mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection” and a “rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature.” Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.Alison Bechdel read from her work on April 10, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon received her B.A. from Washington and Lee University and her M.F.A. from Penn State. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattapallax, and Shenandoah, and in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page and Role Call. A semi-finalist in the “Discovery”/The Nation Contest in 1999 and 2001, she was one of 20 writers featured in the 2005 PSA Festival of New American Poets. Her first book, Black Swan, was awarded the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.Ernesto Quiñonez is the author of the novels Bodega Dreams, which was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title as well as a Borders Bookstore Original New Voice selection, and Chango’s Fire.J. Robert Lennon is the author of six novels, including Happyland, serialized in Harper’s in 2006, and the forthcoming Castle. He is also the author of Pieces For The Left Hand, a collection of 100 anecdotes.All three writers are members of the Cornell University Creative Writing faculty. They delivered the Richard Cleveland Memorial Reading on March 28, 2008, at the Hollis Auditorium in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day. Leading the conversation were three Cornell Lecturers in English: Stephanie Gehring, Jon Hickey, and George McCormick.

Paul Lisicky is the author of a novel, Lawnboy, and Famous Builder, a collection of essays. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Short Takes, Open House, Boulevard, Flash Fiction, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City, and has taught at Cornell University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Houston, and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming.Paul Lisicky read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place two weeks later.