2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 January 31, 2007 Ngûgî wa Thiong'o Ngûgî wa Thiong'o is Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation & Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine. Ngûgî, formerly Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, New York University, is a novelist, a playwright, and an essayist from Kenya, whose works include, among others: Weep not Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Detained: A Writers Prison Diary; Matigari; Decolonising the Mind. His most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow, is newly published from Pantheon Books. February 28, 2007 Kevin Clark and Jane Miller Kevin Clark's book of poems In the Evening of No Warning earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets, and his poetry has appeared widely in such journals as The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Kestrel, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review. His criticism has appeared in many venues, including The Iowa Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. In 2007, Longman will publish his poetry writing textbook, The Mind's Eye. Clark earned the Distinguished Teaching Award at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo where he teaches poetry writing and modern literature. Jane Miller's latest collection of poems is the book-length sequence, A Palace of Pearls, (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), winner of the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Among earlier collections are Wherever You Lay Your Head; Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems; The Greater Leisures, a National Poetry Series Selection; and August Zero, winner of the Western States Book Award. She has also written Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel, in the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry Series. She is a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award for Poetry, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She serves as an adjudicator for the Fulbright Foundation and as a consultant to several literary foundations and literary presses. A resident of Tucson, she is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona, having served as the program's director 1999-2003. March 28, 2007 Don Bogen and Bruce Guernsey Don Bogen is the author of three books of poetry: After the Splendid Display (1986), The Known World (1997), and Luster (2003), all from Wesleyan University Press. Prizes for his work include a Discovery / The Nation Award, The Writer / Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A recent Fulbright lecturer in Spain, he teaches at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review. Bruce Guernsey is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Lost Wealth, January Thaw, Peripheral Vision, The Lost Brigade, and Soldier's Home. Guernsey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University where he taught creative writing and American Literature for twenty-five years. He has also taught at William and Mary, Johns Hopkins, the University of New Hampshire, and Virginia Wesleyan College where he was the poet in residence for four years. A graduate with honors from Colgate University, he holds M.A.'s from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins and a PhD from New Hampshire, writing his dissertation on tools as metaphor in Robert Frost's poetry. Bruce's poems have appeared in well-known publications such as Poetry, The Atlantic, American Scholar, and many of the quarterlies. He has been honored with fellowships in writing from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He was also a featured poet in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. Beginning in January 2007, he will take over the editorship of Spoon River Poetry Review. April 25, 2007 Henri Cole and Simone White — 3rd Annual Benefit Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has received many awards for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A new collection, Blackbird and Wolf, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Boston. Simone White is a Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter. White’s album I Am The Man was released in 2007. The UK magazine MOJO says about White’s music, “For those bewitched by the posthumous small-hours voice of Karen Dalton, here is a living echo of that still, small, intensely concentrated spirit. ...an intimate prettiness concealing within the rosebud the thorns of subtly articulated political protest and the warped, eerie gaze on human weakness that has been The Velvet Underground's legacy to the modern folk idiom.” Her music can be found at myspace.com/simonewhite and at simonewhite.com. May 30, 2007 Glen David Gold Glen David Gold is the author of Carter Beats the Devil, an international bestseller translated into fourteen languages. A graduate of the UC Irvine MFA program in Creative Writing, he has written essays, short fiction and memoirs that have appeared in McSweeney's, Playboy and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He has also written comic books for Dark Horse and DC, and has written about comic book artwork for Yale University Press. His new novel will be published in 2008. June 27, 2007 Charles Harper Webb Charles Harper Webb grew up in Houston, Texas, graduated magna cum laude from Rice University, and then went on to earn an M.A. from the University of Washington, and an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, where he won the Academy of American Poets prize. A professional rock singer/guitarist for fifteen years, he is currently Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and has received both the Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Achievement Award, and the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He is also a licensed psychotherapist, specializing in work with creative artists. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, A New Geography of Poets, the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize series, and many other literary magazines and anthologies. He has published a novel, The Wilderness Effect (Chatto & Windus), a book of poetry and psychology, Poetry That Heals, (Red Wind Books), as well as six collections of poetry, including Reading the Water (Northeastern University Press) which won the 1997 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Liver (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, published by BOA Editions in 2002, and Hot Popsicles, published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2005. His book Amplified Dog won the Benjamin Saltman Prize, and was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press. He is co-editor of Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles, editor of Stand Up Poetry: the Anthology (University of Iowa Press), and recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. July 25, 2007 A Conversation with David Lehman David Lehman is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Two of his books, The Daily Mirror (2000) and The Evening Sun (2002), reflect the adventure of writing a poem a day, a practice he maintained for nearly five years. In collaboration with James Cummins, he has written a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2006). In 1988, Lehman launched The Best American Poetry and he continues as series editor of this distinguished annual anthology. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems (2003). He has written such nonfiction books as The Perfect Murder (about murder mysteries) and The Last Avant-Garde (about the New York School of poets). He is poetry coordinator of the graduate writing program at the New School. He lives in New York City. August 29, 2007 Alexandra Sokoloff and Antonieta Villamill Alexandra Sokoloff is a screenwriter who has sold original suspense and thriller scripts and written novel adaptations for numerous Hollywood studios, for producers such as Michael Bay, Laura Ziskin, David Heyman and Neal Moritz. Her adaptation of Sabine Deitmer's psychological thriller Cold Kisses was filmed in Germany. She is the author of two new supernatural thrillers: The Harrowing, a ghost story just out from St. Martin's Press, and The Price, which will be out from St. Martin's in 2007. Sokoloff is an outgoing director of the Board of the Writers Guild of America, west, and is the founder of WriterAction.com, an online community of 2000+ professional screenwriters. Antonieta Villamil author of seven books, born in Colombia in 1962, is an international award winning bilingual poet, narrator, editor, translator and activist. Included in the documentary film Poetry In War Time, her work focuses on the forgotten ones and honors them with a voice. Villamil edits and translates the collection Poetry Solos / Solos de Poesía, directs the poetry workshop and the press Casa de Poesía / House of Poetry, the poetry review Moradalsur and, a Spanish language radio show for www.kpfk.org 90.7FM Los Angeles, on contemporary poets. Villamil won the International poetry prize Gastón Baquero 2001 with her book Cliff of dream / Los acantilados del sueño, published in Madrid, Spain by Verbum press, a Prose Poems Project Prize 2001, for Migration fields, and Poetry in Motion Project for the poem "Green Shoes" / "Zapatos Verdes," a poster which was showcased on Los Angeles MTA buses. September 26, 2007 Christian Wiman and Joel Brouwer Christian Wiman is the author of two books of poetry, The Long Home and Hard Night. A selection of his essays, Ambition and Survival: A Life in Poetry, will be published in fall 2007. His work appears in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and other places. He is the editor of Poetry magazine. Joel Brouwer is the author of two books of poems, Exactly What Happened and Centuries. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Progressive, Tin House, and other magazines. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama. October 24, 2007 Dorianne Laux and Dana Levin Reading cancelled due to southern California wildfires Dorianne Laux's fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, (finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and the Oregon Book Award), was published by W.W. Norton in 2005. She is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke, (2000). She is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has been twice included in Best American Poetry. She has been awarded with a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Laux is a Professor in the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. She lives in Eugene with her husband, poet Joseph Millar. Dana Levin graduated from Pitzer College (1987) and The Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University (1992). Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry and Volt. Levin has received three Pushcart Prizes, a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 2004 fellowships from the Library of Congress and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and a 2005 Whiting Award. Levin teaches in the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and chairs the Creative Writing, Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies Department at College of Santa Fe. Her newest book is Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). November 28, 2007 Sarah Gorham, Mario Muller, and Jeffrey Skinner Sarah Gorham is the author of three collections of poetry: The Cure (2003), The Tension Zone (1996), and Don't Go Back to Sleep (1989). Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Open City, and Best American Poetry 2006. She is President and Editor-in-Chief of Sarabande Books, an independent publisher devoted to poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction. A native New Yorker, Mario M. Muller, has pursued his artistic career for two decades now. As a painter and a sculptor he has had eighteen solo exhibitions in cities as diverse as Louisville, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Paris. The most recent exhibition was titled Heaven or Las Vegas at DCKT Contemporary Gallery in Manhattan. Throughout his career, Muller has been the recipient of numerous public art commissions including a mural for the Louisville International Airport Authority and the Kentucky Center for the Arts. The next significant piece will be 12 Glass windscreen panels for an above ground subway station in NYC slated to be installed in Fall of 2007. In 1996 he won the Early Times Fellowship Grant administered by the Kentucky Arts and Crafts foundation. Muller's works on paper have been published by the journals Sonora Review, The American Voice, and Phoebe and used as book jacket illustrations by University of Pittsburg Press, Hummingbird Press and Sarabande Press. His work has been featured in more than thirty groups shows across the nation as well. Muller is in significant public and private collections in America and Germany, which include Pfizer, Banana Republic, Northwestern University, Swiss RE:, Deutsche Bank, Louisville Gas and Electric, Radio Shack and the JB Speed Art Museum. In addition to his prolific art career, Muller has published numerous articles on art and film criticism. He has curated several exhibitions for corporate, gallery and non-for profit settings. Muller holds a degree from Northwestern University in Film and early in his career attended master classes with Roy Lichtenstein, Audrey Flack, James Brooks, and Wayne Theibaud. Jeffrey Skinner has published five collections of poetry: Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press), A Guide to Forgetting (a winner in the 1987 National Poetry series, chosen by Tess Gallagher, published by Graywolf Press), The Company of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series), Gender Studies, Miami University Press, Spring 2002, and Salt Water Amnesia, his most recent, published in 2005 by Ausable Press. He has written an informal text on creative writing for high school students, Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens (Chicago Review Press, 1991), and, with the poet Sarah Gorham, edited an anthology, Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, & Deliverance (Sarabande Books). His poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, and The Georgia, Iowa, and Paris Reviews. Skinner's writing has gathered grants, fellowships, and awards from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts (two awards: 1986, 2006), the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the state arts agencies of Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky. Three of his plays have been finalists in the Eugene O'Neill Theater Conference competition, and his one-act, Delta Waves, won the 1991 Market Theater short play competition. His full length play Fortunate Son was given a staged reading at the O'Neill Center as part of the 2002 Local Playwrights Festival, and again at The Theater at Monmouth, in Maine. His short plays have had productions in New York City, Ohio, and Kentucky. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. His work has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio. In 1997 Skinner was the Frost House Poet-in-Residence, and in 1998 served as the American writer-in-residence at the annual Arts Festival in Country Kildare, Ireland. In 2002 he served as Poet-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. Over the years Skinner has made his living in a variety of ways, including work as social psychologist, actor, waterfront director, factory stock man, and private detective. He is co-founder and editorial consultant for Sarabande Books. When not occupying the houses of dead poets, Skinner lives in Louisville with his wife, the poet and publisher Sarah Gorham, and their two daughters.