MELIORA WEEKEND

Jennifer Grotz
James Longenbach
Stephen Schottenfeld
Joanna Scott

Lander Auditorium,
Hutchison Hall

10 Oct 2009, 4:15 pm

Jennifer Grotz, who joins the University of Rochester's creative writing faculty this year, is the author of Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Her poems, reviews, and translations from the French and Polish have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Ploughshares, New England Review, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry. She is also the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

James Longenbach, who has taught creative writing at the University of Rochester since 1985, is the author of four books of poems, most recently Draft of a Letter (Chicago, 2007) and the forthcoming Island. He is also the author of several critical works, most recently The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago, 2004) and The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2008), and his poems and reviews of contemporary poetry appear regularly in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.

Stephen Schottenfeld, who joined the University of Rochester's creative writing faculty last year, has completed a story collection, Miss Ellen Jameson Is Not Deceased, and is currently writing a novel set in Memphis. His stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and other literary magazines, and have garnered a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant and special mentions in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies.

Joanna Scott has taught creative writing at the University of Rochester since 1988. Character and the motion of thought; the effects of varied narrative form; contradictory perceptions of time and place; the idiosyncracies of voice; mystery and the impact of disclosure; beauty and ugliness; comedy, temptation, collapse, and recovery; the elusive potential of imagination--these are some of the subjects that Joanna Scott explores in her novels and stories. Modern and contemporary authors she has written about include Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Maureen Howard, William Gass, and J.M. Coetzee. Her latest novel, Follow Me, was published in 2009.

Tony Hoagland

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

22 Oct 2009, 5:00 pm

Tony Hoagland's chapbook, Hard Rain, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. His poems and critical writings have appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Agni, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and the 1991 Pushcart Prize anthology. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.

ZZ Packer

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

10 Nov 2009, 5:00 pm

ZZ Packer attended Yale University, where she received a B.A. in 1994. Her graduate work included an M.A. at Johns Hopkins University in 1995 and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1999. She was named a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

Her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books, 2003) was published to considerable acclaim. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and personally selected by John Updike for the Today Show Book Club. In 2005, she was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She was the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing (joining the ranks of Simon Winchester, Ishmael Reed, James D. Houston, Molly Giles, Ursula Le Guin, James Kelman, Al Young, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Carolyn Kizer) at San Jose State University during the spring 2008 semester. She is on the faculty of California College of the Arts, where she serves as senior visiting professor of creative writing. She lives in Pacifica, California, and is currently at work on a novel set in the aftermath of the Civil War.

David Mason

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

24 Sep 2007, 5:00 pm

David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, has just been published. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review.

A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives in the mountains outside Colorado Springs with his wife, Anne Lennox.

MELIORA WEEKEND

David Leavitt

Lander Auditorium,
Hutchison Hall

20 Oct 2007, 3:30 pm

Professor David Leavitt graduated from Yale University in 1983 with a BA in English. He is the author of the short story collections Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award), A Place I’ve Never Been, Arkansas, and The Marble Quilt, as well as the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, While England Sleeps (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), The Page Turner, Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing, and The Body of Jonah Boyd. In 2002, he published Florence, A Delicate Case as part of Bloomsbury’s series “The Writer and the City.” His Collected Stories was published in 2003 by Bloomsbury. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Origins of the Computer appeared in 2005 and a new novel, The Indian Clerk, is due out in fall 2007. Professor Leavitt is also the editor of Subtropics, a new literary magazine.

With Mark Mitchell, Professor Leavitt is co-author of Italian Pleasures and In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany, and co-editor of the anthologies The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories and Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. His work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, The Southwest Review, Tin House, Food & Wine and Travel and Leisure. He has also taught at Princeton University.

A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute of Catalan Letters in Barcelona Spain, Professor Leavitt was recently named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.

Audio Interview with David Leavitt

Wikipedia article about David Leavitt

David Leavitt filmography on IMDB

Review of The Page Turner and interview with David Leavitt

David Leavitt books

Tom Sleigh

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

30 Oct 2007, 8:00 pm

Tom Sleigh attended the California Institute of the Arts, Evergreen State College, and earned an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. His most recent collections include Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and Far Side of the Earth (2003), named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Society for the Book. He is the author of After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series Prize, 1983; Waking (1990), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize; The Chain (l996), nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize; and The Dreamhouse (1999), a selection of the Academy of American Poet’s Poetry Book Club and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has also published a translation of Euripides's Herakles (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2006).

Among his many awards are an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merill Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Anthony Giardina

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

14 Nov 2007, 8:00 pm

Anthony Giardina's fourth and most recent novel, White Guys was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2006, and in paperback by Picador earlier this year. He is also the author of the novels Men With Debts, A Boy’s Pretensions and Recent History, as well as the story collection The Country of Marriage. His plays have been produced in New York at the Manhattan Theater Club and Playwrights Horizons, and at many of the major regional theaters in the U.S., including Seattle Rep, the Long Wharf in New Haven, and the Cleveland Playhouse. His short stories, essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine. He is a regular Visiting Professor at the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

Robert Boyers
Peg Boyers

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

11 December 2007, 5:00 pm

Peg Boyers is executive editor of Salmagundi and author of Hard Bread, also published by the University of Chicago Press. She teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Slate, Ploughshares, Raritan, Daedalus, Notre Dame Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, New England Review, Ontario Review, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, and other magazines. She is author of two books of poems, Hard Bread (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Honey with Tobacco (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

She has translated, from Spanish and Italian, such writers as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Natalia Ginzburg. She has also conducted extensive published interviews with such writers as Ariel Dorfman and Natalia Ginzburg.

Robert Boyers is Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, editor of Salmagundi, and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of several books, including Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, and a book of stories, Excitable Women, Damaged Men. Boyers is also a frequent contributor to Harper's, The New Republic, and other journals.

Claudia Rankine

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

6 Mar 2008, 8:00 p.m.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004), PLOT (Grove/Atlantic, 2001), The End Of The Alphabet (Grove/Atlantic, 1998), and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Press, 1995). She is also co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press). A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Lannan Foundation, she is the Henry G. Lee ‘37 Professor of English at Pomona College.

Of her most recent book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, an experimental multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and images, poet Robert Creeley said: "It’s master work in every sense, and
altogether her own."

John Koethe

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

27 Mar 2008, 8:00 p.m.

John Koethe is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, where he lives. His collection North Point North was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and his collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. In 2005 he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He is also the author of The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought and Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press).

His gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. Of his book Sally’s Hair, the most recent of his seven books of poems, it was said, “The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless 'slow approach to anonymity and death.' " John Ashbery said of his book, Falling Water, "As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love, and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American Poet."

David Treuer

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

8 Apr 2008, 8:00 p.m.

David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Canada, a Pushcart Prize, the 1996 Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the Penn West prize in 1999. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently completing his fourth novel, Neverland. He divides his time between his home on Leech Lake Reservation and Minneapolis.

The son of Robert Treuer, a holocaust survivor, and Margaret Seelye Treuer, a tribal court judge, David Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation. He attended Princeton University where he wrote two senior theses—one in anthropology and one in creative writing. Treuer graduated in 1992 and published his first novel, Little, in 1995. He received his PhD in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. His third novel, The Translation of Dr. Apelles, was published in 2006, and was named a "Best Book of the Year" for 2006 by the Washington Post, Time Out Chicago, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

His novels have been translated into Norwegian, Finnish, French, and Greek.

Bradford Morrow

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

22 Apr 2008, 8:00 p.m.

Bradford Morrow is the author of the novels Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), Trinity Fields, Giovanni's Gift, and Ariel's Crossing. His children's books include A Bestiary, illustrated by 18 major American artists, among them Eric Fischl, Kiki Smith, Joel Shapiro and Richard Tuttle, and Didn't Didn't Do It, in collaboration with legendary cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Morrow has edited numerous books, most recently, with Sam Hamill, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. In 1998, the American Academy of the Arts and Letters presented him with the Academy Award in Literature. The founder and editor of the literary journal, Conjunctions, Morrow is a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.

In 2007 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in literary journal editing. Recently completed books include a new novel, The Fifth Turning, and Lush, a collection of thirteen Gothic stories. He is currently at work on a
new novel, The Prague Sonatas. Morrow lives in New York.

Susan Stewart

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

25 Sep 2008, 8:00 pm

Poet and critic Susan Stewart was born in 1952. She received a B.A. in English and anthropology from Dickinson College, an M.A. in poetics from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Columbarium (2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forest (1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; The Hive (1987); and Yellow Stars and Ice (1981).

Her collected essays on art, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. She also co-translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony.

About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."

Her honors include a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

Stewart taught at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1978 to 1997. She is currently Professor of English at Princeton University where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005.

MELIORA WEEKEND

Jonathan Franzen

Hoyt Auditorium,
Hoyt Hall

18 Oct 2008, 3:30 pm

When The Corrections was published in the fall of 2001, Jonathan Franzen was probably better known for his nonfiction than for the two novels he had already published. In an essay he wrote for Harper's in 1996, Franzen lamented the declining cultural authority of the American novel and described his personal search for reasons to persist as a fiction writer. “The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read,” he wrote. “Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?”

Five years after publishing the Harper’s essay, Franzen became fully engaged with his culture. The Corrections was an enormous international bestseller, with translations in 35 languages, American hardcover sales of nearly one million copies and nominations for nearly every major book prize in the country – Franzen was awarded the National Book Award for this novel.

Jonathan Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), was a reimagination of his hometown, St. Louis, through the eyes of conspirators and terrorists from southern Asia. His second novel, Strong Motion (1992), was a thriller-cum-love-story set in the student slums of Boston. Both books displayed Franzen's ability to connect the personal and the political, the emotional and the social, in compelling and richly textured narratives.

Born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959, Jonathan Franzen grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981 he studied in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard. Franzen is also the author of a bestselling collection of essays, How to Be Alone and the memoir The Discomfort Zone. He recently published a new English translation of the play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind. His short stories and his essays, including political journalism, have most recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The New York Times, and The Guardian.

Edward Hirsch

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

12 Nov 2008, 8:00 pm

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.

His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from The Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, he has published four books of poems, most recently Lay Back the Darkness (2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); and The Night Parade (1989).

He is also the author of the prose volumes The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002); Responsive Reading (1999); and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), which the poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, he published Poet's Choice (2007), which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay-letters running in the Washington Post Book World.

Hirsch has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Mary Gaitskill

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

2 Mar 2009, 8:00 pm

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. Her novel Veronica was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005; it was also nominated for the National Critic’s Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award.

Her new story collection will be appearing in March 2009. She has taught as a guest lecturer or a Writer-In-Residence at Hollins College, UC-Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, and Brown. She was an Associate Professor at Syracuse until last year.

Frank Bidart

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

23 Mar 2009, 8:00 pm

Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939 and educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Harvard University. His early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990). His recent volumes include Watching the Spring Festival (2008), Star Dust (2005), Music Like Dirt (2002), and Desire (1997), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. He is also the co-editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (2003). Bidart’s honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky." In 2007, he received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Bidart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has taught at Wellesley College since 1972.

Anthony Doerr

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

8 Apr 2009, 8:00 pm

Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. His books have been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, a "Book of the Year" in the Washington Post, and a finalist for the PEN USA fiction award. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. He currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. From 2007 to 2010, he will be the Writer-in-Residence for the State of Idaho.