Writers in Residence
2012-2013 residents will be fiction writer Baron Wormser, poet Barbara Hamby, and nonfiction writer John Bresland.
Baron Wormser's Reading is scheduled for March 21st at 7:30 in the Faculty Commons of Alden Library.
Baron Wormser
Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of twelve full-length books. His titles include The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems, and a work of fiction entitled The Poetry Life: Ten Stories. In March 2011 his most recent book of poetry, Impenitent Notes, was published.
A former poet laureate of Maine he teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and is Director of Educational Outreach at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has worked for decades as a freelance teacher and led dozens of workshops including sessions in Maine, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Illinois.
Barbara Hamby
Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawai’i. She now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband, the sublime poet and all-around molto fun guy, David Kirby. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Florida State University. Her book of stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize/John Simmons Award, she was named a Distinguished University Scholar at Florida State, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship--all in 2010. She also published Seriously Funny, an anthology of poetry that she co-edited with David Kirby, and Amy Gerstler chose five of her Lingo Sonnets for Best American Poetry 2010.
Her other books include: All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press: 2009; Babel, which was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize and was also published by Pittsburgh; and The Alphabet of Desire, which won the 1998 New York University Prize for Poetry.
John Bresland
John Bresland is coauthor of the forthcoming book, Crafting the Video Essay (University of Chicago Press). His audio essays have aired on public radio's Weekend America, and his video essays can be seen at Blackbird, Ninth Letter and Wag’s Revue. His print essays can be read at TriQuarterly and Brevity, as well as The Fourth Genre (2011), an anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction, and Essayists on the Essay, Montaigne to Our Time (2012).
He teaches creative writing, filmmaking, and digital production at Northwestern University.
Watch some of his work at Bresland.com
2011-2012 residents were nonfiction writer Ander Monson, fiction writer Porter Shreve, and poet Adrienne Su.
Ander Monson
Ander Monson is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website
Porter Shreve
Porter Shreve is the author of three novels, all with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: The Obituary Writer was a 2000 New York Times Notable Book and a Borders Original Voices Selection; Drives Like a Dream was a 2005 Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a People "Great Reads" Selection, and When the White House Was Ours was a 2008 Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Reading Group Choices Featured Selection. He is coeditor of six anthologies, including the Contemporary American Short Story: A Longman Anthology and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: I & Eye. Shreve’s book reviews, nonfiction, op-eds and short stories have appeared in Witness, Northwest Review, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
He is currently working on a new novel and a story cycle, both set in Chicago. He has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is now Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University.
Adrienne Su
Adrienne Su is the author of three books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009). Her literary awards include a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for Arts, the Ralph Samuel Poetry Fellowship at Dartmouth College, and a summer as resident poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Since 2000, she has taught at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is poet-in-residence.
Su, who holds an A.B. from Harvard and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, spent several peripatetic years as a freelance writer and editor, occasionally publishing essays on food and cooking, before taking up teaching. She has been in residence at The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poems appear in anthologies including The New American Poets, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Best American Poetry, Literature and Its Writers, Poetry Slam, and Poetry Daily. Recent poems appear in Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and Asian American Literary Review.
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2010-2011 residents were fiction writer Rob Roberge, poet Mark Cox, and essayist Rebecca McClanahan.
Rebecca McClanahan
Rebecca McClanahan has published nine books, most recently Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987-2007 and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, which won the Glasgow Award for nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize series, and in collections published by Norton, Doubleday, Putnam, Beacon, and numerous other journals and anthologies.
McClanahan earned a B.A. from California State University and a Master’s and Ph.D. from University of South Carolina. For fifteen years she was Poet-in-Residence for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, a service for which she received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education. A past recipient of the Wood Prize from Poetry, the Carter Prize for the essay from Shenandoah, and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, North Carolina Arts Council, MacDowell Colony, and Bread Loaf, McClanahan teaches in the low-residency MFA programs of Queens University (Charlotte) and Rainier Writers Workshop (Tacoma). Her current work-in-progress, a multi-generational nonfiction saga, focuses on the difficulties and rewards of communal bonds.
Mark Cox
Mark Cox teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington, and the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. His honors include a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, and The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize.
He has served as poetry editor of Passages North and of Cimarron Review, and has received fellowships from the Kansas Arts Commission, the Vermont Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and The Frost Place, Robert Frost's family home, where he served as the 24th Poet‑in‑Residence. Cox has read and presented across 35 states and has published poems in many national anthologies and magazines such as Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The North American Review, The New England Review, and New Ohio Review.
His books are The Barbells of the Gods, (Ampersand, '88), Smoulder (Godine, '89), Thirty‑Seven Years from the Stone (Pitt Poetry Series, '98), and Natural Causes (Pitt Poetry Series, '04). He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Rob Roberge
Rob Roberge is the author of the book of stories, Working Backwards From the Worst Moment of My Life and the novels More Than They Could Chew and Drive. He teaches writing at the Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA in Creative Writing, UC-Riverside’s Palm Desert MFA program and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where he received the Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing in 2003.
His stories have been featured in ZYZZYVA, Chelsea, Black Clock, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Ten Writers Worth Knowing Issue of The Literary Review. His work has also been anthologized in Another City (City Lights, 2001), It’s All Good (Manic D Press, 2004) SANTI: Lives of the Modern Saints (Black Arrow Press, 2007) and Orange County Noir (Akashic, 2010). Non-fiction appears, or has appeared, in The Nervous Breakdown and Penthouse. He plays guitar and sings with several LA bands, including, among others, the punk pioneers, The Urinals. In his spare time, he restores and rebuilds vintage amplifiers and quack medical devices. For news and more info, visit & or email, go to www.robroberge.com.
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2009-2010 residents were fiction writer Josip Novakovich, poet David Wojahn, and essayist Brenda Miller.
Josip Novakovich
Josip Novakovich (Croatian: Novaković) is a Croatian-American writer who grew up in the Central Croatian town of Daruvar and studied medicine in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad. At the age of 20 he left Yugoslavia, continuing his education at Vassar College (B.A.), Yale University (M.Div.), and the University of Texas, Austin (M.A.). He has published a novel, April Fool's Day, three short story collections Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, two collections of narrative essays Apricots from Chernobyl, Plum Brandy: Croatian Journey and a textbook Fiction Writer's Workshop.
Novakovich has taught at Nebraska Indian Community College, Bard College, Moorhead State University, Antioch University in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and is currently a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Mr. Novakovich is the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was anthologized in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and O.Henry Prize Stories.
David Wojahn
David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and attended the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987 and won the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for the best volume of poetry to be published during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997) and Spirit Cabinet (2002). His most recent collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, published by Pittsburgh in 2006, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was the winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Wojahn is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987-88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is also a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts.