Faculty // 2008

Dorothy Allison is the best-selling author of Bastard out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.  She is the author of Trash, a collection of short stories; The Women Who Hate Me, a collection of poetry; and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, a collection of essays.

Steve Almond is the author of a bunch of books, some which he makes himself.  His latest collection, “God Bless America,” was published by Lookout Books.

Andrea Barrett is the author of six novels, most recently The Air We Breathe, and two collections of short fiction, Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award, and Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in western Massachusetts and teaches at Williams College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Aimee Bender is the author of 4 books, the most recent being the novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.  Her short fiction has been published in Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, GQ, the Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s This American Life.  She teaches creative writing at USC and lives in Los Angeles.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories; Orphans, a collection of essays; and The Dead Fish Museum.  He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, and, most recently, Memory Wall. Doerr’s fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. He also writes the “On Science” column for the Boston Globe.

Yiyun Li came to the United States from Beijing in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. She lives in Oakland, California and teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.

Peter Rock is the author of The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, This Is the Place, and most recently, My Abandonment. His short fiction has appeared widely, and he has adapted his own fiction and that of others for film. Since 2001, he has been an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Walter Kirn is a novelist, essayist, and book critic who lives in Livingston, Montana. His works of fiction include My Hard Bargain (stories), Thumbsucker (the basis of the 2003 movie) and Up in the Air (currently being developed for the screen by director Jason Reitman). Kirn’s serial novel, The Unbinding, was composed on the Internet for Slate Magazine in 2006 and published in paper form in 2007. He contributes essays to such periodicals as “The Atlantic” and “The New York Times Magazine” and is a regular reviewer for “The New York Times Sunday Book Review.”

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and Apex Hides the Hurt, as well as a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. A recipient of a Whiting Writers award and a MacArthur fellowship, he lives in New York City.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of five collections including Louise in Love and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon. Her most recent book, Elegy, was published by Graywolf Press in October. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, New American Writing, Fence, Volt, and elsewhere.

Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether and Blind Huber, for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year elsewhere.

Eileen Myles is probably America’s best-known unofficial poet. Her latest book is Sorry, Tree from wave books. Other books include Cool for You, Not Me, and Chelsea Girls. In 1995, with Liz Kotz, she edited The New Fuck You/adventures in Lesbian Reading (Semiotext(e). She has been a professor of writing at UCSD since 2002. In 2007 she received The Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writing fellowship.

David Shields is the author of eleven books, including How Literature Saved My Life (forthcoming from Knopf on February 5, 2013), Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller, and Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives with is wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.

Abigail Thomas worked in publishing as an editor and literary agent for twenty years before morphing into a writer.  She has published two collections of stories, Getting over Tom and Herb’s Pajamas; a novel, An Actual Life; and three books for children.  Her most recent book is a memoir, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life.

Frank Bidart’s most recent full-length collections of poetry are Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Watching the Spring Festival, Bidart’s first collection of lyric poems, was  published by FSG in April 2008.

Denis Johnson is the author of several novels, plays, and books of verse. His novel Tree of Smoke won the National book award in 2007.

Annie Proulx is the author of The Shipping News and three other novels, That Old Ace In the Hole, Postcards and Accordion Crimes, and the story collections Heart Songs and Close Range, which includes the story “Brokeback Mountain”.  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, two O. Henry Prizes, and a PEN/Faulkner, she lives in Wyoming.