Faculty // 2009

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.

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.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of Hunger, a novella and stories, and the novels Inheritance and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost. She is the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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.

Ron Hansen is the author of six novels, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983) and Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) He is also the author of a book of stories, Nebraska (1989), and the collection of essays, A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (2001). In May, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published his biographical novel, Exiles.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was nominated for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad, coming out in March. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, the New Yorker and Playboy. He teaches at Williams College.

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.”

Karen Shepard is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, and, most recently, Don’t I Know You? Her short fiction has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Bomb, Ploughshares, Failbetter, Glimmertrain, Mississippi Review, and Southwest Review, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in Self, More, The Boston Globe, and USA Today, among others.  She teaches at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

Marie Howe’s third collection of poems will be published by W. W. Norton in 2007.  Howe’s first collection, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series, and Howe has received a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Agni, Harvard Review, and New England Review, among others. Stanley Kunitz has praised her “luminous, intense, eloquent” verse. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY.

D. A. Powell most recent volume, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, was published by Graywolf in 2012. Chronic (Graywolf, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell’s honors include a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship  and awards from the California Commonwealth Club, the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebellion, which appeared from Knopf in January 2011. His Jelly Roll: A Blues, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of five volumes, including last year’s The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury). He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.

Ann Hood is the author of the novels The Red Thread, and, The Knitting Circle, as well as the memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and chosen as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train and many other publications. She has won a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction and two Pushcart Prizes.

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.

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books, including The Adderall Diaries. His creative non-fiction has been published in the New York Times, Esquire, the Believer, McSweeney’s, Salon, the Village Voice, Tin House, and others. He is the founder and managing editor of The Rumpus.

Ehud Havazelet is the author of two critically acclaimed short-story collections: What Is It Then Between Us? and Like Never Before. He teaches at Oregon State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

Bret Anthony Johnson is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, he is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard.

Jon Raymond is the author of The Half-Life, a novel, and Livability, a collection of stories, and winner of the 2009 Oregon Book Award. Two of of his stories were made into the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. He’s also the writer of Meek’s Cutoff, a forthcoming film by Kelly Reichardt, and co-adaptor, with Todd Haynes, of Mildred Pierce, a forthcoming miniseries for HBO.