Carl Phillips

Susan Deer Cloud

Matt Sienkiewicz

Amoussa Koriko

Maxine Hong Kingston

Jamaica Kincaid

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Double Shadow (2011) and Speak Low (2009). He has also written a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004) and translated Sophocles's Philoctetes (2004). A graduate of Harvard, where he majored in Classics, Phillips taught high school Latin for eight years, while writing the poems which would result in his first book, In the Blood, recipient of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. Other honors since then include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was named a Chancellor in 2007. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Susan Deer Cloud is a Métis Catskill Native of Mohawk/Blackfoot/Seneca lineage. She has received various awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Chenango County Council for the Arts Literature Grant, First Prize in Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition (twice), Prairie Schooner’s Readers’ Choice Award, and Native American Wordcraft Circle Editor’s Award for multicultural anthology Confluence. Deer Cloud’s most recent books are The Last Ceremony and Car Stealer (FootHills Publishing); her poems, stories and essays have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She has also edited Native anthology I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool) plus 2008 Spring Issue of Yellow Medicine Review, a Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought (she is now an adviser to Yellow Medicine). Currently, Deer Cloud is editing FootHills’ Re-Matriation Chapbook Series of Native Poetry and her next book of poetry, Braiding Starlight, is coming out in September 2010. You can find her on Facebook or contact her at susan.poetrymatters@gmail.com.

Matt Sienkeiwicz (http://www.livefrombethlehem.com/) is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter and documentarian, as well as a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin. His most recent film, Live From Bethlehem was released by the Media Education Foundation in September 2009 and has screened worldwide at venues including the Rhode Island International Film Festival, the Chicago Palestine Film Festival and London’s Frontline Club. Other credits include the award winning comedy series Windy Acres and the Emmy-nominated television documentary Festa. His academic research focuses on Western involvement in Middle Eastern broadcasting initiatives and ethnic representation in American media. His work has been published in The Journal of Film and Video, The Velvet Light Trap and Sage Publications' Understanding Community Media.

Amoussa Koriko was born in Lomé, the capital city of Togo, a very small country in West Africa. He grew up in very harsh environment in one of the most populous areas in Lomé called Nyékonakpoè surrounded by more 12 national languages among which he speaks five. This environment constitutes one the elements that shape Amoussa writings. He hold a four years college degree in Communication and Linguistics from the university of Lomé where voluntarily refused to write his master thesis. In 2004, he moved to the U.S. and attended North Dakota State University where he got a BA in French and Theater. He is currently working on his master in Educational Foundation and Research at UND.

A published playwright, Amoussa is also a director, actor, percussionist, and African traditional dancer. He had most of theater experience working with directors from Africa and Europe, and U.S. He has taught Togolese tribal dance at NDSU, MSUM and La Comédie de Saint-Etienne in France. In 2009, he was nominated for the Grand Prix Afrique du Thèâtre Francophone. He has founded a theater company called "Theatre Assassan du Togo" where he trains young people in theatre arts. He is also the founder of the African Arts Arena in Grand Forks that provides a culture sharing space through African dance and drumming teaching. He recently directed a play he wrote When the Bird Takes Flight as the main stage production for the newfangled theater, a student production branch of the Little Country Theatre at NDSU that was invited to the Kennedy Center for American College Theater Festival 2010 for the Region V.

Amoussa has been in many productions including movies (Walking Shadow, with Uniti Teatri in Italy) as playwright, director or actor. As playwright Amoussa wrote many plays including: When the bird takes flight (published in French, English and French, awarded best directing Festhef, Lomé), Night shadow (in publication) Pour un vulgaire coup de queue, A pearl around the ankle, and Ainsi soit-il (Unesco award).

Among other things, Amoussa translates for new Immigrants and Refugees of French and Togolese origin in the FM area.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who operated a gambling house in the 1940s, when Maxine was born, and then a laundry where Kingston and her brothers and sisters toiled long hours. Kingston graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from the University of California at Berkeley, and, in the same year, married actor Earll Kingston, whom she had met in an English course. The couple has one son, Joseph, who was born in 1963. They were active in antiwar activities in Berkeley, but in 1967 the Kingstons headed for Japan to escape the increasing violence and drugs of the antiwar movement. They settled instead in Hawai‘i, where Kingston took various teaching posts. They returned to California seventeen years later, and Kingston resumed teaching writing at the University of California, Berkeley. While in Hawai‘i, Kingston wrote her first two books. The Woman Warrior, her first book, was published in 1976 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, making her a literary celebrity at age thirty-six. Her second book, China Men, earned the National Book Award. Still today, both books are widely taught in literature and other classes. Kingston has earned additional awards, including the PEN West Award for Fiction for Tripmaster Monkey, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the National Humanities Medal, which was conferred by President Clinton, as well as the title "Living Treasure of Hawai‘i" bestowed by a Honolulu Buddhist church. Her most recent books include a collection of essays, Hawai‘i One Summer, and latest novel, The Fifth Book of Peace. Kingston is currently Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

Writer, novelist and professor Jamaica Kincaid skillfully and elegantly tempers the boundary between poetry and prose. With her books and novels, including Annie John, Lucy, At the Bottom of the River and A Small Place, she has carved out a unique and cherished place in the American literary landscape.

Kincaid’s literary "voice" is deeply rooted in her experiences as a child in her native Antigua. Growing up under the colonial rule of England instilled in her a tragic, yet often-ignored perspective. Says Kincaid, "I never give up thinking about the way I came into the world, how my ancestors came from Africa to the West Indies as slaves. I just never forget it. It’s like a big wave that’s still pulsing." Known for her candid and emotionally honest writing, in 1976 her work attracted the attention of William Shawn, former editor of The New Yorker, where she became a staff writer and featured columnist for nine years.

Kincaid won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts for her first book, At the Bottom of the River. Her award-winning book, A Small Place, inspired the 2001 documentary, Life and Debt, about the impact globalization can have on a developing country. Kincaid is at work on a new novel, See Now Then.

A professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences April 29, 2009. She's also the 2010 recipient of the Clifton Fadiman Medal. Prior to joining Claremont Mckenna College in 2009, Kincaid began her academic career in 1991 at Harvard University holding joint appointments in the English and African-American Studies departments