Jane
Smiley |
Lee Ann
Roripaugh |
Pam
Houston |
Brenda
Miller |
Hal
Herzog |
Aaron
Poochigian |
Mark
Doty |
Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California, moved to the suburbs of St. Louis,
Missouri as an infant, and lived there through grammar school and high school (The John Burroughs School). After getting her BA at Vassar College in 1971, she traveled in Europe for a year, working on an archeological dig and sightseeing, and then returned to Iowa for graduate school at the University of Iowa.
MFA and PhD in hand, she went to work in 1981 at Iowa State University, in Ames, where she taught until 1996. Jane is the author of numerous novels including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Moo, Horse Heaven, Good Faith, Ten Days in the Hills, and the young adult novel, The Georges and the Jewels, as well as many essays for such magazines as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper’s,The New York Times Magazine, Allure, The Nation and others. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying,
getting dressed, Barbie, marriage, and many other topics. She is also the author of the
nonfiction books A Year at the Races, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel and from Penguin Lives Series, a biography of Charles Dickens. In 2001, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2006, she received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.
Jane lives in Northern California, as do several of her horses.
Lee Ann Roripaugh describes herself as a hapa poet and fiction writer of Japanese-American descent who, having grown up in Laramie, Wyoming with a first-generation Japanese mother, is a fusion of East-meets-American West. Originally trained as a classical pianist, she now finds herself obsessed with insects, mollusks, art glass, jellyfish, jazz, and sushi -- but not necessarily in that order. She is the author of three volumes of poetry: Beyond Heart Mountain (National Poetry Series - Penguin, 1999), Year of the Snake (Crab Orchard Poetry Series - Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), and On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Crab Orchard Poetry Series - Southern Illinois University Press, 2009). She currently lives in Vermillion, South Dakota, with several very wayward cats, and teaches creative writing and literature at The University of South Dakota.
Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Her new book, Contents May Have Shifted, will be published by W.W. Norton in early 2012.
Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002), co-author of Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2003), and of a collection Blessing of the Animals, (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009) whose essays include two Pushcart Prize winning essays (“Blessing of the Animals” and “Raging Waters”) and "Table of Figures" which was named a "Notable Essay" in The Best American Essays, 2009 and was selected for inclusion in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3, by W.W. Norton. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes and has been published in many journals, including Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, Utne Reader, The Georgia Review, and The Missouri Review.
Brenda lives in Bellingham, WA, with her dog Abbe and her cat Madrona, both of whom are acting as muses for her next book, and where she is a Professor of English at Western Washington University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.
Hal Herzog has been investigating the complex psychology of our interactions with other species for more than two decades. He is particularly interested in how people negotiate real-world ethical dilemmas, and he has studied animal activists, cockfighters, animal researchers, and circus animal trainers. An award-winning teacher and researcher, he has written more than 100 articles and book chapters. His research has been published in journals such as Science, The American Psychologist, The Journal of the Royal Society, The American Scholar, New Scientist, Anthrozoös, BioScience, The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, and Animal Behavior. His work has been covered by Newsweek, Slate, Salon, National Public Radio, Scientific American, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and many other newspapers. Hal Herzog is Professor of Psychology at Western Carolina University and lives in the Smoky Mountains with his wife Mary Jean and their cat Tilly.
Aaron Poochigian grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, studied poetry at Moorhead State University, and Classics at the University of Minnesota. He was a visiting professor of Classics at the University of Utah and D.L. Jordon Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He now lives and writes in New York City. He has published translations, with introduction and notes, of Sappho’s poems and fragments for Penguin Classics, and his translations of Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes appear in the Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation. Most recently, he has published an edition of Aratus’ astronomical poem, The Phaenomena, with his introduction and notes. His original poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Arion, The Dark Horse, Poetry Magazine and Smartish Pace.
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird, and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.
Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.
Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Doty lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island. In the fall of 2009, he joined the faculty at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
|
