teachers

Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel's most recent poetry books are Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). A bilingual edition of her poems, Afortunada de mí (Lucky Me), translated into Spanish by Dagmar Buchholz and David Gonzalez, came out in 2008 with Bartleby Editores (Madrid.) Her work has been anthologized widely, including eight editions of The Best American Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

John Frey

John Frey is a graduate of the William Esper Studio for Actors in New York City (Meisner Technique) under the teaching of William Esper, and has worked as an actor in theater, film, and television in Europe and the United States for the past fifteen years. He has also taught acting in Lisbon, Copenhagen, and New York City. John is also a screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for “The Lovebirds,” shot in Lisbon, Portugal in 2007. “The Lovebirds” garnered the Best Screenplay, First Prize Award at the 2008 International Film Festival in Ourense, Spain and was also awarded a special Jury First Prize Award for Best Film at the Fantasporto International Film Festival, Portugal. John also co-wrote the feature films “The Collection” and”Delgado.” The latter is based on the assasination of the Portuguese General Humberto Delgado and will begin shooting in Portugal in February, 2011.

Philip Graham

Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collections The Art of the Knock (William Morrow) and Interior Design (Scribner), and the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language (Scribner).  He is also the co-author (with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb) of two memoirs of Africa, Parallel Worlds (Crown/Random House) and, most recently, Braided Worlds (University of Chicago Press).  His memoir of living for a year in Portugal, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon (University of Chicago Press), has been translated into Portuguese as Do Lado de Ca do Mar (Editorial Presença).

Graham’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Paris Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and elsewhere.  He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction.  He teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is a co-founder and the current nonfiction editor of the literary/arts magazine Ninth Letter, and is the recipient of three campus teaching awards.  He also teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing.

 

Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones has written for McSweeney’s, the New York Times, and The Believer. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, received best-of-the-year nods from The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Creative Loafing. Her second book, The Untelling, won the Lillian C. Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council. And her most recent book, Silver Sparrow, was an O, The Oprah Magazine Best Book for 2011, a Library Journal Best Book for 2011, and the National Women’s Book Association 2011 Great Group Read.

Jones holds degrees from Spelman College, Arizona State University, and the University of Iowa. She spent the 2011–2012 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and in 2012, she was awarded a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information, visit www.tayarijones.com.

Adam Levin

Adam Levin's stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Tin House/Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, Levin holds an MA in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. His collection of short stories, Hot Pink, was published by McSweeney's in 2011. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College and The School of the Art Institute. He also has a parrot.

Robert Olmstead

Fiction writer Robert Olmstead is the author of eight books including the bestseller Coal Black Horse which received the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the Ohioana Book Award. Far Bright Star, his most recent novel, received the 2010 Western Writers of America Spur Award for best novel. His work has appeared in such places as Black Warrior Review, Spin,McSweeney’s, Granta, Epoch, Ploughshares, Mid-American Review and Sports Afield. He was a contributing writer for both the Washington Redskins and Carolina Panther’s Game Day Book. He has earned senior arts awards from Pennsylvania and Ohio, an Apex Award in Journalism, and an Idaho Press Club Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant. His reputation is international, with translations in both Europe and Asia. He is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University and the MFA Program at Converse College. He is a graduate of Syracuse University and teaches widely throughout America and in Europe and Russia.

Katherine Vaz

Katherine Vaz has been a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University and Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. This fall she is the Harman Fellow in Fiction at Baruch College. She’s the author of two novels, SAUDADE (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection) and MARIANA, published in six languages and picked by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998. Her collection FADO & OTHER STORIES won a Drue Heinz Literature Prize and OUR LADY OF THE ARTICHOKES won a Prairie Schooner Award. Her children’s stories have appeared in anthologies by Viking, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster, and her short fiction has appeared in many magazines. She lives in New York City.

She’s the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded by the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division). Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a citation as a Portuguese-American Woman of the Year, an appointment to the six-person Presidential Delegation (Clinton) to the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon.

Terri Witek

Terri Witek is the author of Exit Island, which includes a suite of images by Cyriaco Lopes and an art book edition (Orchises Press, 2012), The Shipwreck Dress (Orchises Press, 2008, Florida Book Award Medalist), Carnal World (Story Line Press, 2006), Fools and Crows (Orchises Press, 2003), Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest) and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self (University of Missouri Press, 1993). She has published poems in Slate, The Hudson Review, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and other journals, and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat, and the state of Florida. A native of northern Ohio, she holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University.

http://www.terriwitek.com/