Award-winning authors to give public performances at IU Writers' Conference
The Indiana University Writers' Conference, now in its 66th year, will welcome 10 nationally renowned writers to Indiana University Bloomington from June 11-16 for a weeklong festival of readings, classes and workshops. The authors will read from their work at a special Evening Reading Series beginning Sunday through Thursday, June 11-15.
Samrat Upadhyay, a creative writing professor at IU Bloomington and author of the critically acclaimed novel "The Guru of Love," is one of 10 nationally renowned writers who will participate in IU's Writers' Conference, now in its 66th year. The writers will give public readings from their work at a special Evening Reading Series beginning Sunday through Thursday, June 11-15.
The readings will start at 8 p.m. each evening in the Harry G. Day Lecture Hall of IU's Chemistry Building and will be followed by a reception with free refreshments in the University Club at the Indiana Memorial Union. The evening readings are free and open to the public.
The schedule of readings is as follows:
Sunday, June 11: Susan Gubar (fiction) and Scott Russell Sanders (nonfiction)
Monday, June 12: Barbara Hamby (poetry), Samrat Upadhyay (fiction), and Tyehimba Jess (poetry)
Tuesday, June 13: Richard Cecil (poetry), Richard McCann (fiction/nonfiction), and Debra Kang Dean (poetry)
Wednesday, June 14: Jon Tribble (poetry), Dana Johnson (fiction), and Mark Wunderlich (poetry)
Thursday, June 15: Allison Joseph (poetry), Amy Bloom (fiction), and David Kirby (poetry)
The IU Writers' Conference attracts a staff of nationally prominent writers who are also excellent teachers. Over the years, many distinguished writers have taught at the conference including Gwendolyn Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Madeleine L'Engle and Raymond Carver. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has described the IU Writers' Conference as "the most respectable writers' conference that I know of."
Conference days are filled with readings, single presentations on writing and publishing, classes and workshops.
Here is biographical information about each writer:
Amy Bloom is the author of Come to Me, Love Invents Us, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude. She has earned a National Magazine Award, as well as nominations for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her short stories have been published in the 1991, 1992 & 2000 Best American Short Stories, and the 1994 O. Henry Prize Story Collection. Her work has also appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Vogue. She is a practicing psychotherapist and instructor at Yale..
Richard Cecil has published four collections of poetry: Twenty First Century Blues, In Search of the Great Dead, Alcatraz, and Einstein's Brain. In 1991 he received the Verna Emery Poetry Award for Alcatraz. His work has been published in a wide array of literary magazines including the Atlanta Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Southern Review. He is an instructor in the Department of English and the honors division of IU.
Debra Kang Dean has written three books of poetry: Back to Back, News of Home, and Precipitates. She won the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition for Back to Back, and was a co-winner of the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Margaret Motton Award for News of Home. Her work has been published in The Best American Poetry 1999, The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City, and Yobo: Korean American Writing in Hawai'i. She teaches in the low-residency master of fine arts program at Spalding University, and serves as a contributing editor for Tar River Poetry.
A Distinguished Professor of English at IU, Susan Gubar is the co-author with Sandra M. Gilbert of The Madwoman in the Attic and its three-volume sequel No Man's Land. Besides co-editing the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, she has published a number of books including Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century, and Poetry after Auschwitz. In 2005 she provided an introduction and notes for the first annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own to appear in the United States. In 2006, her Rooms of Our Own will be published by the University of Illinois Press.
Barbara Hamby is the author of Babel, The Alphabet of Desire, Delirium, Skin, and Eating Bees. She won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Prize for Delirium, as well as the New York University Prize for Poetry for The Alphabet of Desire. She also received the 2003 AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Babel. The Florida Arts Council has awarded her with three fellowships, and she has received one fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in many journals including Best American Poetry 2000, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Pushcart Prizes 2001. She is a writer-in-residence at Florida State University.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of leadbelly, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He is an alumnus of Cave Canem, New York University, and the Chicago Green Mill Slam teams. He received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000-2001, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. He currently teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Dana Johnson is the author of Break Any Woman Down, for which she received the 2000 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In addition, her book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Patterson Fiction Prize. Her stories have been published in the Missouri Review, American Literary Review, and Ninth Letter. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Shaking the Tree: A Collection of Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, The Dictionary of Failed Relationships: 26 Stories of Love Gone Wrong, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. A graduate of IU's Creative Writing Program, she is currently an assistant professor at the University of California Riverside.
Allison Joseph is the author of Worldly Pleasures, Imitation of Life, and Soul Train. What Keeps Us Here, her first collection of poetry, received the Ampersand Press Women Poets Series Prize and was awarded the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize by Ploughshares and Emerson College. She has also received a Literary Award and an Individual Artist's Fellowship in Poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Conference and the Sewanee Conference. She has earned awards from the Georgia State University Review, the Oregon State Poetry Society, the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, the Rock River Times, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art. Her work has appeared in 1997: Soul Train and In Every Seam. She is the poetry editor for The Crab Orchard Review, and is an associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University.
David Kirby is the 2006 Earle J.S. Ho endowed poet. He has published over 20 books, as well as numerous articles and reviews. His most recent works include The Ha-Ha, What is a Book?, The Travelling Library, and House of Blue Light. He has been awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, four Pushcart Prizes, as well as the Guy Owen Prize, the Kay Deeter Award, and the James Dickey Prize. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Florida Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is regularly featured in the New York Times, and his poetry has been included in Best American Poetry 2000 and Best American Poetry 2001. In 1992 and 1997 he received the University Teaching Award, and in 1994 and 1999 he won the Teaching Incentive Program Award. He is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University.
Richard McCann is the author of the poetry collection Ghost Letters and the story collection Mother of Sorrows. He was also the editor (along with Michael Klein) for the book Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. He has earned the 1994 Beatrice Hawley Award and the 1993 Capricorn Poetry Award for Ghost Letters, as well as various honors from the Fulbright Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. His work has been published in The Atlantic, Esquire, Ms., Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine. He is an instructor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the American University in Washington, D.C..
Jon Tribble is the managing editor of The Crab Orchard Review and teaches literature and writing at Southern Illinois University. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and masters degrees from IU Bloomington, where he was a staff member and editor for the Indiana Review. His work has been published in a number of journals, including Crazyhorse, The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Ploughshares, Poetry, Quarterly West, and Where We Live: Illinois Poets. His honors include the 2001 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize and a 2003 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award in Poetry.
Samrat Upadhyay is the author of the short story collection Arresting God in Kathmandu and the novel Guru of Love, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003. He won the Whiting Writers' Award for Arresting God in Kathmandu. His work has been published in Scribner's Best of the Writing Workshops and in Best American Short Stories 1999. He was born in Nepal, and he is the first person from his country to have his work published in English in the West. He is a professor of English at IU Bloomington.
Mark Wunderlich has published two collections of poetry: The Anchorage and Voluntary Servitude. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University and has been the recipient of the 1999 Lambda Literary Award, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship. He has received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and his work has been published in the Boston Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Southwest Review, Quarterly West, and Yale Review. He currently teaches at Bennington College in Vermont.
The Indiana University Writers' Conference is a non-profit organization that supports creative writing in Indiana, the Midwest and throughout the country. For more information visit http://www.indiana.edu/~writecon.
