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Walloon Writers Retreat— September 25 - 28, 2003
2003 Guest Authors
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Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library "Literary Lion." His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. His readings are usually SRO, and his audience ñ enlarged tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio ñ includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as "a form of travel writing" and considers humor "a door into the serious." It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight. "Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." ó John Updike Billy Collins has published seven collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. In May 2000, Picador in the UK published his collection of poems, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes. In September 2001, Random House published his collection of poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems. In the fall of 2002, Random House published his new collection of poems, Nine Horses, and in spring 2003 Random House will publish an anthology of poems selected and with an introduction by Billy Collins, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. He is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He lives in Somers, New York. In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. |
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Jane Hamilton burrows into the souls of fictional Midwesterners whose own ordinary lives get upended: a young wife battling her abusive mother ("The Book of Ruth"), a schoolteacher whose friend's daughter drowns while in her care ("A Map of the World") and a gay dancer whose personal crises are overshadowed by his brother's cancer ("The Short History of a Prince") In her most recent book, "Disobedience," a 17-year-old boy secretly looks at his mother's e-mail and discovers she is having an extramarital affair. These days, her intense avocations include playing music by Bach and Handel on the recorder. In "Disobedience," she drew on her folk-dancing expertise and love of Baroque music to flesh out the interests of Henry's mother, Beth. Her first novel, "The Book of Ruth," was published in 1989 to laudatory reviews, and it won the PEN/Hemingway Prize for best first novel, but it was hardly a bestseller. With "A Map of the World" five years later, Hamilton again impressed the critics and fared much better commercially. Oprah Winfrey made Hamilton's a name of note even at airport newsstands when she picked "Ruth" for her fledgling book club in 1996. Three years later, the Oprah Book Club featured "A Map of the World," shortly before the release of the movie version, which earned Sigourney Weaver an Oscar nomination. She is one of only three authors chosen twice by the club, along with Toni Morrison and Wally Lamb. She never believed in "women's fiction" until she started reading new fiction full-time for the PEN awards. "I always felt that's baloney, there isn't even such a genre, but there is, you can see it." One of its hallmarks, besides heroines who undergo epiphanies, is "a quality to the prose, a kind of intimacy" that puts the reader "right there in the kitchen," said Hamilton.photo by Jerry Bauer |
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Marie Howe has written two books of poetry and edited a book of writings which address the AIDS pandemic. Her poems explore the spiritual aspects of daily life, including awareness of living and dying. She also emphasizes recovering lost or repressed memoriesóreclaiming experiences that may have been too frightening to remember. Her first book The Good Thief was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Her second book What the Living Do was named one of the five best books of poetry published in l997 by Publishers Weekly. A graduate of the Columbia University M.F.A. program, she is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, as well as the I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Mary Ingram Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. Marie Howe teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. |
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Joyce Maynard burst onto the literary scene in 1972 with the publication of a New York Times Magazine cover story, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life," followed the next year by her first book, "Looking Back," a memoir about growing up in the sixties. Since then Maynard has published three novels and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles for such publications as "Newsweek," "The New York Times," "Self," "Glamour, " "Mademoiselle," and "Vogue." As a writer of fiction, Maynard is best known as the author of the novel, "To Die For," made into a film by Gus van Sant starring Nicole Kidman. She is also the author of "Where Love Goes," and "Baby Love." In her memoir, "At Home in the World," she chronicles not only her young years, but her year-long relationship, at age eighteen, with a mesmerizing man thirty years older, author J.D. Salinger. In her years as a journalist, Maynard has written about a vast range of subjects, but her themes nearly always involve the unique issues facing families - particularly women - raising children, while pursuing lives beyond the kitchen. Maynard's new novel is The Usual Rules, out in February of 2003 with St. Martins Press. |
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Craig Holden, like many writers, held a variety of jobs before becoming a full time writer, including high school teacher, college instructor, factory worker, literary agent and night-shift technician at a medical center lab. His hospital experiences inspired his acclaimed first novel, The River Sorrow, the story of an emergency room doctor who becomes involved in a murder investigation. Published by Delacorte in 1994, the New York Time Book Review called it ìan auspicious beginning for Holden.î His second novel, The Last Sanctuary (Delacorte, 1996), which has been optioned for film, is the story of a war veteran drawn into a world of underground militias and terrorist cults after being falsely accused of murder. This ìliterary thrillerî earned further praise from Robert B. Parker, Tony Hillerman and James Ellroy, among others. Craigís most recent novel, Four Corners Of Night (Island paperback, 1999), was awarded The Great Lakes Booksellers 1999 Book Award in Fiction. Craigís book The Jazz Bird was published by Simon & Schuster in January of 2002 and has just been released in paperback. |
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Laurel Blossom's most recent book of poetry is THE PAPERS SAID (Greenhouse Review Press, 1993). Earlier books include WHATíS WRONG (Cobham & Hatherton Press, 1987) and ANY MINUTE (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, and in national journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Pequod, The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Deadsnake Apotheosis, Many Mountains Moving and others. She recently completed a book-length poem, ìDegrees of Latitudeî, the first in a projected trilogy. Blossom is the editor of SPLASH! GREAT WRITING ABOUT SWIMMING (Ecco Press, 1996) and MANY LIGHTS IN MANY WINDOWS: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community (Milkweed Editions,1997). Blossom has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She also received a scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writersí Conference and a residency at Yaddo. |
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Jason Shinder’s second book of poems, Among Women, was recently published by Graywolf Press. He is the editor of several books, most recently Tales From The Couch: Writers On Therapy, The First Book Market, and Best American Movie Writing, of which he is the series editor. What Thou Loves Well Remains, a book of his conversations with poets on poets of the past is forthcoming in 2002 (University of Michigan Press). He teaches in the graduate writing programs of Bennington College and the New School University. A graduate of Skidmore College and the University of California at Davis, he also holds certificates from Naropa Institute and the National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis. He is the founder and director of the YMCA National Writer’s Voice, a network of literary arts centers at YMCAs, and is also the director of the writing program at Sundance Institute. |
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M.L.Liebler
has authored 10 books of poetry and fiction including the recently
released Written In Rain:New & Selected Poems 1985-2000 (Tebot Bach
Books in Los Angeles). Also in print, "Brooding the Heartlands: Poets
of the Midwest" (1998), "Breaking the Voodoo" (1990), "Deliver
Me" (1990), and the 1995 Viet Nam Generation Press release, "Stripping
the Adult Century Bare." Much of his work has been published in Exquisite
Corpse, Rolling Stock, Cottonwood Review, River Styx, Gargoyle, and anthologies
from Michigan State University, Kent State University, and Viking-Penguin.
He directs The Writer’s Voice at the Metropolitan Detroit YMCA and
has been on full-time faculty in literature, creative writing, American
Studies and Labor Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980. |
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Kathleen Ripley Leo is a native of Chicago and received her MA in Latin American Literature from the University of Pittsburgh where she had the opportunity to study with Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz. Twice given a special tribute by the Michigan legislature for her work as a poet in residence in Michigan schools, Ms. Leo is an esteemed Michigan poet listed in Poets and Writers, the Creative Writers in the Schools program of the Michigan Council for the Arts, and Michigan Authors. She is the past president of Detroit Women Writers, an organization noted
for its over 35 year Writers Conference co-sponsored by Oakland University,
in Rochester, Michigan. Kathleen leads manuscript workshops at universities
in poetry and fiction, and is a popular speaker at conferences and readings.
She is published through literary presses, and has won prizes and grants
for her work, including two nominations for a Pushcart. We are featuring
three of her books here, with excerpts: The Old Ways, Town One South,
and The Circle is Assembled. |
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Terry Wooten, Michigan's poet bard, has a special gift for helping people relate to poetry and enjoy it. Offering more than ninety poets' work from which his audience can select, he recites in juke-box fashion their requests --whether the audience is 5 or 50. Terry's oral repertoire of over eight hours includes poems by many well-know poets --from Chaucer to Whitman-- as well as his own poems. He is a living anthology of classic literature, folklore, children's and contemporary poetry, presented in an educational and entertaining package. The range of his selections run rich in humor or can reflect the more serious issues of our modern times. |
M.L.Liebler
