Maxine Chernoff
November 3, 2006
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Maxine Chernoff is a professor and chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing.
She is the author of six books of fiction and eight books of poetry, most recently Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005), of which Cole Swenson said, "Among the Names [creates] a vast and layered network, in short, an economy. Exploring complexities of 'the gift,' Chernoff's is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new."
Her work has appeared in many magazines including Conjunctions, Zyzzyva, North American Review, Chicago Review, the Paris Review, Partisan Review, Sulfur, New Directions Annual, Denver Quarterly, Hambone, Slope, and Verse. Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her novel A Boy in Winter is currently in production in Canada by an independent film company. With Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which will be published by Omnidawn Press in 2007.
Chris Abani
November 9, 2006
7 p.m., Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Imprisoned by the Nigerian regime at age 18 when his debut novel was deemed a threat to national security, Chris Abani continued, after his release, to challenge injustice, as part of a guerrilla theater group that performed plays in front of government buildings. His activism led to more arrests and, eventually, a death sentence. When he was finally released, he chose exile, settling first in the United Kingdom and then in California.
Abani's prose includes the forthcoming novel The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2006), the novella Becoming Abigail (Akashic Books, 2006), and GraceLand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004). His poetry collections include Hands Washing Water (Red Hen Press, 2004) and Dog Woman (2004).
He is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the California Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN Hemingway Book Prize.
Pizza, Poetry, Prose
November 10, 2006
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
With music by DJ Zachary
Students and faculty read in an informal setting, including music, pizza, and beverages.
Robert Olmstead
November 17, 2006
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Robert Olmstead is author of the upcoming novel Coal Black Horse (Algonquin, 2007) and the memoir Stay Here With Me (Henry Holt & Co., 1996). His work has appeared in several journals and magazines, including Mid-American Review, McSweeney's, Idaho Review, Cutbank, Black Warrior Review, the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Story, Ploughshares, Granta, Faultline, Writers Digest, New York Times Book Review, Spin, and Sports Afield.
He has been a regular book reviewer and food critic. He has received an Idaho Press Club Award, honorable mention in the O. Henry Awards, honorable mention in Best American Short Stories, Black Warrior Review Fiction Award, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship, an APEX award in journalism, National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Pennsylvania Council on the Senior Arts Literature Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Literature Fellowship.
He is currently the director of creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Ted Pelton
December 8, 2006
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Ted Pelton is the author of Malcolm & Jack (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006), a novel based on a conjectured meeting between Jack Kerouac and Malcolm X.
Pelton earned a master's in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a PhD in English at University of Buffalo, and received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. In 2000, he founded Starcherone Books (pronounced "start yer own"), which publishes innovative fiction and sponsors an annual contest. Starcherone published Pelton's debut collection, Endorsed by Jack Chapeau (2005).
He has also published widely as a critic, having written on Robert Creeley, Ben Marcus, Kenneth Koch, and Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Fiction International, Electronic Book Review, and elsewhere.
He lives in Buffalo, where he is an associate professor of humanities at Medaille College.
Word. World.
December 9, 2006
7 p.m., Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Followed by a reception in the Writers' Studio
Please come to celebrate our December graduates: Heather O'Neill, Greg Thompson, Francesca Myman, and Elliot Harmon, who will read from the work that earned them an MFA in Writing.
Holiday Party and Reading
December 15, 2006
5–8 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Celebrate the end of the semester with food, beverages, and words!
Diane di Prima
January 19, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Followed by pizza and a poetry and prose reading
Diane di Prima has 40 years worth of books: poetry books, nonfiction books, collaborative books, audio books. She's a key figure in the formation of the beat movement.
Recent titles include Revolutionary Letters (2006); First Thought Best Thought (audio CD, 2004), with William S. Bourroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman; and her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (Viking Adult, 2001). She is also the author of Memoirs of a Beatnik (Penguin, 1998).
Her work has been translated into at least 20 languages. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993, she received an award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the National Poetry Association. In May–June 1994, she was artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 1999, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. In spring 2000, she was poet in residence at Columbia College, Chicago. She was recently nominated to be the first poet laureate of California.
Her works in progress include Opening to the Poem, a book of exercises and essays on poetics; Death Poems for All Seasons; Alchemical Studies (poetry); Not Quite Buffalo Stew, a surreal novel about California life; The Mysteries of Vision, a book of essays on H.D.; and One Too Like Thee, a study of Shelley's poetic use of traditional Western magic. She lives and writes in San Francisco.
Laura Mullen
January 26, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Poet Laura Mullen is the author of Subject (University of California Press, 2005). She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently teaches at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.
Her first collection of poems, The Surface (1991), was chosen as a National Poetry Series selection. She is also the author of The Tales of Horror (Kelsey Street Press, 1999).
Her writing has won many awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Linda Hull Memorial Prize, the Eisner Prize (University of California, Berkeley), and the Stanford Prize. She is also a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award.
Dan Chaon
February 2, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Dan Chaon's novel You Remind Me of Me (Ballantine, 2004) was listed as one of the best books of 2004 by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. His book of short stories, Among the Missing (Ballantine, 2001), was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award.
Chaon's stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories (1996 and 2003), Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize (2000, 2002, and 2003), The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005.
His work has been translated into 10 languages. He is most recently the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Chaon lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two sons, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College, where he is the Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities.
Pizza, Poetry, Prose
February 9, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Students and faculty read in an informal setting, including music, pizza, and beverages.
Martha Collins
February 16, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Martha Collins's newest book of poetry, Blue Front, was published by Graywolf Press in 2006. She has several other books to her name, including the chapbook Gone So Far (Barnwood, 2005). She has published numerous poems and translations in magazines and anthologies.
Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant.
A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005. Other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.
Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and has taught at Oberlin College since 1997, where she is Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and one of the editors of FIELD magazine and Oberlin College Press.
Michael Palmer
February 22, 2006
7 p.m., Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Michael Palmer is the author of 10 books of poetry, including Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), which is short listed for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and The Promises of Glass (New Directions, 2001).
Avec Books published a prose work, The Danish Notebook, in 1999. His work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, Grand Street, and O-blek.
Palmer's honors include two grants from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989–90 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. During 1992–94 he held a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award. From 1999 to 2004, he served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In the spring of 2001, he received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He has also won the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 prize given annually for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry." He lives in San Francisco.
Pizza, Poetry, Prose
March 2, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Students and faculty read in an informal setting, including music, pizza, and beverages.
Ann Williams
April 2007 (date forthcoming)
5:30–7:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Ann Joslin Williams's short story collection, The Woman in the Woods, won the Spokane Prize for short fiction and is forthcoming in fall 2006 (Eastern Washington University Press).
She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Story, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Chattahoochee Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.