Anselm Berrigan
Friday, September 14, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Anselm Berrigan is a poet and author of three books of poetry, all published by Edge Books: Some Notes on My Programming (2006); Zero Star Hotel (2002); and Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999). He currently is writing an in-progress serial poem (long poem made of short poems) with repeating title of "Have A Good One."
(To read an excerpt, visit www.2ndavepoetry.com.)
From 2003 – 2007 Berrigan served as artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and hosted its weekly Wednesday Night Reading Series for four seasons. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he coedited the 750-page Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2005).
He is currently core faculty in the Bard College summer MFA program and a visiting writer at Wesleyan University for the fall 2007 semester. He lived in San Francisco from 1994–1996, and now lives in his hometown of New York.
Jess Walter
Friday, September 21, 2007
7 p.m., Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Jess Walter is the author of four novels, most recently The Zero, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and recipient of the 2007 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. His previous novel, Citizen Vince, was awarded the 2006 Edgar Allen Poe Award for best novel. He also authored one nonfiction book and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award in both fiction and nonfiction.
Walter's work has been recognized as either notable or as a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews. His short fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in Playboy, Details, Story, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Peter Orner
Friday, September 28, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo: A Novel, awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His collection, Esther Stories (2001), earned the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Orner's fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, McSweeney's, and Best American Stories. In 2006 Orner received a Guggenheim Fellow distinction.
He currently serves as faculty at San Francisco State University.
Anna Joy Springer
Friday, October, 19, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Anna Joy Springer received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Among her teaching and writing interests: graphic texts (including sculptural poetry, intermedia installations, digital literatures, and comics); interrelationship of age and gender, experimental theater, punk rock, feminist ethics, taxonomic and tonal literary structures, and literary arts pedagogies.
Jane Miller
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Graduate Lecture Series
Jane Miller is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, not including Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1996). Other collections include A Palace of Pearls and Wherever You Lay Your Head (Copper Canyon Press). Miller has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a third from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She placed first in the National Poetry Series Open Competition in 1982 with The Greater Leisures and coauthored Black Holes, Black Stockings (with Olga Broumas). Working Time is Miller's collection of essays on poetry, culture, and travel (University of Michigan Press).
She has taught at Goddard College, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of Arizona in Tucson where she also served as program director for its Creative Writing program (1999–2003).
From Jane Miller:
I've always believed that one of the functions of art is the transformation of sorrow. To use the terms we use with painting, I've moved from the abstract to the figurative. No big deal, really, just a matter of emphasis or perspective, but also a matter of form, of finding form. For so long I worked associatively, burying the story, now I need to inhabit and reconstruct the physical spaces. I go in, as into an excavation, through the hot weather, the beach, the bedroom, the hospital, the condominium where things happen, not to describe, as a novelist might, but to analogize, metaphorize, and to refigure the real and let it tear. More often than not, this starts by presenting the salient features (of place, structure, landscape) and then, by way of compression–poetry's habit of mind–distilling the experience into feeling. This compression, this distillation, I think of as essential to art, and essentially erotic, in the sense that Eros is the friction of creation.
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.
Fiction Publishing Panel
Friday, November 11, 2007
Fiction Publishing Panel features Tom Barbash, Aimee Phan, Michelle Richmond, and Gloria Frym.
Claudia Rankine
Friday, November 16, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
"Claudia Rankine has made of her savage and stern intelligence, her ruthlessness and her terror, great art." —Louise Glück
Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Claudia Rankine's voice is one of unflinching and unrelenting candor, and her poetry is some of the most innovative and thoughtful to emerge in recent years. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at Williams College and Columbia University, Rankine has authored four collections of poetry, including the award-winning Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). In The End of the Alphabet and Plot, she welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque.
Her latest book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)—an experimental multigenre project that blends poetry, essays, and image—is an experimental and deeply personal exploration of the condition of fragmented self-hood in contemporary America. According to poet Robert Creeley: "Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I've yet seen. It's master work in every sense, and altogether her own."
Rankine coedited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and her work is included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project newsletter.
She lives and teaches in California.
Aimee Phan
Friday, December 7, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Aimee Phan was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first book, We Should Never Meet: Stories, was named a Notable Book by the Kiryama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, and The Oregonian. She is currently an assistant professor in the BFA & MFA writing programs at the California College of the Arts.
Brenda Hillman
Friday, December 30, 2007
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), all from Wesleyan University Press. Additionally, she has authored three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, coedited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003).
Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Hillman has been increasingly interested in the innovative and experimental lyric traditions, particularly in how the Romantic concepts of nature and spirit have manifested in contemporary poetry. In her essay entitled, "Split, Spark, and Space," Hillman writes about the emergence of different kinds of lyric impulses in her writing: "The sense of a single 'voice' in poetry grew to include polyphonies, oddly collective dictations, and the process of writing itself. This happened in part because of a rediscovered interest in esoteric western tradition and in part because I came to a community of women who were writing in exploratory forms. . . . A poetic method which had heretofore been based on waiting for insight suddenly had to accommodate process, and indeterminate physics, a philosophy of detached looking."
Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She is a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers' Conference and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hillman is also involved in nonviolent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is married to poet Robert Hass.
Aya de Leon
Friday, January 18, 2008
7 p.m., Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Writer, performer, hip hop theater artist, poetic activist, and community healer, Aya de Leon lives in Oakland, California. Her work has received acclaim in the Village Voice, the Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, the Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was named 2004's best discovery in theater by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a Goldie Award in spoken word from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2005 she was voted "Slamminest Poet" in the East Bay Express annual Best of the Bay edition.
In November 2006 Aya performed in Voices of a People's History with Mos Def, Alice Walker, Luis Valdez, Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove, and others. In April of 2005 Aya and Mos Def cohosted a kickoff rally for Al Gore's Current TV on cable network. In 2004 she appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and was a finalist for Showtime's American Candidate Reality television series. She also has shared the stage with a wide range of performers: hip hop and spoken word artists Mos Def, KRS ONE, The Roots, Saul Williams, De La Soul, The Coup, Mystic, Sarah Jones, and Danny Hoch; literary artists Sonia Sanchez, Tillie Olsen, Walter Mosley, and Alice Walker; musicians Tracy Chapman, Bonnie Raitt, Alanis Morrisette, Susana Baca; and activists Danny Glover, Barbara Lee, Julia Butterfly Hill, Al Gore, Woody Harrelson, Howard Zinn, and Ram Dass. In 2004 she coauthored the book How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office.
Aya came remarkably close to being elected in her fall 2004 show, Aya de Leon is Running for President. Her previous show, Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip Hop, played to sold-out crowds in the Bay Area and toured with the Hip Hop Theater All Stars.
Aya has taught spoken word and poetry at Stanford University and has been a guest artist in residence at New York Theatre Workshop. She is a Cave Canem poetry fellow and a slam-poetry champion. In 2003 she presented her work at the Ford Foundation in New York and The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
In 1996 Aya married herself, and her article about the experience was featured in Essence magazine. For the past 10 years Aya has been hosting annual alternative Valentine's Day celebrations in spoken word and music that focus on self-love, love of Spirit, love of community, and in recent years, love of peace and democracy. In 2004 she began a new Valentine's tradition, the Beloved Self, a mass self-marriage ceremony and workshop extravaganza. From 2004 to 2005 she married more than 60 persons to themselves.
A graduate of Harvard College, Aya studied theater with Whoopi Goldberg, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the Jean Shelton School. She also studied fiction in the MFA program at Bennington College. Aye is currently working on her first novel, as well as a collection of essays about self-love. She released her first spoken-word CD, "Aya de Leon: Live at La Pena" in 2003 and her next one, "Joy in the Struggle," in 2005. Aya is the director of June Jordan's Poetry for the People and is currently teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.
Renee Gladman
Friday, January 25, 2008
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Born in Atlanta and a former resident of San Francisco and New York City, Gladman indicates the urban experience is always present in her writing. Her prose collection includes the chapbooks Arlem and Not Right Now, as well as the full-length books Juice and The Activist. Last year she published a book of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her sixth book, titled Newcomer Can't Swim, will be published this spring. Brian Evenson, director of the Literary Arts Program, calls Gladman "one of the most interesting and most innovative cross-genre writers working today."
Gladman received her bachelor's in philosophy from Vassar College and her master's in poetics from New College of California. Prior to joining Brown's Literary Arts program, she taught at Pratt Institute, Naropa University Summer Writing Program, and University of California at San Diego. She also was a writer-in-residence at Brown University in the fall of 2001.
Since 2004 Gladman has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a perfect-bound series of books for "experimental prose and thinking text." Previously, she founded the Leroy chapbook series, under which she edited and published 10 chapbooks of innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers.
Gladman speaks with passion about having her next books "appear in the world." Her new work, including two novellas set in the fictional Eastern European locale Ravicka, is concerned with "a kind of globalist fiction that explores translation, structure and community as passages to a deeper understanding of experience." In a forthcoming book, Prose City, Gladman explores those conditions that create prose—and she again connects this to a city landscape.
According to Gladman: "When you think about a person writing sentences, I literally think of that person moving through the space of language. What kinds of things come up when you're navigating a space? If students become more aware of that . . . it seems it would make writing more interesting."
Dodie Bellamy
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
7 p.m., Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Graduate Lecture Series
Dodie Bellamy, who grew up in the Calumet region of Indiana and studied at Indiana University, has become one of today's most-celebrated innovative writers since her epistolary masterpiece, The Letters of Mina Harker, first appeared in the 1990s. Identified as one of the original New Narrative writers and widely compared to Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles for her unapologetic use of sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, Bellamy frequently writes about feminism, cultural politics, literary transgression, queer culture, AIDS, and body issues.
Bellamy's various titles include a wide number of hybrid and innovative books that challenge and flaunt the boundaries of genre: Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro (Talisman House, 1995), her epistolary collaboration with the late Sam D'Allesandro, which tackles AIDS, sexual transgression, and the desire for the forbidden; Feminine Hijinx (Hanuman, 1990); Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2002), a radical feminist revision of the "cut-up" pioneered by William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin, which won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Poetry; and Fat Chance (Nomados, 2004). University of Wisconsin Press reprinted Letters of Mina Harker in 2004 with an introduction by Dennis Cooper. Also in 2004 San Francisco's Suspect Thoughts Press published Pink Steam, a collection of her fiction, memoirs, and essays. Academonia, another cross-genre collection—essays and fiction that incorporate essay elements—is forthcoming from Factory School.
Bellamy's writing has appeared in, among others, the anthologies Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache, Best American Erotica 2001, High Risk, The New Fuck You, and Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, Out/Look, San Diego Reader, Nest, and elsewhere. Bellamy is currently working on The Fourth Form, a multidimensional sex novel.
In 1998 Bellamy was awarded the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature. For five years she served as director of Small Press Traffic, the seminal San Francisco writing lab. Currently she is an associate faculty member in the MFA program at Antioch Los Angeles and a lecturer in the Creative Writing Department of San Francisco State University and California College of the Arts. With Kevin Killian, she has edited over 100 issues of the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period(ical).
Poetry Publishing Panel
Friday, February 15, 2008
Panel members: TBA
Marcia Douglas
Friday, February 22, 2008
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Marcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her novels include Madam Fate (Soho, 1999) and Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells (Peepal Tree Press, 2005), and her collection of poetry, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (Peepal Tree Press, 1999) received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the United Kingdom.
Douglas's work has appeared in anthologies and journals internationally, including The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse; Mojo: Conjure Stories; Enlaces: Transnacionalidad- El Caribe y su Diáspora- Lengua, Literatura y Cultura en los Albores del Siglo XXI; Whispers from under the Cotton Tree Root; The Forward Book of Poetry 2000; Cultural Activism: Poetic Voices, Political Voices; The Edexcel Anthology for GCSE English; and Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean.
Marcia lives in Broomfield, Colorado.
Erin Mouré
Friday, February 29, 2008
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Originally from Calgary, Ontario, Mouré wrote her first collection of poetry in Vancouver, British Columbia, Empire, York Street (House of Anansi Press, 1979), which was nominated for a Canada Council for the Arts' Governor General's Award. She then authored Wanted Alive and Domestic Fuel (Anansi, 1983, 1985 respectively), the latter of which was awarded the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Mouré has lived in Montreal since 1985, where she published Furious (Anansi, 1988), and for which she received a Governor General's Award); WSW (West South West) (Véhicule Press, 1989), which received the QSPELL award); and Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love (Véhicule, 1992). She next released a collection of selected poems, The Green Word (Oxford University Press Canada,1994). Her book-length poem titled, Pillage Laud, was released as a special book edition (Moveable Type, 1998), followed by a collection of poems, A [The] Frame of the Book (Anansi, 1999).
Mouré also has published four chapbooks: The Whisky Vigil (Harbour, 1981), Excess (Pocket Edition, 1988), Visible Spectrum (pomflit, 1992) and Search Procedures, or Lake This (disOrientation, 1993), a finalist for a Governor General's Award.
Mouré works as a freelance editor, translator, and communications specialist in Montreal, Québec. She has previously led short workshops on poetry and poetic practice in Banff, Alberta; Fredericton and St. John's, New Brunswick; Sydney, Nova Scotia; Calgary and Kingston, Ontario; Montreal (Québec); and within the United States in Fort Collins, Colorado and Santa Barbara, California. She has taught supervision and management skills, communications practices, and strategic planning in corporate and educational settings alike. She also occasionally teaches creative writing and poetry at Concordia University in Montreal.
Karen Bender
Friday, March 7, 2008
3:30–5:30 p.m., Writers' Studio, San Francisco campus
Karen E. Bender grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in New York with her husband and son. She authored the novel Like Normal People (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), and her short stories have appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Story, the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, and others. Her fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize series and read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space in New York.
Bender has taught fiction writing at the YMCA National Writer's Voice program in New York, as well as the MFA programs at Antioch Los Angeles and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Bender received her bachelor's from the University of California at Los Angeles and her MFA from Iowa Writer's Workshop. She's received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She will use her fellowship grant to work on a story collection titled, Anything for Money.
Creative Nonfiction Publishing Panel
Friday, March 14, 2008
Panel members: TBA