CHRISTINE EVANS

Christine Evans’ plays have been produced at many venues in her native Australia, including the Adelaide International Festival of the Arts and Sydney’s Belvoir St. Theatre. Since moving to the U.S., her work has been developed or produced in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Providence, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Santa Rosa, Pittsburgh, Dallas and New Jersey.

Honors include a Fulbright Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Rella Lossy Playwriting Award, the Weston Award in Dramatic Writing, Perishable Theatres’ International Women’s Playwriting Award (Mothergun, 2001; All Souls’ Day, 2002) and the 2007 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (Trojan Barbie).

Productions in 2007 include the October world premiere of Weightless at Perishable Theatre, RI (where Christine is a Resident Artist) and Emergency Theater Project’s New York production of Mothergun. Further details of Christine’s work can be viewed at ozscript.org/author.php?id=211 and www.crowdedfire.org/sfb.html.

Courses:
English Ckr. Introduction to Playwriting
English Clr. Introduction to Screenwriting
English Cakr. Advanced Playwriting
English Calr. Advanced Screenwriting

DARCY FREY

Darcy Frey is the author of The Last Shot (Houghton-Mifflin, 1994), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and George Divoky’s Planet (forthcoming from Pantheon). He has also been a Contributing Editor for Harper’s Magazine and a longtime Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, for which he has written about science, medicine, technology, music, art and the environment. His essays and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Essays and Best American Science Writing. His honors include a National Magazine Award, the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and an award for public service from the Society for Professional Journalists.

On The Last Shot:
“Darcy Frey writes as balletically as the young men in this book play basketball. This is not, however, a book about basketball but about the American Dream…. A spellbinding book.”
--Ken Auletta
 
“Soars toward the basket…. A brilliant portrait of what has gone wrong in our cities and, by extension, in our country.”
--The Chicago Tribune

Courses:
Intro to Creative Nonfiction
The Nonfiction Novella

JORIE GRAHAM

Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, is a former director of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her 1996 volume, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, won the Pulitzer Prize. Other collections of poems include Never (Harper Collins, 2002), and her most recent Overlord (Ecco, 2005).


on The Dream of the Unified Field

"Everything comes together here - the voice like the wind that somehow marshalls itself out of kitchen daydreams and prosaic events into utterance that swings with the conviction of Blake's...(Graham) is one of the finest poets writing today."
--JOHN ASHBERRY

Courses:
English Capr. Advanced Poetry Workshop
English Cpwr. Poetry Workshop

Bret Anthony Johnston, Director of Creative Writing, is the author of the bestselling Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer and the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories, both from Random House.  Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, the collection has won numerous awards, including the Glasgow Prize. His work appears in magazines such as The Paris Review, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Tin House.  In 2006, he received a National Book Award honor for young novelists.   For more information, his website is: www.bretanthonyjohnston.com

On Naming the World..

Not only is Naming the World a rich compendium of provocative prompts, but as a whole it serves as a timely conversation of the larger aesthetic of well-made fiction, a roomful of caring experts.  Mr. Johnston, by assembling these worthy exercises, has done us all a valuable favor.   –Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies and The Hotel Eden

With charm and intelligence, Naming the World touches on nearly every teachable aspect of the devilishly difficult art of writing fiction.    –Ethan Canin, author of America America

On Corpus Christi...

"Here arrives an author with a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and a dead-on eye for conjuring an entire universe with one simple detail. Johnston 's genius lies in weaving a web of optimism around a series of difficult topics. [I]f they are read as they seem destined to be -- obsessively, in one sitting -- their rapt audience will turn the last page with a profound sense of calm." – SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"Corpus Christi, Texas, provides the setting for Johnston's debut collection of ten hard-eyed, soulful stories, but it is primarily a country of the mind. These stories are large hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C. S. Lewis on Chaucer, "every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy" (The Allegory of Love); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last." - BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

Courses:
English Crr, Fiction Writing
English Ctr, Advanced Fiction Writing

JOANNA KLINK

Joanna Klink taught in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Montana for seven years.  A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award in 2003, her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals.  She is the author of They Are Sleeping (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and Circadian (Penguin, 2007).

on They Are Sleeping...

“This is beautiful writing, sensuous and troubling.”—Colorado Review

on Circadian...

“Eliot’s Four Quartets comes to mind, but I think Circadian bears a closer
kinship with Rilke’s Duino Elegies via its gorgeous, anguished calls toward
the space beyond language, or before it…”—Rain Taxi

“Klink writes love poems to nature. . . . This is beautiful writing, and it’s also very
American. Walt Whitman might find something to envy in the way Klink’s more gentle sense of song…tumbles out of simple, individual acts of attention.”—Chicago Tribune

Courses:
Poetry Workshop

JAMAICA KINCAID

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on the island of Antigua. She completed her secondary education under the British system and went on to study photography at the New York School for Social Research, and also attended Franconia College in New Hampshire. Her first writing experience involved a series of articles for Ingenue magazine. In 1973, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. Through her writing, she befriended George W.S. Trow, a writer for the New Yorker, who began writing "Talk of the Town" pieces about her. As a result, Kincaid met the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, who offered her a job. She published her first book At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories in 1983. In 1985, Kincaid published her first novel, Annie John. Her works draw primarily from her childhood in Antigua. Some of her other works include Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Garden (Book) (1999) and Mr. Potter (2002). She teaches creative writing at Bennington College and Harvard University.

on The Autobiography of My Mother

"A book that comes to both haunt and to dazzle us...[Kincaid] writes like an angel: with enviable lucidity and precision and a lyric touch that frequently aspires to the condition of poetry . . ."
--THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

Courses: 
English Cvr. Fiction Writing

PETER RICHARDS


Peter Richards is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the John Logan Award. His poems have appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Yale Review, and other journals. He is the author of Oubliette (Verse Press, 2001), which won the Massachusetts Center for the Book Honors Award. His latest collection is Nude Siren (Verse Press/ Zephyr Press, 2002).

on Nude Siren

"NUDE SIREN reaches us full of mad austerities and wreckless decorums. Using
descriptive intensity as a form of imaginative liberty, these poems come from
the blast furnace of a new idiom, what "Coastal People" calls "a June-fed
incinerator." We never leave the world as we know it but are given it cracked
and glazed through incantatory rites of formal elegance, gritty emotional
longing, and a seemingly limitless verbal range. The force of these volatile
lyrics comes in part from an articulation pushed beyond the combinatory
explosiveness of surrealism toward a vatic brilliance, and their darkness is
utterly convincing because it is so full of comets and stars." -- Dean Young

Courses:
English Cqr. Advanced Poetry Writing
English Cpr. Poetry Writing

DANIEL RUBIN

After many years writing for professional theater companies as well as scripting industrial films and children's television, Danny Rubin began writing screenplays. His screen credits include "Hear No Evil," "S.F.W.," and "Groundhog Day," for which he received the British Academy Award for Best Screenplay and the Critics' Circle Award for Screenwriter of the Year, as well as honors from the Writers Guild of America and the American Film Institute.

Rubin has taught screenwriting in Chicago at the University of Illinois, Columbia College, and the National High School Institute; at the Sundance Institute in Utah; the PAL Screenwriting Lab in England; the Chautauqua Institution in New York; and in New Mexico at the College of Santa Fe.

For more information see Danny's website and blog (the "Blogus groundhogus") at www.dannyrubin.com

Courses:
English Clr. Introduction to Screenwriting
English Calr. Advanced Screenwriting

PETER SACKS

Peter Sacks is the author of five collections of poetry, In These Mountains (Macmillan, 1985), Promised Lands (Viking/Penguin,1990), Natal Command (Chicago, 1998), O Wheel (Georgia, 2000), and Necessity (W.W. Norton & Company, 2002); and of The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Johns Hopkins, 1986). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Boulevard, The Paris Review, and other publications.

on Natal Command

"These are poems of hopelessness, of despair, yet they are restorative in their waves of clear interrogative light, their keen and moving exactitude."
-- CAROL MUSKE in The New York Times Book Review

Courses:
English Cpw. Poetry Workshop

Katherine Vaz, a 2006-7 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Saudade (St. Martin's Press, 1994), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; her second novel, Mariana, was published in six languages and named by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998. Rizzoli in Italy named it one of their top three books of the year, and it was a bestseller in a number of other European countries. Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and her short fiction has appeared in over three dozen magazines, including Tin House , BOMB , Glimmer Train, The Provincetown Arts Journal, The Antioch Review, Ninth Letter, and The Harvard Review.

She is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division) and was on the six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation sent to Expo 98/the World’s Fair in Lisbon. She also published book reviews, essays, and children’s stories and has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

on Fado & Other Stories

“Throughout the collection, Vaz succeeds in creating unusual protagonists…(Fado & Other Stories) is a celebration of the drama of individual lives. With inventive lyricism, it explores the notion of a ‘grand event allotted to each person'…
-- The New York Times

“Her enviably poetic sensibility, already deservedly noticed in two novels…sets her in the first rank of contemporary authors for whom the American dream of expatriate parents has become an all too ambiguous reality.”
-- The Times Literary Supplement /London

“Like listening to a blues album by a splendid artist.”
-- The Boston Globe

On Mariana

“Seldom does on read pages of such intense beauty and intelligence about the female heart like those written by Vaz.”
-- Il Giornale /Italy

On Saudade

“Vaz is an extremely talented writer, and there's much to love in her book, especially for devotees of magical realism…”
-- The San Francisco Chronicle

Courses:
English Csr. Fiction Writing I
English Cwr. Fiction Writing II