To watch videos of our Writing Award winners click on the following;
Personal Essay winner Emely Lopez
Fiction winner Adalyne Perryman
Honorable mention in Poetry Dorothea Caposito
Critical Essay winner Gillian Canavan
Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured in Plume, Hobart Pulp, Barrelhouse, Auburn Avenue, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy, The Future of Black, and Plume Poetry 9. She is the author of STUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), a chapbook reimagining the life of Nellie Jackson, a Black madam and FBI spy from Natchez Mississippi. Her first full-length collection, let the dead in (Alan Squire Publishing) was released in Spring 2022. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, Saida is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has received support from the Ruby Artist Grants, and the Blue Mountain Center, amongst others. She lives online at www.saidaagostini.com
Robert Bensen’s latest book is What Lightning Spoke (Bright Hill Press), a 300-page collection of new poems and poems selected from six previous books. His poems, non-fiction and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, Native Realities, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, River Styx, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature and authored American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies (Oxford University Press). His writing has earned awards and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, Newberry Library, NYSCA, Illinois Arts Council, Harvard University, NY State Fair, and the Eric Hoffer Foundation. He conducts the Seeing Things poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center. Bensen is Professor Emeritus at Hartwick College, where he taught writing and literature and directed writing programs from 1978-2017. He has also taught as a lecturer at SUNY Oneonta. Find him online at www.robertbensen.com
Tessa Yang is a fiction writer from upstate New York. Her debut story collection, The Runaway Restaurant, was published by 7.13 Books in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, CRAFT, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of Literature, Media, and Writing at Hartwick College, where she teaches creative writing. Find her online at www.tessayang.com.
J.L. Torres is the author of a novel, The Accidental Native; The Family Terrorist and Other Stories; and the collection of poetry, Boricua Passport. His most recent short story collection, Migrations, won the inaugural Tomás Rivera Book Prize. Of Migrations, judge Luis Alberto Urrea wrote: "Migrations showcases a major talent. It resonates with the music of hard-luck classics from our past, yet sings songs of evasive redemption." He has published stories and poems in numerous journals and magazines including The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eckleburg Review, Puerto del Sol, Las Americas Review, and the groundbreaking anthology Growing Up Latino. A professor emeritus at SUNY Plattsburgh, and a Fulbright recipient, he has taught American Literature, U.S. ethnic literatures and creative writing. He has published various essays on Latinx literature and multiethnic literature, and co-edited Writing Off the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Besides the PhD, he holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. He co-founded the Saranac Review and served as its Editor for many years.
Tom Montgomery Fate is a professor emeritus at College DuPage in Glen Ellyn IL, where he taught creative writing and literature courses for more than 30 years. He is the author of six books of creative nonfiction, including The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries, a travel memoir (Ice Cube Press, 2022), Cabin Fever, a nature memoir (Beacon Press), and Steady and Trembling, a spiritual memoir (Chalice Press). A regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, his essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, Christian Century, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and many others. Dozens of his essays have also aired on NPR, PRI and Chicago Public Radio.
Anthony Grooms is the author of Bombingham: A Novel and Trouble No More: Stories, both winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. He has taught writing and American literature at universities in Ghana and Sweden, and since 1994, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He has lectured widely on American literature and culture, especially on topics related to narrations that reflect on the American Civil Rights Movement. Grooms is a Fulbright Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, a Hurston-Wright Foundation Legacy Award finalist, and an Arts Administration Fellow from the National Endowment for the Arts. His novel The Vain Conversation (2018) has earned honors from the Georgia Center for the Book, the Women’s National Book Association, the Trio Multi-Arts Program, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. For more about Grooms visit anthonygrooms.com.
Barbara Ungar is the author of five full-length books of poems and three chapbooks. Save Our Ship won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2019; it also won a Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association and was a Distinguished Favorite at the Independent Press Awards. Her most recent chapbook, EDGE, is inspired by and named after the EDGE lists of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species. Prior books include Immortal Medusa, named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015, and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, both from The Word Works, and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Prize and a silver Independent Publishers award. A professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, she is lives in Saratoga Springs with her son Izaak, a freshman at SUNY Adirondack.
Adrian Van Young is the author of two books of fiction: the story collection, The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press), and the novel, Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media). His fiction and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, Slate, VICE, BOMB, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among others. He teaches English and Creative Writing and lives in New Orleans with his family. More at: adrianvanyoung.com.
John Robert Lee has published 15 collections of poetry, plus scores of short stories, essays and reviews. Lee’s latest publications are Pierrot (Peepal Tree Press) and Collected Poems 1975-2015 (Peepal Tree Press). His short stories and poems are included in the anthologies Facing the Sea, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, and World English Poetry. He has been a teacher, librarian, radio and TV broadcaster, literary journalist, reviewer, newspaper columnist, actor and director.
Lisa Dublin is a Saint Lucian performance poet, author and entrepreneur who now lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with her husband and three sons. Through the media of performance poetry, prose and video blogging, she explores themes that include the intersection of race and Christianity, womanhood, love and relationships, inspiration, and authenticity of personhood. She runs Basement Chronicles, an inspirational video blog on FB, IG and YouTube. In addition to her first poetry chapbook, Sani Baat: A Voice Throwing, she has released several poetry performances on Facebook and YouTube.
Vladimir Lucien is a writer, actor and critic from Saint Lucia. His writing has been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, Wasafiri, Small Axe journal, The PN Review, BIM magazine, Caribbean Beat, The Washington Square Review, Poetry International, VOGUE and other journals. He was awarded the first prize in the poetry category of the Small Axe prize 2013 and the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), the youngest to ever win the prize. Lucien has been featured at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Read My World Festival in Amsterdam, Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, and the Miami Book Fair.
Jack Wang is the author of the story collection We Two Alone, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award from the Writers’ Union of Canada for best debut collection in English. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune calls We Two Alone a collection of "finely crafted stories" with "carefully wrought characters [who] grapple with their own ambitions and failures, an all-consuming battle he captures beautifully." The judges of the Danuta Gleed Award describe Wang as "a profoundly talented writer who cares deeply about what it means to be human in turbulent times.” Jack Wang's fiction has appeared in Brick, PRISM international, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, and Joyland. He is a recipient of the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and a fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts.
Nahid Rachlin attended writing programs at Columbia University (on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship) and Stanford University (on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship). Her publications include the memoir Persian Girls (Penguin), a short story collection, Veils (City Lights), and four novels, including Foreigner (Norton) and Married to a Stranger (E.P. Dutton-Penguin). Her short stories have appeared widely in magazines, such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Nimrod, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts, performed at New York’s Symphony Space. Her interviews have appeared in Poets & Writers and AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle and on NPR’s Fresh Air. Her numerous awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pen Syndicated Fiction Project award. Rachlin’s books have been translated into multiple languages, and she has spoken widely at writers’ conferences from Paris to Geneva to Taos. She has taught at Yale, Barnard College, Southampton College, and Warren Wilson College and currently teaches creative writing at The New School.
David Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University, both in creative writing. He has published four collections: The Dream Detective, The Sudden Country, After Mistic, and most recently Boneyarn. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Obsidian, and Fence. He has also received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, The American Antiquarian Society, and the Lannan Foundation. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years (and as an actor performs a one-person show of Hughes’ works). He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.
Sven Birkerts is a renowned literary critic, editor, reviewer, memoirist and essayist. He has edited AGNI since 1992. Among his fifteen books are the recent Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Other Walk (Graywolf Press, 2011), Art of Time in Memoir: (Graywolf Press, 2008). His other books include The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber & Faber), Readings (Graywolf Press, 1999), and his memoir My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (Viking, 2002). He won the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle and the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN. Birkerts has reviewed regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst and has been Briggs-Copeland lecturer in nonfiction at Harvard. He directed the Bennington Writing Seminars and has been a member of the core faculty since 1994.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of the story collection Wild Things (BkMk Press 2016); Shark Girls (Livingston Press 2009); Dream Lives of Butterflies, which won the gold medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards; Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and the story collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Publishing Prize. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Book link for Wild Things
Book link for Vanishing Acts
Book link for Shark Girls
Beth Alvarado, who has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro- American woman marrying into a Mexican-American family, has spent most of her life in Arizona. Her essay collection Anxious Attachments, an Oregon Book Award winner, was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. Beth is also the author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir, and the short story collection Not a Matter of Love.
Roger W. Hecht's poetry has been published widely in literary journals including Diagram, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and Sheila-na-gig. His poetry collections include Talking Pictures (Cervena Barva Press) and the recently released Witness Report (Finishing Line Press). He has also published two edited collections of historical writing: The Erie Canal Reader (Syracuse UP) and Freemen Awake: Rally Songs and Poems from New York's Anti-Rent Movement (DCHA Press). When he's not teaching literature and creative writing at SUNY Oneonta, he's playing drums with the blues band Off the Rails.
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Syrian-American Rana Bitar is a doctor by day and writer by night. Her memoir The Long Tale of Tears and Smiles (unpublished) and her 2019 collection of poems, A Loaf of Bread, embrace both the losses of her upbringing and home in Syria and struggles to make a new life in America. A practicing oncologist and hematologist, Rana earned her Master’s in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University in 2017. Her poetry appeared in The Deadly Writers Patrol, DoveTales, Earthen Lamp Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A Loaf Of Bread (Unsolicited Press 2019) was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition (2017), and won honorable mention in The Louis Award for poetry (2017).
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Alice Lichtenstein graduated from Brown University and received her MFA from Boston University where she was named the BU Fellow in Fiction. She has received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction and has twice been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Her novels include The Genius of the World and Lost, and, most recently, The Crime of Being, which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, most recently Before (Five Oaks Press), and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poems have appeared in Agni, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Callaloo, Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, Native Realities, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry Wales, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Thomas Hardy Review, and many others. His work has earned an NEA poetry fellowship, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Summer Poetry Prize, and Illinois Arts Council and NY State Council on the Arts awards. He has edited anthologies of Caribbean and Native American writing, including Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (Univ. of Arizona Press). He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College.
Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Cave (winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013), as well as four chapbooks. He graduated from SUNY Oneonta with a BS in English in 1992. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: thelinebreak.wordpress.com/. Twitter: @TheLineBreak
Suzanne Cleary’s fourth poetry book, Crude Angel, was published in 2018 by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). Beauty Mark (BkMk 2013) won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her other awards include the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her publication credits include the journals The Atlantic, Georgia Review, and Poetry London, and anthologies including Best American Poetry. Her website is suzanneclearypoet.com
Jim McCord is an emeritus professor of English at Union College whose poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals and four books. Carol McCord is a lifelong hiker and former yoga instructor. Her photographs have been selected for exhibitions and publications in the United States and abroad.
Bertha Rogers is a poet, visual artist, and educator. Her published poetry collections include Wild, Again (Salmon, Ireland); Heart Turned Back (Salmon, Ireland); Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, Reliquaries; and several chapbooks. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was published in 2000, and her translation with illuminations of the Anglo-SaxonRiddle-Poems from the Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, was out in 2019. In 1992, with her late husband, Ernest M. Fishman, she founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center of the Catskills, a literary organization; she retired as executive director in 2017.
Damian McNicholl is an author and literary agent. His critically acclaimed first novel, A Son Called Gabriel was an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Pick and finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards, and Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards. His second novel Twisted Agendas is published by Legend Press in the UK. The Moment of Truth is published by Pegasus Books and was chosen as Houston Chronicle's 10 Books to Read. Damian has appeared on CBS, WYBE Public Television, National Public Radio and other media outlets in the United States and United Kingdom to discuss his work. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and is at work on a new novel.
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Terry Roberts' direct ancestors have lived in the mountains of Western North Carolina since the time of the Revolutionary War. His debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and his second novel, That Bright Land, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award as well as the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South. Both novels won the annual Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, given to the author of the best novel written by a North Carolinian. Born and raised near Weaverville, North Carolina, Roberts is the Director of the National Paideia Center and lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
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Anna Moschovakis is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the author most recently of the novel Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018). Her books of poetry include the James Laughlin award winning You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and They and We Will Get into Trouble for This. Her translations from French include works by Albert Cossery, Annie Ernaux, and the Algerian poet Samira Negrouche. A recipient of grants and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and Howard Foundation, and apexart, she has taught in the graduate writing programs at Bard, Pratt, and Columbia. She is a longtime member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and co-founder of Bushel, an art and community space in Delhi, NY.
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Jordan Smith is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, and The Light in the Film, The Names of Things Are Leaving, and For Appearances, all from the University of Tampa Press. His earlier books appeared from Princeton University Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Copper Beech Press, and his chapbooks are from The Pudding Press, Right Hand Pointing, and Swan Scythe. His poems have been published in a wide range of literary journals, including Agni, Antaeus, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. he lives in upstate New York, where he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women, through voice, music, and hip-hop-inflected magical realist techniques. She is the author of the short story collection Blue Talk and Love(Riverdale Ave 2015), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for fiction. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, the Center for Fiction, and the NEA.
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Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons. The latter was recently awarded the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Henri Cole calls Hutchinson’s poetry “luxurious and stern at once. His hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” Hutchinson lives in Ithaca, NY, where he teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
Bradley J. Fest is the assistant professor of English at Hartwick College. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), along with a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.
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Julie Suarez Hayes has recently retired from Hartwick College where she was an Assistant Professor of English for thirty-four years. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Phoebe, Women’s Voices of the 20th Century, La Presa, The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Her chapbook, It Does Not, was published by Bright Hill Press in 2006.
An acclaimed ecologist and author, Sandra Steingraber explores the links between human rights and the environment, with a focus on chemical contamination, climate change, and shale gas extraction via fracking. She takes a personal and scientific look at the issues and offers insights into how we can protect our environment and our communities. Steingraber brings a clear, lyrical voice to the complex evidence of biology.
Melora Wolff is an essayist and prose writer whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Southern Review, The New York Times, The Normal School, Brick, West Branch, The Chronicle Review and Salmagundi, and in anthologies such as Every Father's Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers; Best American Fantasy; Best New Writing 2016; and The New Brick Reader. She has received three Notable Essay citations from Best American Essays; two Special Mentions in Nonfiction from The Pushcart Prizes; and her essay "Mystery Girls" received the Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award in Nonfiction. The Parting, a collection of her prose poems and flash fictions, is available from Shires Press
David Mills is a writer and actor who has worked professionally in the dramatic and literary communities for more than a decade. For three years, he lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark home where he was inspired to create a one-person dramatic rendition of Hughes’ poems and short stories.
He has two collections of poetry: The Dream Detective, a small-press bestseller, and The Sudden Country, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Prize. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, Jubilat, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Mills was commissioned to write a play for Julliard, the narration for Deborah Willis’ exhibition, “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers” and for I Giullari Di Piazza’s folk dance piece, “Tarantella.”
This lecture is presented in collaboration with the Department of Africana and Latino Studies’ celebration of Black History Month
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George Hovis is a SUNY Oneonta Professor of English. His short stories have appeared in such publications as Carolina Quarterly, Limestone, New Madrid, and Stone Canoe.
He is the author of a monograph, Vale of Humility, and numerous essays devoted to the study of Southern literature.
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Peter Ramos is Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State and author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost and three shorter collections.
Highly regarded as both critic and poet, his poems have been published in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, and Indiana Review.
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Michael D. Lemonick is currently the Chief Opinion Editor at Scientific American Magazine. He was previously Senior Science Writer at ClimateCentral.org, and, prior to that, Senior Writer at Time magazine for more than 20 years, during which he wrote more than 50 cover stories on every aspect of science.
He has also written cover stories for National Geographic, Discover and Scientific American, and teaches writing at Princeton University. “The Perpetual Now” is his seventh book.
Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His memoir, SCHOOLHOUSE: Lessons on Love & Landscape is just released from Ice Cube Press. (www.icecubepress.com) He's won a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University, edits fiction for The Fourth River, and is at work on a new novel, HOUDINI’S HEIRS. More @ www.marcnieson.com
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Watch Marc's YouTube video Q&A.
Marc Smith founded the Poetry Slam in Chicago in the mid-1980s, and since then the movement has spread around the world.Smith’s poetry has been celebrated for its emotional intensity and has been collected in Crowdpleaser and published widely in anthologies and journals, including Chicago Magazine, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, winner of the 1994 American Book Award).
Helena Maria Viramontes is the author of Their Dogs Came with Them, a novel, and two previous works of fiction, The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel. Named a Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus. Viramontes is Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a new novel.
Daniel G. Payne's book-length works include Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (1996); The Palgrave Environmental Reader (2005); Writing the Land: John Burroughs and His Legacy (2008); Why Read Thoreau's Walden? (2013); and Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston (2016).
Watch Daniels YouTube video.
Watch Continuation of Dan's YouTube video.
Charlotte Zoe Walker is the editor of two books on naturalist John Burroughs for Syracuse University Press: Sharp Eyes and The Art of Seeing Things, and directed the first two Sharp Eyes Conferences at SUNY Oneonta, where she taught for many years. A former NEA Creative Writing Fellow and O. Henry Award winner, she has recently released a thirtieth anniversary edition of her novel Condor and Hummingbird, set in Colombia in the 1960’s
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Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and the forthcoming collection of poems Trebuchet (University of Georgia, 2016), a 2015 National Poetry Series selection. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and recent work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Baffler.
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Libby Cudmore worked at video stores, bookstores and temp agencies before settling down in Upstate New York to write. Her short stories have appeared in The Big Click, The Stoneslide Corrective, PANK, and the HANZAI Japan anthology. The Big Rewind is her first novel.
Watch YouTube Video of Libby reading chapter 2 of The Big Rewind
Watch YouTube Video of Libby reading chapter 3 of The Big Rewind
Watch YouTube Video of Libby reading chapter 4 of The Big Rewind
Frank X Walker is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of eight collections of poetry, including Affrilachia; Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award; and Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary work in Poetry and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Honor Award for Poetry. A 2005 recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry, in 2013 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Kentucky, becoming the youngest and the first African-American to hold that position. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and the African American and Africana Studies Program at the University of Kentucky, and founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture.
New York Times bestselling writer M. T. Anderson is the author of Feed, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party, won the National Book Award in 2006. Its sequel, The Kingdom on the Waves was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. His most recent book, Symphony for the City of the Dead, is an account of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his experience during the siege of the city of Leningrad during WW II. M. T. Anderson lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Emily Vogel appears as a joint effort of SUNY Oneonta’s Red Dragon Reading Series and Hartwick College’s New American Writing Festival. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry; a full-length collection, The Philosopher’s Wife; a collaborative book of poetry, West of Home, with her husband Joe Weil; and a recently released collection, First Words. Her poems have been published widely, including forthcoming work in The Boston Review and Omniverse. She teaches writing at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.
Gustavo Arango is the author of three story collections and several novels, including Santa Maria del Diablo (Saint Mary of the Devil) winner of the Latino Book Award 2015 for the Best Historical Novel in Spanish. He has won the Marcio Veloz Maggiolo Prize (New York, 1002), for the best novel in Spanish written in the U.S., and he was the honored author at the 2013 Hispanic/Latino Book Fair of New York
Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones is the author of 5 story collections and 15 novels, including Growing Up Dead in Texas (2012). An NEA fellow, Jones has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award. Hailed for their lyricism and postmodern sensibility, his narratives have explored such genres as horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
Kimberly Elkins was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and has published fiction and nonfiction in the Atlantic, Best New American Voices, Iowa Review, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, and Village Voice, among others. Her debut novel, What Is Visible, was named the Bookpage June 2014 Fiction Pick of the Month and was chosen by Woman's Day as the Most Inspirational Book of 2014. Rave reviews have appeared widely, including the cover of the New York Times Book Review. National Book Award winner Ha Jin calls the novel "the art of fiction at its best." What Is Visible provides a fictional biography of Laura Bridgman, born in 1829, who at age two lost her sight, hearing, and the senses of smell and taste. By age twenty, Bridgman was considered the nineteenth century's second most famous woman, having mastered language and charmed the world with her brilliance. Given Laura's worldwide fame in the nineteenth century (fifty years before Hellen Keller), it is astonishing that she has been virtually erased from history.
D.T. Max is a graduate of Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of the best-selling Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, which the New York Times named one of the ten best books of the year and of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: Unravelling A Venetian Medical Mystery, which Natalie Angier, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called "gripping, cleanly written, cannily plotted and elegantly educational…The book brims with great tales." He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and at work on a book about Mark Twain. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, their two young children, and a rescued beagle who came to them named Max.
Watch YouTube video of D.T. Max.
Obiwu is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and scholar. His first collection of poems, Rituals of the Sun (1982), established his reputation in the Nigerian literary canon. His second collection, Tigress at Full Moon (2012), has been called “a triumph of poetic wish fulfillment...the stuff of which the mythic imagination is made.” He has also completed two new poetry manuscripts, “Unspeakable” and “Mad River.” His essay, “The Ecopoetics of Christopher Okigbo and Ezra Pound,” won the 2009 Donatus Nwoga Prize for Literary Criticism in Poetry. His most recent book is The Critical Imagination in African Literature (Syracuse University Press, Spring 2015).
Watch YouTube video of Obiwu reading "Her Eyes Were Watching God"
Paul R. Lilly is Professor Emeritus at SUNY Oneonta where he taught American literature in the English Department. He received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006. He taught at universities in Spain, Belgium, and India as the recipient of three Fulbright awards in American Studies. He is the author of Jerzy Kosinski: Words in Search of Victims, as well as essays on modern and contemporary writers. The Lake of Far is his first collection of short stories. In the spring he teaches at the Georgetown University Learning Center.
Watch Paul's YouTube video of "Fiver"
Poet Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Wisconsin. He earned his BA from Beloit College, MFA from George Mason University, and a PhD from SUNY-Buffalo. Foust once noted that he is “generally uncomfortable with comfort in poetry,” and his work has received praise for its uncompromising, even dark, blend of humor, allusion, and metaphysical investigation. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including As in Every Deafness (2003); Leave the Room to Itself (2003), which won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Necessary Stranger (2007); A Mouth in California (2009); and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (2013). With Samuel Frederick, Foust co-translated the German poet Ernst Meister’s In Time’s Rift (2012). Foust’s essays and writing have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Jacket, and TriQuarterly. He has taught at Saint Mary’s College of California and at the University of Denver.
Watch Graham's YouTube Q&A session
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April L. Ford's debut story collection, The Poor Children, won Grand Prize for the Santa Fe Writers Project 2013 Literary Awards Program for Fiction (judge David Morrell). Previously, the collection was shortlisted for the international Scott Prize (Salt Publishing, UK). In 2014, Gentle, April’s debut novel, was a finalist for the Molly Ivors Prize for Fiction (Gorsky Press), and a Semi-Finalist for the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition (Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society). Gentle is forthcoming in Spring 2016.
April is managing editor of Digital Americana Magazine, and she teaches creative writing at State University of New York at Oneonta. She has spent time at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as a Robert Johnson Fellow, and at Ucross Foundation as a Writer in Residence. She is completing her second novel.
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Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Tia Lessin is the director and producer, with Carl Deal, of Citizen Koch (shortlisted for the 2015 Oscars) and Trouble the Water, winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award. She was a co-producer of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, winner of the Palme d'Or, Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine, and Capitalism: A Love Story.
In television, Tia directed and produced Behind the Labels for which she received the Sidney Hillman Award for Broadcast Journalism. Her work as producer of the Bravo series The Awful Truth earned her two Emmy nominations, one arrest and a lifetime ban from Disney World.
Watch Tia's YouTube Q&A session
Watch Citizen Koch movie trailer.
Buddy Wakefield is the two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion featured on NPR, the BBC, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and most recently signed to Strange Famous Records. He has recently toured with Ani DiFranco and appeared in hundreds of venues internationally, from Comedy Central’s Hudson Theater and Scotland’s Oran Moore to San Quentin State Penitentiary, House of Blues (New Orleans) and CBGB’s. A Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle and member of Team Seattle 2006 for the National Poetry Slam Finals, Buddy is known for delivering raw, rounded, high vibration performances of humor and heart.
Bertha Rogers is a poet, visual artist, and co-fBertha Rogers is a poet, visual artist, and master teaching artist. Her poems appear in journals and anthologies and in her several collections, including Heart Turned Back (Salmon Poetry Publishing, Ireland, 2010) and the forthcoming Wild. Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000 (Birch Brook Press, NY), and her translation of the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book is forthcoming. Rogers co-founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center in Treadwell and administers the NYS Literary website and map; she serves as a member of the Empire State Writers Hall of Fame panel.
Robert Morgan is an acclaimed poet and writer of novels, short stories, and biographies. His books have been selected for the Oprah Book Club and as Notable Books by the New York Times. Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, his numerous accolades include the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize.
Former National Poetry Slam Champion Regie Gibson has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, various NPR programs, and in the feature film love jones. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Harvard's Divinity Magazine, The Iowa Review, and in his volume Storms Beneath the Skin, winner of the Golden Pen Award.
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Watch Regie's YouTube Performance of "The Illiad and Gangster Rap
Watch Regie's You Tube video
Margaret Noodin is currently President of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literature. Her most recent book is Bwaajimowin: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature. Her poetry has recently appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas and Cell Traffic by Heidi Erdrich.
Ron Padgett has been a central figure in the New York poetry world since 1960. He is the author of over 20 books including Great Balls of Fire, The Big Something, How to Be Perfect, and most recently Collected Poems. Padgett is also considered to be the preeminent translator of the French poets Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001 he was named Officier dans l’Order des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communications.
Dale Ray Phillips is the author of the book My People's Waltz, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best Stories from the South, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, and literary quarterlies. He has taught at a variety of universities and is now an assistant professor at Murray State University, where he was the past distinguished Watkins Chair in Creative Writing.
Tom Montgomery Fate is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Beyond the White Noise (1997), Steady and Trembling (2005), and, most recently, Cabin Fever (2011), his memoir of an urban father’s pursuit of wilderness. His essays have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, Orion, Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Christian Century, and many other journals and anthologies; and they regularly air on National Public Radio and Chicago Public Radio. A graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and of Chicago Theological Seminary, he is currently a professor of English at College of DuPage, in suburban Chicago.
Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, and is also of Chumash and Jewish ancestry. She is the author of two poetry collections—Indian Cartography, which won the Diane Decorah Award for First Book from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas, and The Zen of La Llorona, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and a collection of forthcoming essays, The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae, from the University of Nebraska Press. She also co-edited the collection, Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature, a Lambda Literary Award finalist and winner of the 2011 Independent Publishers Silver Medal. Her latest book, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, was published by Heyday Books in January 2013. Miranda is an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University.
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Eleanor Henderson, Novelist and essayist, has published widely in such journals as North American Review, Salon, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and included in The Best American Short Stories 2009. Henderson's debut novel Ten Thousand Saints, about the straight edge punk scene in the 1980s, was named one of the top ten novels in 2011 by The New York Times. Eleanor Henderson lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is an assistant professor of writing at Ithaca College.
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Shahriar Mandanipour, Iranian novelist is the 2006 recipient of Brown University’s International Writers Project Fellowship, is regarded as one of the most accomplished and successful writers in contemporary Iran. He is the author of five collections of short stories, including The Eighth Day of the Earth, Violet Orient, Midday Moon, Mummy and Honey and Shadows of the Cave. His most recent collection, Ultramarine Blue, gathers eleven stories that relate in various ways to the events of 9/11. Mandanipour is also the author of a two-volume novel, The Courage of Love, and of essays, translations, and children’s books. His various works explore, sometimes in symbolic or metaphorical terms, the effects of dictatorship and oppression on the Iranian people, and he has spoken out in a number of international lectures on censorship in Iran. As a result of his literary and political activities, Mr. Mandanipour has been subjected to harassment, by the Iranian government and was barred from publishing his work for many years.
Regie Gibson is a former National Poetry Slam Champion Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba, and Europe. He has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, various NPR programs, and in love jones, a feature film from New Line Cinema based largely on events in his life. Critically acclaimed on both the stage and the page, Gibson has been published in Poetry Magazine, Harvard's Divinity Magazine and The Iowa Review, among others. His volume of poems, Storms Beneath the Skin, received the Golden Pen Award. In response to Gibson’s live performance, Kurt Vonnegut proclaimed, “Regie . . . you are supersonic and in the stratosphere . . . you sing and chant for all of us. Nobody gets left out.”
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Watch Regie's Red Dragon Reading
Daniel Anderson's work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Harper's, The New Republic, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Best American Poetry and Southwest Review, among other places. He has published two books of poetry, Drunk in Sunlight (Johns Hopkins University Press) and January Rain (Story Line Press), and edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press). His honors include a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.
Michael Martone is the author of more than a dozen books, and he has been especially acclaimed for his short fiction. He has won two Fellowships from the NEA, a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and his stories have won numerous prizes. He has taught at Syracuse University, Iowa State University, and Harvard University. He is currently a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama, where he has been teaching since 1996. at 7:30 pm on Thursday October 25 in the Craven Lounge, located in the Morris Conference Center on the SUNY Oneonta campus.
Molly McGlennen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is of Anishinaabe and European descent. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and Native American Studies at Vassar College. She holds a PhD in Native American Studies from University of California, Davis and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Her scholarship and creative writing have been published widely. Most recently, her first collection of poetry, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits, was published by Salt's award-winning "Earthworks Series of Native American Authors."
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a poet, writer and literary scholar. Her first book, Tongue Tied Woman, won the Edda Poetry Chapbook Competition for Women in 2002. Her second collection, Work Is Love Made Visible, won the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry, the 2010 Western Heritage Award for Poetry from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum and the 2010 WILLA Award for Poetry from Women Writing the West. Dr. Mish is currently a member of the faculty of the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA program at Oklahoma City University and editor of Mongrel Empire Press.
Sandra Steingraber Ph.D. is an internationally recognized authority on the environmental links to cancer and human health. The Sierra Club has heralded Steingraber as “the new Rachel Carson,” and, indeed, she is a recipient of the Rachel Carson Leadership Award, as well as the Heinz Award; the Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund; and the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles.
Nate Hendley is a Toronto-based freelance writer, journalist and author. He has a written a series of books, primarily true-crime tomes and biographies. His recent titles include Crystal Death (about methamphetamine), biographies of Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, and John Lennon, and American Gangsters Then and Now: An Encyclopedia (published 2010 by ABC-CLIO). Hendley’s non-crime related books include Motivate to Create: A Guide for Writers. This book outlines practical steps on starting up or stepping up a non-fiction freelance writing business. Hendley’s talk will focus on “True Stories: Non-Fiction Writing as an Art Form.”
Arthur Flowers is a novelist, memoirist and children’s book author. A Vietnam veteran, blues singer, co-founder of the New Renaissance Writer’s Guild, and a Memphis native, Flowers considers himself a contemporary griot, referring to the storytellers of ancient African societies who passed on the history of their people to future generations through the oral tradition. His works include novels (De Mojo Blues and Another Good Loving Blues), a memoir (Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman) and a graphic novel (I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.), illustrated by Manu Chitrakar. Winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts, Arthur Flowers is currently an Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University.
Anne Waldman, presented at the Red Dragon Reading Series, in the Fall of 2011. She is the author of more than 40 books, poet Anne Waldman writes in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg as an "open field investigator of consciousness." Together with Ginsberg, she co-founded the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
Jim and Carol McCord presented at the Red Dragon Reading Series, in the Fall of 2011, "The Singing Eye," a collaborative performance of poetry and poetry and photography that promotes conservation of our natural, historical, and cultural environments.
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Ann Neelon, winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Writers and Readers Award gave a reading of her poetry at the Red Dragon Reading Series in the Fall of 2011.