Visiting Writers

Wesley Brown is the author of two published novels, Tragic Magic and Darktown Strutters; three produced plays, Boogie Woogie and Booker T, Life During Wartime, A Prophet Among Them; and wrote the narration for one of the segments of the PBS documentary, "W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices." 

He taught literature and creative writing at Rutgers University for 26 years and currently teaches fiction workshops in Columbia University's School of General Studies. 

David James Duncan is author of the novels The Brothers K (1992), and The River Why (1983), both Pacific NW Booksellers Award winners, the latter selected as an American Library Association Notable Book in 1993. Duncan has two story/essay/memoir collections, River Teeth: Stories and Writings (1996) and My Story As Told By Water. The latter was a 2001 National Book Award finalist, winner of a Pushcart, a Lannan, the Western States Book Award, and twice selected for Best American Spiritual Writing.

Duncan speaks on issues such as wilderness, endangered rivers and salmon, the writing life, the non-monastic contemplative life, and the non-religious literature of faith.

He lives with his family on a Montana trout stream, where he is at work on a novel set at the confluence of Asian mysticism, American mountains and rivers, and the love between a man and a woman, titled Eastern Western.

David Hamilton

David Hamilton, the long-time editor of The Iowa Review, is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm and of The Least Hinge and Ossabaw, a chapbook and a book of poems.
Chris Hedges       Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than 50 countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the best selling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. Hedges was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. His most recent books include Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and I Don't Believe in Atheists . Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister, graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut in 1975. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard during the academic year of 1998-1999 where he spent a year studying classics. As well as Arabic, Latin and ancient Greek, he speaks French and Spanish. He currently writes for numerous publications including Foreign Affairs, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Granta and Mother Jones.

Anita Helle is associate professor of English at Oregon State University, where she teaches 20th century literature and advanced writing in the graduate and undergraduate English programs.

Her forthcoming book is The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (University of Michigan Press). She has published articles, reviews, and critical essays on a range of modern and contemporary writers, including Mina Loy, Kay Boyle, Louise Gluck, William Stafford, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde.

Christopher Howell was born in Portland, Oregon, and attended Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He was a Navy Journalist during the Viet Nam War, and afterward earned graduate degrees from Portland State University and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of eight collections of poems, including Light’s Ladder (2004). His collection Sea Change won the Washington State Governor's Award in 1986. He has received the Helen Bullis Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, the Vachel Lindsay prize, the Vi Gale Award, fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Washington State Artist Trust. Since 1975, he had been director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and director of the university press at Eastern Washington University, where he is on the faculty for the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many journals, including: Harper's, Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Gettysburg Review.

The 1994 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award and the William Faulkner Prize from Universite de Rennes for his volume Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993), Yusef Komunyakaa is a prolific author whose works borrow thematically from jazz and the Vietnam War. Currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University, his other books include: Dedications and Other Darkhorses (1977); Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979); Copacetic (1984); Toys in a Field (1986); I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Dien Cai Dau (1988), winner of The Dark Room Poetry Prize; February in Sydney (1989); Magic City (1992); Thieves of Paradise (1998), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); and Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001). Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (2000). He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) with Sascha Feinstein and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995). Additional honors include: the Thomas Forcade Award; the Hanes Poetry Prize; and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Komunyakaa received the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam as a correspondent and managing editor of The Southern Cross, a military newspaper. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

Ursula Le Guin is a distinguished author whose work includes twenty novels; short stories in ten collections reprinted from periodicals including The New Yorker, Omni, Redbook, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic, Amazing, Playboy, Playgirl, Tri-Quarterly, and Kenyon Review; six volumes of poetry; four volumes of translation; thirteen books for children; criticism in periodicals including The Yale Review, Antaeus Foundation, SF Studies, Calyx, Critical Inquiry, Parabola; and four collections of essays.

She has received several Hugo and Nebula awards, the Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy award in 1979, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction in 2002, the Grand Master award of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2003, and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in 2004.

Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch

Bret Lott is the author of eleven books, including the bestselling novels Jewel and A Song I Knew by Heart. His newest novel. Ancient Highway, will be published in July, 2008. He has served as editor of the literary journals Crazyhorse and The Southern Review, and is a writer in residence and professor of English at The College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2006 he was named a Fulbright senior American scholar, and served as writer in residence at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv; he is also a member of the National Council on the Arts.

One of the world's great stand-up bass players, Glen Moore has collaborated and improvised with renowned writers in performances, including Billy Collins, Joseph Straud, Yusef Komunyakaa, Karl Kirchway, Marvin Bell, Galway Kinnell, Brenda Hillman, Al Young, Patricia Goedeke, David James Duncan, Kim Addonzio, and Lisa Coffman.

Moore co-founded the group “Oregon” in 1970 with Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless and Collin Walcott. In 1999, he completed work on the group’s 23rd album called “Oregon In Moscow,” which features his bass playing and compositions with the Moscow Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra. He has toured Eastern and Western Europe, Northern Africa, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and throughout the United States in major clubs, concert halls and festivals with that band. His most recent solo CDs are “Nude Bass Ascending,” featuring Steve Swallow, Carla Bley, Rabih Abou-Khalil and Arto Tuncboyaciyan on the Intuition label, and “King on the Road,” featuring Nancy King and Rob Scheps on the Cardas Audio label. Currently he is at work on an album of his piano songs for Intuition.

Sharon Olds' numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant; a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first collection, Satan Says (1980); and the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead & the Living (1983). Her other books of poetry are Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992) which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in England. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Named New York State Poet Laureate, 1998-2000, Olds teaches in New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Photo by David Bartolomi

Hilda Raz

Pattiann Rogers has published 10 books of poetry, a book-length essay, The Dream of the Marsh Wren, and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with the artist Joellyn Duesberry. Her two most recent books are Generations (Penguin, 2004) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded Edition (Milkweed, 2005). Song of the World Becoming, New and Collected Poems, 1981 – 2001 (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and an Editor’s Choice in Booklist. Firekeeper, New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1994. Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Poetry Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, and the 2005 Lannan Award for Poetry. Her poems have won the Tietjens Prize, the Hokin Prize, and the Bock Prize from Poetry, the RoethkePrize from Poetry Northwest, two Strousse Awards from Prairie Schooner, and five Pushcart Prizes. In May, 2000, Rogers was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Her papers are archived in the Sowell Family Collection of Literature, Community, and the Natural World at Texas Tech University. She has been a visiting professor at numerous universities and colleges and was Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas from 1993–1997. Rogers has two sons and three grandsons. She lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.

Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the U.S. in 1986. The full-length collections of her poetry Seen, Unseen (QingHai Publishing House of China), Water Words (New World Poetry Press, CA) and most recently Because of Mountain (TonSan, Taiwan) were published in 1999, 2002 and 2005. Her poems have also appeared in English translation in many poetry journals. She has 6 chapbooks in translation: Winter Garden (Goats and Compasses), Verses on Bird (Jensen/Daniels), The Autumn of Gu Yao (Spuyten Duyvil), Pick Lotus (Belladonna Books), Carved Water (Tinfish Press), and Sight Progress (Pleasure Boat Studio). Verses on Bird, Zhang Er’s selected poems in a Chinese and English bilingual edition, was published by Zephyr Press in the summer of 2004. She has read and lectured at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities in the U.S., China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Argentina, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

Xu Xi

Xu Xi (www.xuxiwriter.com) is the author of six books, most recently Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories and Essays of the Chinese, Overseas, and a novel, The Unwalled City.  Her essay collection Evanescent Isles, and Fifty-Fifty, an anthology of new Hong Kong Anglophone writing which she is editing, will both be published in 2008. She is on the prose faculty at Vermont College’s MFA program and splits her time between New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand.