9/2/10: Carl Phillips, poet (Stearns Cinema, 5:30pm)
10/21/10: Nancy Mitchell, poet (Stearns Performance Space, TBA)
10/27/10: Michael Steinberg, creative essayist (Stearns Center Performance Space, 6:00pm)
11/16/10: Antonya Nelson, novelist and short story writer (Stearns Center Performance Space, 5:30pm)
Contacts: Jacob White Jacob.White@jsc.edu
Elizabeth Powell Elizabeth.Powell@jsc.edu
Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Double Shadow (2011) and Speak Low (2010), a National Book Award Finalist; Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (2007); and Riding Westward (2006). His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.
His work has been anthologized in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (2002), Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988), Contemporary American Poetry (2001), and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000). His poems have also been chosen eight times for the annual Best American Poetry series.
Phillips is also the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004), and the translator of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (2003).
His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.
According to the Judges' Citation for the 1998 National Book Awards, "Carl Phillips' passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts."
Phillips is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program. He was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006.
Nancy Mitchell is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Near Surround (Four Way Books, 2002) and Grief Hut (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), and her poems have appeared in Agni, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, Great River Review, and in the current issue of Johnson State College's Green Mountains Review, and are anthologized in Last Call by Sarabande Books, 1997. Her poems and a teaching exercises on Sound are anthologized in The Working Poet, Autumn House Press, 2009. She has received an Artist in the Schools grant for Virginia, and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (in Amherst, VA and in Auvillar, France), and from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Mitchell teaches in the English Department at Salisbury University, Maryland, and has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine. She resides in Salisbury, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, with her husband John Ebert, a filmmaker
Michael Steinberg is a writer, editor, and teacher. His memoir, Still Pitching, was chosen by ForeWord Magazine as the 2003 Independent Press Memoir/Autobiography of the Year. The Association of American University Presses also chose the book for inclusion on its 2004 list of "Books Selected for School Libraries.” And the Melton Center for Jewish Studies selected it for inclusion in "The American Jewish Story in Print," a national on-line directory.
Other books include, Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs From Michigan--a finalist for the 2000 Foreword Magazine Independent Press Anthology of the Year, and for the 2000 Great Lakes Book Sellers Award; The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, currently in its fifth edition; Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching--the latter two with Robert Root Jr.; and, The Writer's Way: A Process-to-Product Approach to Writing, with Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. He also collaborated with Bob Baldori on I'm Almost Famous, a stage play that was produced in 1984 at the Apollo Theater in Chicago.
Steinberg's personal essays and memoirs have been published in many literary journals and widely anthologized, and his work has won several national awards--including the Missouri Review Editor's Prize, the National Harness Racing Writers of America Feature Writing Award, and a Roberts Writing Award. A half-dozen pieces have been cited as "Notable Essays" in the Best American Essays, and Best American Sports Writing annual anthologies. Five others have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Steinberg is the founding editor (1999) of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, an award-winning journal of literary nonfiction. Fourth Genre is one of three literary journals that exclusively publish works of creative nonfiction.
Antonya Nelson is the author of six short story collections, including Nothing Right and Female Trouble, and the four novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, Living to Tell, and, most recently, Bound, which received a glowing review in The New York Times). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.
