Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Chris-Abani-Lecture

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS  

Chris Abani's first novel, published when he was 16, was Masters of the Board, a political thriller about a foiled Nigerian coup. The story was convincing enough that the Nigerian government threw him in jail for inciting a coincidentally timed real-life coup. Imprisoned and tortured twice more, he channeled the experience into searing poetry.

Abani's best-selling 2004 novel GraceLand is a searing and funny tale of a young Nigerian boy, an Elvis impersonator who moves through the wide, wild world of Lagos, slipping between pop and traditional cultures, art and crime. It's a perennial book-club pick, a story that brings the postcolonial African experience to vivid life.

Now based in Los Angeles, Abani published The Virgin of Flames in 2007. He is also a publisher, running the poetry imprint Black Goat Press.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Adrian-Castro-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Adrian Castro is a poet, performer, and interdisciplinary artist. Born in Miami, a place which has provided fertile ground for the rhythmic Afro-Latino style in which he writes and performs. Articulating the search for a cohesive Afro-Caribbean-American identity, Castro honors myth on one hand and history on the other. He addresses the migratory experience from Africa to the Caribbean to North America, and the eventual clash of cultures. Castro creates a circular motion of theme, tone, subject matter, style, and cultural history, giving rise to a fresh illuminating archetypal poetry.

Castro is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey,(Coffee House Press, 1997), Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time,(Coffee House Press, 2005), and has been published in many literary anthologies.

He is the recipient of a Cintas Fellowship, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, NewForms Florida, the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets, NALAC Arts Fellowship, and several commissions from Miami Light Project and the Miami Art Museum.

Castro has performed with many dancers and actors including Chuck Davis and African American Dance Ensemble, Heidi Duckler and Collage Dance, and Keith Antar Mason and the Hittite Empire.

The New York Times Book Review selected Wise Fish as an editor’s choice saying, “Sinuous, syncopated verses about the Caribbean melting pot.” And “…even a cursory glance suggests his poems—which seem to be trying to dance off the page…would truly come alive on the stage. Wise Fish is a serious and seriously enjoyable contribution to our flourishing Latino literature.”

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Chris-Abani-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS  

Chris Abani's first novel, published when he was 16, was Masters of the Board, a political thriller about a foiled Nigerian coup. The story was convincing enough that the Nigerian government threw him in jail for inciting a coincidentally timed real-life coup. Imprisoned and tortured twice more, he channeled the experience into searing poetry.

Abani's best-selling 2004 novel GraceLand is a searing and funny tale of a young Nigerian boy, an Elvis impersonator who moves through the wide, wild world of Lagos, slipping between pop and traditional cultures, art and crime. It's a perennial book-club pick, a story that brings the postcolonial African experience to vivid life.

Now based in Los Angeles, Abani published The Virgin of Flames in 2007. He is also a publisher, running the poetry imprint Black Goat Press.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Mark-Doty-Lecture

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.

Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.

Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Doty lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Mark-Doty-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.

Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.

Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Doty lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Peter-Orner-Reading-with-Chris Abani

 Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Peter Orner is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), and the editor of Underground America (McSweeney's, 2008). Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, edited by Orner and Annie Holmes, was published this past December. (McSweeney's, 2010) A new novel, Love and Shame and Love, will be out from Little, Brown in November, 2011. Excerpts from the new book have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, The Believer, and A Public Space.

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. Mark Shone in the New York Times wrote, "Orner hits the right notes and no others."

The novel has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and German. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's.

Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. Esther Stories was a 2001 New York Times Notable Book. Of the book, Margot Livesey wrote in the New York Times, "Orner doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls."

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice appeared in the Pushcart Prize anothology (Best of the Small Presses). Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Fellowship (2007). A film version of one of Orner's stories, "The Raft" with a screenplay by Orner and the film's director, Rob Jones, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

Orner has taught at the University of Montana, Bard College, Charles University in Prague, Washington University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Orner is a long time permanent faculty member at San Francisco State where he is an associate professor. He is a currently visiting fiction faculty at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and living in Iowa City.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Paul-Lisicky-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow.

He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Rikki-Durcornet-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

The author of eight novels, three collections of short fiction, a book of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has twice been honored by the Lannan Foundation. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad.

Recent exhibitions of her paintings include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2008, and El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile, in 2009.

She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard and Anne Waldman among others.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Robert-Wrigley-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He received his BA (with honors) in English Language & Literature at Southern Illinois University in 1974, and his MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976.

His collections of poetry include Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

His work has also been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. Wrigley's awards and honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and two Pushcart Prizes. From 1987 until 1988 he served as the state of Idaho's writer-in-residence.

Wrigley lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, on the Clearwater River in Idaho. He has taught at Lewis-Clark College, at the University of Oregon, twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry, and at Warren College. He is the Director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Robert-Wrigley-Lecture

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He received his BA (with honors) in English Language & Literature at Southern Illinois University in 1974, and his MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976.

His collections of poetry include Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

His work has also been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. Wrigley's awards and honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and two Pushcart Prizes. From 1987 until 1988 he served as the state of Idaho's writer-in-residence.

Wrigley lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, on the Clearwater River in Idaho. He has taught at Lewis-Clark College, at the University of Oregon, twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry, and at Warren College. He is the Director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Sam-Ligon-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Samuel Ligon is the author of Drift and Swerve, a collection of stories (2009), and Safe in Heaven Dead, a novel (2003). His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Sleepingfish, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers, in Spokane, Washington, and is the editor of Willow Springs.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Camille-Dungy-Reading

 Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Camille Dungy is author of Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006).

Dungy is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Dungy has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf.

She is a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award (2010 and 2011), a Silver Medal Winner in the California Book Award (2011), and a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee (2010 and 2011). She was a 2011 finalist for the Balcones Prize, and her books have been shortlisted for the 2011 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award, and the Library of Virginia 2007 Literary Award. Dungy is currently a Professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. Her poems and essays have been published widely in anthologies and print and online journals.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Shane-Book-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Shane Book was raised in Canada and Ghana. He was educated at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Victoria, New York University where he was a New York Times Fellow in Poetry, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing.

His writing appears in numerous U.S., U.K., and Canadian literary journals, including PN Review, Volt, and Boston Review and has been collected in many American and Canadian anthologies, including Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Revival: An Anthology of Black Writing and Breathing Fire 2. His work also appears online in audio and print format, most recently at From the Fishouse, Harp & Altar, and Poetry Mountain. He has published book reviews and feature-length non-fiction pieces in numerous newspapers and magazines and his own writing has been reviewed in publications across North America.

Shane is a fellow of the Cave Canem Workshop/Retreat for African American Poets, and has received scholarships to attend the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. Co-founder of the literary publisher, Smoking Lung Press, his honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize, The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, a San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the Charles Johnson Award, and a National Magazine Award.

Shane has taught film, literature, and creative writing at New York University and the University of Iowa and was Writer-in-Residence at Randolph-Macon Women’s College. He currently teaches at Stanford University and is directing and producing the documentary film Laborland.

Listen Now:

2009-PTWC-Tony-Cohan-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Tony Cohan grew up in Manhattan and Los Angeles, where at the age of fourteen he made his debut as a jazz musician. After attending Stanford and the University of California he spent two years in Europe and North Africa, performing with jazz artists Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell and blind Catalan pianist Tete Monteliu.

Returning to San Francisco, he worked briefly at the University of California Press before moving to Kyoto, Japan for two years to teach and write. Back in California, he wrote an unpublished first novel (and a published erotic novel) and worked as a studio musician with Lowell George, Ry Cooder, and others.

During the 1970s he designed media campaigns for musical artists including Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, and Prince. In 1975 he founded the long-running independent press Acrobat Books, publishing nonfiction books in the arts.

His 1981 novel Canary (Doubleday) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, his 1984 novel Opium (Simon and Schuster) a Literary Guild selection. His bestselling travel narrative On Mexican Time (Random House, 2001) was followed by an autobiographical memoir, Native State (Random House, 2003), a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year, and a second travel narrative, Mexican Days (Random House, 2007).

His collaborations as lyricist with pianist and composer Chick Corea include the jazz classic High Wire. His essays, stories, articles, songs and reviews have appeared in a variety of media worldwide. His most recent novel is Valparaíso.

Listen Now:

2011-Erin-Belieu-Northwinds-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Erin Belieu, Centrum's Artistic Director for the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, is the author of three collections of poetry. Her first book, "Infanta," was a winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth. "Infanta" was also chosen as a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Library Journal. 

Her second collection, "One Above & One Below," was the winner of the Midland Authors Prize in poetry and the Ohioana prize, and her most recent collection, "Black Box," was a finalist in 2007 for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

She is presently Director of The Graduate Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.

2010-PTWC-Dana-Levin-Reading

Subscribe via: iTunes | RSS

Poet Dana Levin grew up in California’s Mojave Desert and received a BA from Pitzer College and an MFA from New York University.

Levin’s collections of poetry include In the Surgical Theatre (1999) and Wedding Day (2005). Selecting Levin’s manuscript for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Louise Glück praised the work as “sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant.” In the Surgical Theatre also won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Osterweil Award.

Levin’s honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. Her work has been widely anthologized and has won several Pushcart Prizes.

She lives in Santa Fe and teaches at the University of New Mexico and Warren Wilson College.