The 10th annual Chautauqua Writers’ Festival will be on the beautiful grounds of the Chautauqua Institution. Live and write with award-winning poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers who share their insights in intensive workshops, reading, panel discussions, and individual conferences designed to ensure personalized attention.

Co-sponsored by Clarion University, Penn State Erie, and University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Chautauqua Writers’ Festival 2013

Thursday, June 13, through Sunday, June 16, 2013

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2013 Faculty

FICTION

Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, and, most recently, Memory Wall. Doerr’s short fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award and three Ohioana Book Awards. In 2010 he won the Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the world for a single short story.

Ann Pancake grew up in Romney and Summersville, W.Va. Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Counterpoint 2007), features a southern West Virginia family devastated by mountaintop removal mining. Based on interviews and real events, the novel was one of Kirkus Review's Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007, won the 2007 Weatherford Award, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award. Pancake's collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless award, and she has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Georgia Review, Poets & Writers, Narrative, and New Stories from the South. She earned her B.A. in English at West Virginia University and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington. Currently, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

NONFICTION

Barbara Hurd is the author of Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (2008); Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year (2003); The Singer's Temple (2003), Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 (2001); and Objects in this Mirror (1994). Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Best American Essays 1999, Best American Essays 2001, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion and Audubon. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and four Maryland State Arts Council Awards, she teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

Scott Russell Sanders is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, including A Private History of Awe and A Conservationist Manifesto. The best of his essays from the past 30 years, plus nine new essays, are collected in Earth Works, published in 2012 by Indiana University Press. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction, the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 to 2009. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.

POETRY

Stephen Dunn is the author of 16 books, including Different Hours, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Since 1974 he has taught at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, where he is the Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He's also been a visiting professor at the University of Washington, New York University, Columbia, and the University of Michigan. He has read his poetry at The Library of Congress, and at many universities and colleges throughout the country. In addition to his books, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, and The American Poetry Review. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, Dunn's honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Margaret Gibson is the author of 10 books of poems, all with Louisiana State University Press, including Second Nature (2010); One Body (2007), which won the 2008 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry; Autumn Grasses (2003); Earth Elegy (1997); Memories of the Future:The Daybooks of Tina Modotti (1986), co-winner of the Poetry Society of America's 1986–87 Melville Kane Award; and Long Walks in the Afternoon (1982), the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Gibson also wrote the memoir The Prodigal Daughter: Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood (University of Missouri Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the 2009 Connecticut Book Award in Memoir and Biography. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship, and grants from the Connecticut Commission on the arts. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes and the James Boatright Poetry Prize. Gibson is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut, and lives in Preston, Conn.

2013 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival Schedule
(subject to change)

Chautauqua Writers' Festival Directors

Diana Hume George is the author or editor of ten books of nonfiction and poetry, including The Lonely Other, The Family Track, and Phantom Breast, as well as literary studies such as Oedipus Anne, The Poetry of Anne Sexton and the Pulitzer-nominated Blake and Freud. With Diane Wood Middlebrook, she edited Sexton’s Selected Poetry. She teaches in Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction, and is a contributing editor of Chautauqua journal.

George Looney’s books include Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012), A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010), The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 novella Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). His poetry has garnered a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Fellowship, two Individual Artist’s Grants from the Ohio Arts Council and one from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and awards from such literary journals as The Missouri Review, New Letters, Zone 3, and The Literary Review. He is chair of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect and translation editor of Mid-American Review.

Philip Terman’s recent books of poetry include Among the Scribes, The Torah Garden and Rabbis of the Air. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Sun Magazine, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and The New Promised Land: An Anthology of Jewish American Poetry. He teaches creative writing and literature at Clarion University, directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center in Franklin, PA, and is contributing editor for poetry for the journal Chautauqua. Occasionally, Terman performs his poetry with the jazz band Catro.