Writers’ Festival 2012

Thursday, June 14, through Sunday, June 17, 2012

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2012 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival Schedule

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

The ninth 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.

FICTION

Glenn Taylor was born and raised in West Virginia, the setting for his first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, originally published by West Virginia University Press in 2008, when it was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. After being named a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, Ecco/HarperCollins bought and re-issued Trenchmouth. In 2010, Ecco released Taylor's second novel, The Marrowbone Marble Company. The books have since been published in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Portugal. After nine years teaching at Harper College, a community college in suburban Chicago, Glenn now teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University. He received an MA in English Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Texas State University. He is currently at work on a third novel and lives with his wife and three sons in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Cristina García is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel, recently published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her newest work, Dreams of Significant Girls, is a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s.García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and teaches at Texas Tech University most spring semesters. This fall, Garcia will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14.

NONFICTION

Natalia Rachel Singer is the author of the memoir Scraping By in the Big Eighties and is co-editor of an essay collection, Living North Country. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely published in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, among them: Redbook, The Iowa Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, O: The Oprah Magazine, Harper's, Microfiction, Now Write, The North American Review, The American Scholar, Alternet.org, and Creative Nonfiction. Recently cited as a notable author in The Best American Travel Essays, she is currently working on a travel memoir called On Temple Road, which is set in France and India. She has just completed a novel set in France, The Inventions of Love. She is the Craig Professor of English at St. Lawrence University, where she teaches creative nonfiction, fiction, and environmental literature.

Last year Valerie Boyd worked with several festival writers via Skype, and this year she joins us in person. Author of the critically acclaimed Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and the forthcoming Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood,Valerie Boyd was formerly the arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and has published articles, essays and reviews in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Oxford American, Paste, Ms., Essence and Atlanta Magazine.  She is currently on the faculty at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she serves as the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence and teaches journalism and narrative nonfiction.   

POETRY

Martín Espada, called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors”, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems is called The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011). The Republic of Poetry, a collection published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An earlier book of poems, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). The University of Michigan released his essay collection, The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive, in 2010. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, the USA Simon Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review and The Best American Poetry. His work has been widely translated; collections of poems have recently been published in Spain, Puerto Rico and Chile. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Judith Vollmer’s new book of poetry, The Water Books, is out from Autumn House Press. Her previous books include Reactor, University of Wisconsin Press 2004, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and featured in the Los Angeles Times Book Review; The Door Open to the Fire, awarded The Cleveland State Poetry Prize in 1997 and finalist honors for the Paterson Prize; Black Butterfly (limited edition), awarded the Center for Book Arts chapbook prize in 1997; and Level Green, awarded the Brittingham Prize (Wisconsin 1990.) Vollmer has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies from the American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, the Centrum Foundation, and others. Her essay on Baudelaire, “The Stroll and Preparation for Departure” is included in the Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge University Press 2006). Vollmer teaches in the undergraduate Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and in the Low Residency Poetry MFA Program at Drew University. She lives in Pittsburgh in the Nine Mile Run Watershed and co-edits the national poetry journal 5 AM.

2012 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival Schedule
(subject to change)