Presenters

Steve Almond (creative nonfiction) 

Steve Almond is the author the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction books Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked). His memoir Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life was published in Spring 2010. He also, crazily, self-published three books: This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey, which is composed of 30 very brief stories, and 30 very brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing; Letters From People Who Hate Me, a collection of letters and responses between Steve and his indignant readers; and Bad Poetry, a collection of previously unpublished verse and accompanying self-criticism.  Lookout Books is publishing Almond’s story collection God Bless America in October 2011. He lives outside Boston with his wife, two children, and mounting debt.  For more on Steve Almond, including music recommendations, visit www.stevenalmond.com

Lynne Barrett (fiction/editor) 

Lynne Barrett is the author of the story collections Magpies, The Secret Names of Women, and The Land of Go, and co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion. Her recent fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear in The Written Wardrobe, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Night Train, The Southern Women’s Review, Delta Blues, One Year to a Writing Life, and (forthcoming) Blue Christmas. Her essay “What Editors Want” in The Review Review was cited in the L.A. Times and New Yorker book blogs, and she is guest editor of Tigertail’s current issue “Florida/Flash.” A recipient of the Edgar Award for best mystery story, she teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University and is editor of The Florida Book Review (http://www.floridabookreview.com). Learn more about Lynne here: http://lynne.barrett.googlepages.com

Dan Bern (songwriting)

Dan Bern is singer, songwriter, guitarist, novelist, and painter whose music is often compared to that of Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Bruce Springsteen. He is a prolific composer, having written thousands of songs^.  He also wrote the novel Quitting Science (2004) under the pen name Cunliffe Merriwether and wrote the preface under his own name.  In early 2007, Bern's album Breathe won in The 6th Annual Independent Music Award for Best Folk/Singer-Songwriter Album.

Bern's songwriting skills were used in the biopic parody film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, where he helped write 16 songs for the movie. Many of these songs made the theatrical cut of the film including the Dylanesque "Royal Jelly,” and the melodic "(Have You Heard the News) Dewey Cox Died.” He continues to write songs for films, including Get Him to the Greek. 

His discography includes the studio albums:

#   Dog Boy Van (EP; 1996)

#   Dan Bern (1997)

#   Fifty Eggs (1998)

#   Smartie Mine (double album; 1998)

#   New American Language (2001)

#   World Cup (EP; 2002)

#   The Swastika EP (EP; 2002)

#   Fleeting Days (2003)

#   My Country II (EP; 2004)

#   Anthems (EP; 2004)

#   Breathe Easy (EP; 2006)

#   Breathe (2006)

#   Moving Home (2008)

#   Two Feet Tall (2009)

#   Live in Los Angeles (2010)

#   Live in New York (2011)

and the downloadable albums

#   Divine and Conquer (1994; released 2007)

#   The Burbank Tapes (1998; released in 2007)

#   Macaroni Cola (2000-2001; released in 2007)

Nickole Brown (poetry/editor/publicist)

Nickole Brown's books include her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems, and the anthology, Air Fare, that she co-edited with Judith Taylor. The title poem from her forthcoming collection of poetry, A Book of Birds, recently won AROHO’s Orlando Poetry Prize in 2010. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years.  Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry and works as the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books.  She lives in Little Rock, AR, where she teaches at the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State and is the Assistant Professor poetry at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.  For more info, visit www.nickolebrown.com

Kevin Canty (fiction)

Kevin Canty's seventh book, a novel called Everything, was published by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday in July, 2010. He is also the author of three collections of short stories (Where the Money Went, Honeymoon, and A Stranger In This World) and three previous novels (Nine Below Zero, Into the Great Wide Open, and Winslow in Love). His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Tin House, GQ, Glimmer Train, Story, the New England Review and elsewhere; essays and articles in Vogue, Details, Playboy, the New York Times and the Oxford American, among many others. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Polish, Italian and English. He lives and writes in Missoula, Montana, where he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Montana.

Ron Currie (fiction)

Ron Currie is the author of God is Dead and Everything Matters!.  His writing has won the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association.  He lives in Waterville, Maine. For more info, visit www.roncurriejr.net

John Dufresne (fiction) 

John Dufresne grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he wasted his youth playing baseball and going to movies. He attended Worcester State College and spent seven years as a social worker before attending the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. Dufresne is the author of the story collections The Way That Water Enters Stone (1991) and Johnny Too Bad (2006). His novel Louisiana Power & Light (1994) was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was his second novel, Love Warps the Mind a Little (1997). In describing Deep in the Shade of Paradise (2002), Publishers Weekly wrote, "Imagining John Irving, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Max Shulman (or all of the above at once) on peyote juice only begins to evoke the dimension and energy of the seriocomic fantasies of Dufresne at his freewheeling, frenetic best." In July 2008, W.W. Norton, Dufresne's longtime publisher, will release his most recent novel, Requiem, Mass. In addition to his works of fiction, he has a book on fiction writing titled The Lie That Tells a Truth.  Carl Hiassen chose Dufresne's story "The Timing of Unfelt Smiles" for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2007.   In April 2008, Grand Valley Productions filmed To Live and Die in Dixie, based on a screenplay Dufresne co-wrote with Donald Papy. Since 1989 he has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University (http://w3.fiu.edu/crwriting/). He lives in Dania Beach, Florida, with his wife and son.  For more information on John Dufresne, visit www.johndufresne.com.

Carmen Edington

Carmen Edington is the former managing editor of Fiction Collective Two, an independent and innovative book press. In her three years with FC2, she edited the books of such writers as Michael Martone, Brian Kiteley, Lynn Kirkpatrick and Ameila Gray. She earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from Texas State University, and has published fiction in RE:AL, Arkansas Literary Forum and Arkansas Review.

William Giraldi (fiction/editor)

William Giraldi's novel Busy Monsters is being published by Norton in August 2011.  Giraldi teaches at Boston University and is Senior Fiction Editor for AGNI.  His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, Bookforum, Southern Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, Yale Review, The American Scholar, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, and Salmagundi.  His essay on amateur bodybuilding, “Freaky Beasts,” received a Pushcart Prize and was listed among Most Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2010. His essay “The Physics of Speed” was a finalist for a 2011 National Magazine Award. Giraldi lives in Boston with his wife and son. www.busymonsters.com

Barbara Hamby (poetry)

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawai’i. In 2010, her first book of stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize/John Simmons Award, she was named a Distinguished University Scholar at Florida State, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also published Seriously Funny, an anthology of poetry that she co-edited with her husband, poet David Kirby, and Amy Gerstler chose five of her Lingo Sonnets for Best American Poetry 2010.  Hamby’s other books are: All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), Babel (chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize), The Alphabet of Desire (1998 New York University Prize for Poetry and chosen by The New York Public Library as one of the 25 best books of 1999), and Delirium (which won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize and two prizes for the best first book of poems published in 1995, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award).  Hamby received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, 2009, and 2010 and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001.  She has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, since 1998. In Spring 2009 she was a visiting professor at the University of Houston.  Visit www.barbarahamby.com

John Hoppenthaler (poetry)

John Hoppenthaler's books of poetry are Lives Of Water (2003) and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), both titles from Carnegie Mellon University Press.  With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine (forthcoming from U of Michigan P, 2012).  His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Laurel Review, Barrow Street, West Branch, Christian Science Monitor, Pleiades, and Blackbird, as well as a number of anthologies, including Poetry Calendar (Alhambra Publishing), Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State U of New York P), September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press), Blooming Through the Ashes (Rutgers UP), The Sound of Poets Cooking (JACAR Press), and Chance Of A Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions).  Among his honors are an Arts Fellowship Award for Excellence in the Field of Literature from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, a North Carolina Community Council for the Arts Regional Artist Project Grant, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Elizabeth Bishop House, and the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities.  For eleven years, he served as Poetry Editor for Kestrel, and he now edits A Poetry Congeries for the cultural site, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.  He also serves as Advisory Board Member for Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Words and Music Festival (WAMFEST).  Personal Assistant to Toni Morrison for nine years, he is now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.  He lives on the banks of the Pamlico River in Washington, NC with his wife, Christy, his stepson, Danny, and their kitten, Obi.  http://core.ecu.edu/engl/cw

Christopher Joyce (NPR-writing for radio)

Christopher Joyce is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR. His stories can be heard on all of NPR's news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazon and Central American rainforests, Tibetan outposts in the mountains of western China, and the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, hurricanes, human evolution, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, climate change, wars in Kosovo and Iraq and the artificial insemination of an African elephant.

For several years, Joyce was an editor and correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that was heard frequently on Morning Edition.

Joyce came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests and, as he says, "I just fell in love with radio." For two years, Joyce worked on NPR's national desk and was responsible for NPR's Western coverage. But his interest in science and technology soon launched him into parallel work on NPR's science desk.

In addition, Joyce has written two non-fiction books on scientific topics for the popular market: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell (with co-author Eric Stover); and Earthly Goods: Medicine-Hunting in the Rainforest.

Before coming to NPR, Joyce worked for ten years as the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.

Joyce's stories on forensic investigations into the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia were part of NPR's war coverage that won a 1999 Overseas Press Club award. He was part of the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team that won the 2001 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award and the 2001 Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Joyce won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award. Visit www.npr.org/people/2100689/christopher-joyce

David Kirby (poetry)

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has received many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work appears frequently in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. Kirby is the author of over twenty books of poetry and criticism, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry. His Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll was named one of Booklist's Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010, and the Times Literary Supplement called it "a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense."  Kirby's latest poetry collection is Talking About Movies With Jesus (2011, LSU).   For more on David Kirby, visit www.davidkirby.com. 

Robert Root (creative nonfiction/editor)

Robert Root is the author of two works of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale and Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, and the forthcoming essay collection, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place. He is the editor of Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place and co-editor (with Michael Steinberg) of The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, a textbook now in its sixth edition, as well as Interview/Roundtable Editor of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. His books on nonfiction include E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist and The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction. He teaches nonfiction in the Ashland University MFA Program in Creative Writing and lives in Wisconsin. His website is www.rootwriting.com.

John K. Samson (songwriting) 

John K. Samson is the singer and songwriter for The Weakerthans, an acclaimed rock band. John’s poetry and prose has appeared in Matrix Magazine, Geist, The Believer, and Post-Prairie—an Anthology of New Poetry. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he’s also the managing editor and co-founder of a small publishing house, ARP (Arbeiter Ring Publishing). His forthcoming solo album, Provincial, and book, Lyrics and Poems, 1997—2012, will both be released in January 2012.

Christopher Schelling (literary agent) 

Christopher Schelling represents a wide-ranging list of fiction and nonfiction authors, including #1 New York Times bestselling writers Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors) and Haven Kimmel (A Girl Named Zippy), as well as highly respected literary fiction (Louis Bayard's The Black Tower) and upscale nonfiction (Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History).  His specialty in memoir has also brought writers like Robert Wilder (Daddy Needs a Drink) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye) to his list.  In addition, he represents a number of young adult authors, including Kathe Koja (Buddha Boy), Cinda Williams Chima (The Warrior Heir) and Eric A. Kimmel, author of over 80 picture books. Schelling spent twelve years at Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd. before starting his own agency, Selectric Artists, in 2011.   Previous to being an agent, he held Executive Editor positions at both Dutton and HarperCollins.  

Laurel Snyder (children's lit)

Laurel Snyder is the author of four novels for children--most recently Bigger than a Bread Box--and  a handful of picture books, including Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher.  She's written two books of poetry that are decidedly NOT for children, and she is also an occasional commentator for NPR's All Things Considered.   Laurel lives in Atlanta, GA, with her family, and online at www.laurelsnyder.com  

Darin Strauss (memoir)

Darin Strauss is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a winner of the American Library Association's Alix Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award.  Strauss is the internationally-bestselling author of the novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than It Hurts You, and the NBCC-winning memoir Half a Life. These have been New York Times Notable Books, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year, among others. Darin has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries, and he is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU's creative writing program. For more info, visit www.darinstrauss.com

Jay Wexler (creative nonfiction)

Jay Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, is the author of two books—Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars (Beacon Press 2009) and The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions (Beacon Press 2011).  In addition to many scholarly articles, he's also published over forty short stories, essays, reviews, and humor pieces in places like Barrelhouse, The Boston Globe, McSweeney's, Mental Floss, Monkeybicycle, and Spy.  Before teaching, he worked as a lawyer at the Department of Justice and as a law clerk to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  His website is www.jaywex.com

Tom Williams (novella/editor)

Tom Williams is the author of The Mimic's Own Voice, a novella published in 2011 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. His short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, most recently in Booth, SLAB, RE: AL and The Collagist. An associate editor of American Book Review, he also chairs the English Department at Morehead State University. He and his wife, Carmen, reside in Kentucky with their son, Finn. 

Tom Zoellner (investigative journalism)

Tom Zoellner is the author of three nonfiction books: The Heartless Stone, Uranium and the forthcoming Train. He has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and The Arizona Republic. He lives in Southern California.