LIVELY WORDS

The Writers
Listed in alphabetical order by last name

Carl Adamshick (Session 24) received the 2010 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets judged by Marvin Bell. His book, Curses and Wishes, is published by Louisiana State University Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Narrative, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Though her fiction writing explores a dark threshold between the mundane and the metaphysical, Nina Alvarez’s (Session 23) non-fiction ghostwriting and article writing explores the lighter side of life through balance and emotional well-being. Nina Alvarez’s short stories have been published in 21 Stars Review, Twisted Tongue, Dark Reveries, and Swill. Her poetry has been published in Electric Velocipede, Grasslimb Literary Journal and Contemporary Rhyme. She co-publishes the e-magazine Follow Your Bliss. In May 2011 she was awarded a grant from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Nina has lived on the Oregon coast, Brooklyn, Cape Town, Philadelphia, Paris, the Gulf Coast, and in 2011 finally made it full circle to her hometown of Rochester, NY. She has been a college-level English instructor, a publisher, editor, ghostwriter, writing mentor, art marketing blogger, social media director, and when money is tight she gets naked for art classes.

Robert Boswell (Session 15) is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, in April 2009. His novels: Century’s Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
 
Rus Bradburd (Session 6) is the author of Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops. He teaches at New Mexico State University. He was a college basketball coach for fourteen seasons and his study of race, college basketball and Nolan Richardson will be published by Harper Collins in the fall of 2009.

Travis Brown (Session 4) lives and works in Portland, OR. He received the MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University. His work has been reprinted online by Verse Daily and has appeared in a number of print journals including Fence, Third Coast, West Branch, and Conduit. He was  selected as a finalist for the 2008 Iowa Review Poetry Prize. He has poetry forthcoming in Sixty-Six: A Journal of Sonnet Studies.

Steve Caldes (Session 1) was born and raised in Westfield, MA but now lives in San Diego, CA and teaches rhetoric to freshmen at the local state university. For the first time ever, he loves his job. His work has been published here and there, most notably McSweeney’s and The Cincinnati Review.

Born in the southern Rocky Mountain town of Durango, Colorado, Ann Cummins (Session 11) writes frequently about working class people. During the early part of the 20th century, her family migrated from County Galway, Ireland to Colorado, where they mined silver, coal, and uranium. Cummins is the author of a short story collection, Red Ant House, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Northern California Book Award winner, and a novel, Yellowcake, which was a San Francisco Chronicle notable book and Best of Kirkus, 2007.  Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere; and have been anthologized in a variety of series including The Best American Short Stories, The Prentice Hall Anthology of Women’s Literature, and The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories.  She’s a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs.  A 2002 recipient of a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, she divides her time between Oakland, California and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Terri Ford (Session 19) is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Her first book is Why the Ships are She (Four Way Books, 2001). She is a recipient of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She was the Ohio Arts Council Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1999.

Heather Herrman (Session 18) is a graduate of the NMSU MFA program. She recently moved to Minneapolis and works for the Minnesota Literacy Council. Her fiction has appeared in various journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, The South Carolina Review and Snake Nation Review. Right now she is finishing her “real” novel and, to keep her sane, is also hard at work fictionally killing people in a horror novel.

Dorine Jennette’s (Session 16) poetry collection Urchin to Follow is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press in May 2010. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as the Journal, Ninth Letter, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, the New Orleans Review, and the Georgia Review. She earned her MFA at New Mexico State University and her PhD at the University of Georgia; she earns her keep as a copyeditor for university presses. She lives in Davis, California.

Roxane Beth Johnson’s (Session 17) first book of poetry, Jubilee (Anhinga, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Philip Levine was the judge. She has won an AWP Prize in Poetry and a Pushcart Prize, 2007. She has received scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Callaloo, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea, ZYZZYVA, The Bitter Oleander, American Poet, Parthenon West, Sentence and elsewhere.

Mark Latiner (Session 2) lives in Richmond, California, where he works as an editor and writer. He blackmailed Albert to get on this site.

Megan Levad (Session 25)’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Fence, Granta Online, Tin House, American Letters & Commentary, and other journals. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she runs the visiting writers series for the University of Michigan.

Vicente Lozano (Session 26) was born and raised in the Air Force. His parents are from the Texas Border, and he moved back to the area when he was thirteen. He has lived and worked in Austin for many years now, and is currently working as a systems administrator at U.T.’s Undergraduate Writing Center. The life long theme he has wrestled with is race and how it passes down anxiety. Vicente and his wife live in a lovable,  ‘Portlandia’ like bubble in ATX with one dog and three cats who don’t think that much about race or identity.

Marco Morrone (Session 7) grew up in Manhasset, NY. He had read The Great Gatsby three times before he figured out his home town was the East Egg of the book. Now that he is a high school English and history teacher, he never misses a chance to mention this, even though no one cares. He started writing fiction when he moved to Texas for graduate school. The most enthusiastic feedback he ever received was when a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of American Studies threw one of his stories across the room in disgust. If the professor is still alive, he’d surely be surprised that Marco hasn’t given up yet. Marco’s wife Megan is very supportive of his writing and teaching, neither of which would be enough to feed and clothe any significant fraction of their family of five. Marco lives in Petaluma, CA, which has a pretty good farmer’s market every Saturday afternoon from 2-5 during the summer.

Megan Morrone (Session 8) is a freelance writer who lives with her three children and her one husband. Sometimes she still blogs at JumpingMonkeys.com and will probably do so until her children learn to read.

Antonya Nelson (Session 14) is the author of eight books of fiction, including Female Trouble and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson’s 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 The Best American Short Stories. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and, recently, the Rea Award for Short Fiction. She is married to the writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Christina Olson’s (Session 22) first book of poems, Before I Came Home Naked, won the 2007 Spire Press annual contest and was published in October 2010. Her work has been selected as a finalist for several contests, including the Poetry Southeast prize and the Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest, and by Gerald Stern as the winner of The Dirty Napkin’s Gerald Stern Poetry Prize. Other poetry and nonfiction has appeared (or will soon) in magazines and journals including Barn Owl Review, The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume Three, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Cream City Review, Eclipse, Folio, Gastronomica, Gulf Coast, and several other magazines and journals. She has worked as a healthcare marketing copywriter in Madison, Wisconsin, and taught as a visiting assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 2011-2012, she will teach at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia, and yes, she has heard the Allman Brothers song.

Midge Raymond’s (Session 13) short-story collection, Forgetting English (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009), received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Tri-Quarterly, American Literary Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Midge taught communication writing at Boston University for six years, as well as creative writing at Boston’s Grub Street Writers. While living in Southern California, she taught at San Diego Writers, Ink, where she served as vice president of the board of directors. She now lives and writes in Seattle, where she teaches at Richard Hugo House.

Augustus Rose (Session 12) was born in Bolinas, a small Northern California town. He grew up there and in San Francisco and Berkeley but currently makes his home in Chicago, where he is teaching at Columbia College. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in F Magazine, Readymade, Publisher’s Weekly, The Berkeley Fiction Review and other journals. Currently he is at work on a novel that takes place within the milieu of the underground art and music scenes of the 1980s-90s.

Lauren Schiffman (Session 9) is a mom and a freelance writer and editor in Richmond, California. She received an MFA in poetry from San Francisco State University and has recently had work published in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Wreckage of Reason.

David Schweidel (Session 5) grew up in El Paso, Texas. He studied anthropology at Stanford, UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley, and received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. His novel Confidence of the Heart, about an American anthropologist in Guatemala, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. His latest book, What Men Call Treasure, written in collaboration with Robert Boswell, was just published by Cinco Puntos Press. Schweidel lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and two daughters.
 
Andrew Scott (Session 10) lives in Indianapolis and teaches at Ball State University. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Cincinnati Review , Mid-American Review, The Writer’s Chronicle,  and Glimmer Train Stories. With the writer Victoria Barrett, he co-edits Freight Stories, an online fiction quarterly. He is also the author of a story chapbook, Modern Love. He can be found online at www.andrewscottonline.com.

Tim Staley (Session 20) was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1975. He lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Poems from a manuscript in progress have appeared in Border Senses, Chiron Review, Circumference, Coe Review, and RHINO: The Poetry Forum.

Jill Stukenberg (Session 3) now resides in Portland, Oregon, after having lived in Wisconsin and New Mexico. She teaches English at Clark College and Clackamas Community College. Her newest work can be found in The Sonora Review.

Connie Voisine (Session 21) is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University, where she directs the creative writing program. Educated at Yale University, she received her MFA from University of California at Irvine and her Ph.D. from University of Utah. Her book, Cathedral of the North, was selected winner of the AWP Award in Poetry and was released by University of Pittsburgh Press. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream was published by University of Chicago Press in 2008 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her husband, writer Rus Bradburd and their daughter.