Yusef Komunyakaa

   Guest Writers  for 2008

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he was raised during the begining of the Civil Rights movement. He served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam war, earning him a Bronze Star.

He began writing poetry in 1973, and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado Springs in 1975. His first book of poems, Dedications & Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977, followed by Lost in the Bonewheel Factory in 1979. During this time, he earned his M.A. from Colorado State University and an M.F.A. from University of California Irvine.

Komunyakaa first received wide recognition following the 1984 publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems built from colloquial speech which demonstrated his incorporation of jazz influences. He followed the book with two others: I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize and has been cited for by poets such as William Matthews and Robert Hass as being among the best writing on the war in Vietnam.

Since then, he has published several books of poems, including Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Magic City (1992).

Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (with J. A. Sascha Feinstein, 1991), co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995), and served as guest editor for The Best of American Poetry 2003.

He has also written dramatic works, including Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), and Slip Knot, a libretto in collaboration with Composer T. J. Anderson and commissioned by Northwestern University.

Komunyakaa's honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Josh Bell

Josh Bell's first book, No Planets Strike, was released from  Zoo Press/University of Nebraska Press in 2005. He received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellow. He was the Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Creative Writing Institute, 2003-04, and in the Summer of 2006 was a Walter Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writer's Conference. His poems have appeared in such magazines as 9th Letter, Boston Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Triquarterly, Verse, and Volt. His poems have been reprinted in such recent anthologies as Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande) and Imaginary Poets: 22 Master Poets Create 22 Master Poets (Tupelo Press). New poems are forthcoming in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's) and Third Rail: Rock and Roll Poetry (MTV Books). While at Columbia, he is finishing his doctoral dissertation for the University of Cincinnati, where he was University Distinguished Graduate Fellow.

Carolyn Ferrell

Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the short story collection Don't Erase Me, which received the Art Seidenbaum Award of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the John C. Zachiris Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Century; Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; The Blue Light Corner: Black Women Writing on Passion, Sex, and Romantic Love; and Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present. Carolyn has been the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Association, the German Academic Exchange (D.A.A.D.), the City University of New York MAGNET Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts (Literature fellow for 2004). She received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. from the City College of New York. She lives in New York and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Scott Huler

Scott Huler is the author of three books, including the acclaimed Defining the Wind. Huler is a professional journalist and his articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other leading North American newspapers and magazines. He is a frequent NPR contributor and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

www.scotthuler.com

Sharan Strange

Sharan Strange grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was educated at Harvard College, and received an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a contributing and advisory editor of Callaloo and cofounder of the Dark Room Collective. Her poetry has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The Best American Poetry 1994, The Garden Thrives, In Search of Color Everywhere, and in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She is a professor of English at Spellman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Peter Steinberg

Peter Steinberg began his career in publishg as an assistant at HarperCollins. He  later became an agent at Donadio & Ashworth (later Donadio & Olson) where he worked with notable literary figures, including Mario Puzo, Chuck Palahniuk, Peter Matthiessen, Robert Stone, Cathleen Schine and Edward Gorey. After four years with Donadio, he moved to JCA Literary Agency, where he worked for three years, before coming to Regal Literary in 2004. In the fall of 2007, Peter formed The Steinberg Agency. He's interested in literary and commercial fiction, history, humor, narrative nonfiction, short story collections and the occasional young adult novel. Peter received an undergraduate degree in film production from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Betsy Teter

Betsy Teter is a founder and executive director of the Hub City Writers Project, a non-profit literary arts organization in Spartanburg, S.C., whose publications and activities celebrate place and community. Hub City, which has published 32 books and more than 180 writers since 1996, also sponsors events, readings and workshops; hosts an annual creative writing contest; and makes visits to schools and colleges.

The organization has received several regional and national awards, and its community-based publishing program has been featured in The New York Times, Southern Living, Utne Reader, Orion magazine and other publications. Hub City is the winner of The S.C. Governor’s Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts (2002); the S.C. Governor’s Award for the Humanities (2006); and two “Ippy Awards” from Independent Publisher magazine (1999, short story; and 2005, multicultural nonfiction).

Betsy is a native of Spartanburg and holds a BA in History from Wake Forest University. Prior to helping found the Writers Project, she was a journalist for 15 years and served as business editor and columnist for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.

Louise Shivers

Louise Shivers is the author of two novels, Here to Get My Baby out of Jail, which was named Best First Novel of the Year by USA Today in 1983 and was was made into the movie Summer Heat; and A Whistling Woman, which garnered Shivers the Georgia Author of the Year award in 1993. She is the receipeint of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has served as Writer-in-Residence at Augusta College for more than twenty years.