NewsRoom

The faculty for this year’s conference features poet Eavan Boland and Tayari Jones, whose novel Silver Sparrow was released last year to wide acclaim.

Boland, who was born in Dublin, Ireland, is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and directs the creative writing program at Stanford University. She has published ten volumes of poetry, the most recent being New Collected Poems and Domestic Violence. She has received the Lannan Award for Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award.

Jones was recently awarded a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Silver Sparrow was named a top book of 2011 by Library Journal, O Magazine, Slate and Salon, and has been nominated for a NAACP Image Award.

During the conference week, faculty members will lead intimate workshops with conference attendees, discuss the craft of fiction and poetry in daytime lectures and read from their works in a series of evening events. Lectures and evening readings will be open to the public.

Full conference tuition – including workshops, lectures, evening events and most meals – is $900. One in five conference attendees receive full or partial scholarships, which are awarded according to merit and need. Rolling admissions begin March 1, and scholarship applications are due April 2. For application materials and guidelines and further information visit napawritersconference.org.

Full list of poetry faculty:

• Boland, whose works also include Against Love Poetry, The Lost Land, In a Time of Violence and Night Feed. She also authored two books of prose, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time and A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet and co-edited the Norton anthologies The Making of a Poem and The Making of a Sonnet.

• Forrest Gander, whose poetry works include Core Samples from the World, Eye Against Eye, and Science & Steepleflower. Gander is also a novelist and essayist, and his most recent translations include Watchword by Pura López Colomé, which won the Villaurrutia Prize, and Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. Gander teaches at Brown University.

• Brenda Hillman’s most recent work is Pieces of Air in the Epic, her eighth volume of poetry. Previous titles include Cascadia and Loose Sugar. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry from the Poetry Society of America and Norma Farber First Book Prize, also from the Poetry Society of America. She co-edited the collection The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. She teaches at St. Mary’s College.

• Arthur Sze is a poet and translator whose books include The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and The Silk Dragon, winner of the Western States Book Award in Translation. His most recent work of poetry is The Ginkgo Light. Sze is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and multiple fellowships from both the Witter Bynner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Full list of fiction faculty:

• Kevin Brockmeier’s novels include The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology, among other publications. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN USA Award, and an NEA grant.

• Lan Samantha Chang’s second novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, was published in 2010. Chang is also the author of Inheritance and Hunger: A Novella and Stories. Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

• Ron Carlson is the author of 10 books of fiction, most recently the novel The Signal. Previous work includes Five Skies, At The Jim Bridger, and The Hotel Eden, a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book. His work is included in many anthologies, including the O. Henry: Prize Stories and Best American Stories, and he was awarded the Aspen Prize in Literature in 2009. Carlson is currently director of the graduate writing program at UC Irvine.

• In addition to Silver Sparrow, Jones has written the novels Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. She is an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University. She is spending the 2011-12 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching her fourth novel.

Posted: 2/16/2012