Visiting Writers Series: Spring 2008

Philip Nikolayev

Philip Nikolayev was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1966 and grew up fully bilingual in Russian and English thanks to his father, a linguist. He started out as a Russian poet, but came to the United States in 1990 to attend Harvard University, and has since been writing primarily in English. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Grand Street, Verse, Stand, Jacket, Salt, Overland and many others across the English-speaking world. Nikolayev lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his poet wife Katia Kapovich and their four year old daughter Sophia Margarita.

Nikolayev is the author of two collections of poems, Artery Lumen (Barbara Matteau Editions: Cambridge, MA, 1996) and Dusk Raga (The Writers' Workshop, Calcutta, 1998). His third collection of poems, Monkey Time, is the winner of the 2001 Verse Prize (judge Lyn Hejinian) and is forthcoming from Verse Press this fall. He is also the editor and publisher of Fulcrum, an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

For David Haynes, the road to publication was a long one. Publishing houses just weren't sure there was a market for African-American fiction that didn't involve the inner city, drugs, or gangs. Everything changed when tiny New Rivers Press in Minnesota decided to publish David's first novel, Right By My Side, in 1993. His middle-class, mid-Western, African-American characters--real, human, flawed, and hilarious--struck a chord with readers and critics alike. Three years--and three novels--later, the prestigious literary magazine, Granta, named him one of the twenty best young American novelists.

David Haynes grew up in St. Louis, and now lives in St. Paul. He has taught middle school and worked as a teacher-in-residence for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He is the author of Heathens, Somebody Else's Mama, and Live at Five.

MFA Bonnie Soniat Reading Series

Alix Ohlin is the author of two acclaimed books of fiction.  Her debut novel, The Missing Person, was a Booklist Top Ten First Novel of 2005, and was described by J.M. Coetzee as "an impressively assured debut novel...skillful, attractively quick-witted and wry."  Ohlin's book of short stories, Babylon, was published by Knopf in August of 2006 and shortlisted for the Story Prize.  Her stories have been selected for both Best New American Voices 2004 and Best American Short Stories 2005, and aired on NPR's Selected Shorts.  She teaches at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

Mark Doty is the author of six books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001), and School of the Arts (2005). He is the author of the memoirs Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007). Among his many awards are two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty teaches in the graduate program the University of Houston. He lives in Houston and in New York City.