Visiting Writers Series: 2009 -2010

E. Ethelbert Miller

Ethelbert Miller is a poet, a writer, and a literary activist. His anthology of African-American poetry, In Search of Color Everywhere was awarded the 1994 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a Book of the Month Club selection. Recipient of the 1995 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, Miller was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Emory & Henry College on May 18, 1996. In 1997 he was presented with the Stephen Henderson Poetry Award by the African American Literature and Culture Society. In 2001 the Mayor of Jackson, Tennessee proclaimed May 21, 2001 as "E. Ethelbert Miller Day." Fathering Words was selected by DC WE READ in 2003 for the one book, one city program sponsored by the D.C. Public Libraries. In 2004, Miller was awarded a Fulbright to visit Israel.

MFA Katherine Soniat Reading Series

Margot Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as the Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Carter Prize for the Essay. Margot teaches creative writing at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where she holds the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship.

Melanie Rae Thon

Melanie Rae Thon's most recent book is the novel Sweet Hearts. She is also the author of Meteors in August and Iona Moon, and the story collections First, Body and Girls in the Grass. Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996), three Pushcart Prize Anthologies (2003, 2006, 2008), and O. Henry Prize Stories (2006). She is also a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award (1997), two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1992 and 2008), a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation (2005), and a fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center (2009). In 1996, Granta included her in the Best of the Young American Novelists issue.

Originally from Montana, she now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah.

MFA Katherine Soniat Reading Series

Brian Brodeur was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Margie, Meridian, New Orleans Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Smartish Pace, and the anthology Best New Poets 2005 (Samovar Press, 2005). Brian is the author of So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), winner of the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Contest. Other Latitudes is his first full-length collection. Brian lives and works in Fairfax, Virginia.

Diane Thiel

Diane Thiel is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy; including Echolocations (2000), which received the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press; Writing Your Rhythm: Using Nature, Culture, Form and Myth (Story Line Press, 2001); The White Horse: A Colombian Journey (Etruscan Press, 2004); and Resistance Fantasies (Story Line Press, 2004), She has also published three textbooks with Longman: Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres (2005), Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry (2005), and Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creating Nonfiction (2008). Her chapbook, Cleft in the Wall, was published by Aralia Press (1999). Thiel's translation of Greek author Alexis Stamatis's American Fugue (2008) received an NEA International Literature Award in conjunction with Etruscan Press (one of only three awarded nationally). Thiel was a Fulbright Scholar for 2001-2002 in Odessa, on the Black Sea, and is currently an Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico.

Offutt is th author of the story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods; the 1993 memoir The Same River Twice; the novel, The Good Brother; and the memoir, No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. His work has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation. Offutt was named one of the twenty best young American fiction writers by Granta, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Men's Journal, Oxford American, and on National Public Radio.

In 2005, Offutt made his comic book debut when he wrote "Another Man's Escape" for Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist.

Offutt has been a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Montana, the University of New Mexico, Grinnell College, and Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.