Visiting Writers Series: 2010 -2011

Junot Diaz

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.

He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

C. D. Wright has published numerous volumes of poetry including Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005); Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (2002); and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), with photographer Deborah Luster.

Among her numerous honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Bunting Institute, as well as awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Prize, and a Whiting Award.

With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers. Wright teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Matthew Shenoda

Matthew Shenoda’s debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Introduction by Sonia Sanchez) was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and is the winner of the inaugural Hala Maksoud Award for Emerging Voice, as well as a 2006 American Book Award. His latest collection,Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, was published in Fall 2009 from BOA Editions. He has taught extensively in the fields of Ethnic Studies and Creative Writing and is currently Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity and Professor in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

MFA Katherine Soniat Reading Series

Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of short fiction, and co-editor of The Other Chekhov. His recent work appears in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Plots with Guns, and in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2008 , guest edited by George Pelecanos (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), Surreal South (Press 53, 2007), edited by Pinckney Benedict and Laura Benedict, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006). As a graduate student at the Ohio State University, he was a three-time honoree (in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction) in The Atlantic Monthly’s annual writing contest. Random House named Kyle one of the “Best New Voices of 2006,” and The Columbus Dispatch named him one of their ”20 Under 30 Artists to Watch” in 2007.

Adrian Matejka

MFA Katherine Soniat Reading Series

Adrian Matejka is a graduate of the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is a Cave Canem fellow and his poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden, won the 2002 New York/New England Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, Mixology, a National Poetry Series winner (selected by Kevin Young), was published by Penguin in May 2009.

Antonya Nelson is the author of five short story collections: Nothing Right [2009] Female Trouble [2002], Family Terrorists [1994], In the Land of Men [1992], and The Expendables [1990].  She is also the author of three novels: Living to Tell [2000], Nobody’s Girl [1998] and Talking in Bed [1996]. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook and other magazines, as wells as in anthologies such as Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. The Expendables won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990 and Talking in Bed received the 1996 Heartland Award in fiction. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”

She is the recipient of an National Endowment for the Arts grant and 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. She divides her time between Telluride, Colorado, and Houston Texas, where she shares, with her husband novelist Robert Boswell, the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.