Visiting Writers Series: 2012 -2013

Diana Abu-Jaber

Diana Abu-Jaber is most recently the author of Birds of Paradise, an Indie Books Pick, as well as of the award winning memoir, The Language of Baklava, the best-selling novels Origin and Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the American Book Award. Her first novel, Arabian Jazz, won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

A frequent contributor to NPR, she teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami.

Stephen Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing.  His books of poetry include What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 (W.W. Norton, 2009); Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (1996); New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (1991); Between Angels (1989); Local Time (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (1984); Work & Love (1981); A Circus of Needs (1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling,1974. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998).  Dunn splits his time between Ocean City, New Jersey and Frostburg, Maryland.

Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley’s most recent book is Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir and cultural history of food allergy. She is also the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Other honors for her work include selection for the 2010 Best American Poetry, the 2010 University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence position, a DCCAH Artist Fellowship, the Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Maureen Egen Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Emily Raboteau and Victor LaValle

Emily Raboteau is the author of the novel, The Professor's Daughter, (Henry Holt, 2005) and the memoir, Searching for Zion (Grove Press, 2013). The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches creative writing in Harlem at the City College of New York.

Victor LaValle is the author of the story collection, Slapboxing With Jesus, and the novels The Ecstatic, a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and Big Machine, winner of an American Book Award.  His most recent book is The Devil in Silver (Spiegel and Grau, 2012). He serves as Director of the Fiction Concentration at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

MFA Katherine Soniat Reading Series

Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in 2005.  Her novel Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco, 2011) was named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year by The New York Times.  Her short stories have appeared in Agni, North American Review, Ninth Letter, Columbia, and Salon, among other publications.  Her story “The Farms” was nominated for a Pushcart and selected by Alice Sebold for The Best American Short Stories 2009. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered, Poets & Writers (where she was a contributing editor), and The Virginia Quarterly Review (where she was the chair of the fiction board). From 2006 to 2010 she taught at James Madison University in Virginia.  Now an assistant professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, Aaron, and sons Nico and Henry, and is at work on another novel.

MFA Katherine Soniat Reading Series

Esther Lee received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University and served as Editor-in-Chief for Indiana Review. She has been awarded the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and 2009 Utah Writer’s Contest Award for Poetry, as well as twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and AWP Intro Journals Project.

Her first poetry collection, Spit, was selected for the Elixir Press Poetry Prize and published in 2011, and her chapbook, The Blank Missives, was published by Trafficker Press (2007). Her poems and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Salt Hill, Good Foot, Swink, Cream City Review, New Orleans Review, Hyphen, Columbia Poetry Review, Born Magazine, and elsewhere.

A former Kundiman fellow, she currently pursues a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah where she was recently awarded a Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center to work on her second book.