Writers' Festival
Thursday, June 18 through Sunday, June 21, 2009
Registration deadline extended until June 12.
For four days and three nights, live and write in a community of writers on the beautiful grounds of the historic Chautauqua Institution on the shore of Chautauqua Lake.
The 6th Annual Chautauqua Writers’ Festival will be held Thursday, June 18 through Sunday, June 21, 2009. As in previous years, award-winning writers (two poets, two fiction writers, and two non-fiction writers) will share their insights on the art and craft of writing in intensive workshops designed to assure participants personalized attention. In addition to the workshops, the festival will offer a wide-ranging program consisting of readings, panel discussions, individual conferences with faculty mentors, writing time, open mics, and musical entertainment.
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Schedule of Events
| Thursday | |
| 10 am-Noon | Registration |
| Noon-1 pm | Lunch |
| 1-2 pm | Director's Panel |
| 2-4 pm | Workshops |
| 4-6 pm | Writing Time/Conferences |
| 6:45-8 pm | Dinner |
| 8-9:30 pm | Readings |
| 9:30 pm- | Open Mic |
|
Friday |
|
| 8-9 am | Breakfast |
| 9-11 am | Workshops |
| 11 am-12:15 pm | Poetry Panel |
| 12:30-1:30 pm | Lunch |
| 1:30-3 pm | Open Mic/Conferences |
| 3:15-5 pm | Writing Time/Conferences |
| 5:15-6:15 | Fiction Panel |
| 6:30-7:45 pm | Dinner |
| 8-9:30 pm | Readings |
| 9:30 pm- | Open Mic and Music |
|
Saturday |
|
| 8-8:45 am | Breakfast |
| 9-11 am | Workshops |
| 11-12:15 pm | Writing Time/Conferences |
| 12:30-1:30 pm | Lunch |
| 2-4:45 pm | Writing Time/Conferences |
| 5-6 pm | Non-fiction panel |
| 6:15-7:30 pm | Dinner |
| 8-9:30 pm | Readings |
| 9:30 pm- | Open Mic and music |
|
Sunday |
|
| 8-8:45 am | Breakfast |
| 9-11 am | Workshops |
| 11 am-1 pm | Brunch and Plenary Panel |
2009 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival Faculty
Poetry Faculty:
Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, has published eleven volumes of poetry, including The Volcano Sequence and No Heaven. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Twice a National Book Award finalist, she has also received awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Poetry Center, and the Paterson Poetry Center, among others.
Ostriker’s critical work includes Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America and other books on poetry and on the Bible. Her newest work is For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, of which Elaine Pagels writes, “No one who reads this amazing, brilliantly written book will ever read the Bible the same way again.”
Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ, is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University, and currently teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University.
“Alicia Ostriker has become one of those brilliantly provocative and imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression, whether in prose or poetry, is essential to understanding our American selves.” -- Joyce Carol Oates
William Heyen was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. He is Professor of English and Poet in Residence Emeritus at SUNY Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater. His graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has won prizes and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, Poetry, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets and of September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Perhaps the most prolific American poet of his generation, he is the author of some 30 books including Home: Autobiographies, The Hummingbird Corporation: Stories, Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry, Crazy Horse in Stillness (winner of 1997's Small Press Book Award for Poetry), Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology, Shoah Train: Poems (finalist for the National Book Award in 2004), and the 2008 collection, A Poetics of Hiroshima & Other Poems. He has several times led summer poetry workshops at Chautauqua.
Non-fiction Faculty:
Suzannah Lessard was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years and, before that, an editor of Washington Monthly. She is the author of the memoir The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Whiting Award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington fellowship (at George Washington University), and the Anthony Lukas Award.
A core faculty member in MFA programs that include Goucher College and Queens University, she has also taught nonfiction at George Mason and Wesleyan Universities, The New School, and the Columbia School of the Arts. Her current project is Mapping the New World: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century.
Joe Mackall is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish (Beacon Press, 2007) and of the memoir, The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage. He is the co-founder and -editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. His articles have been published in a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post. His essays have appeared in several anthologies, literary journals, and on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is the director of creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.
Fiction Faculty:
Abby Frucht is the author of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize-winning collection of stories Fruit of the Month and five novels, including Snap (1988), Licorice (1990), Are You Mine? (1993), Life Before Death (2000), and Polly’s Ghost (2002). She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a New Voices Award from the Quality Paperback Book Club, and several citations for notable books from The New York Times.
She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle whose reviews and essays have appeared in such publications as The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and she has taught for many years at the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program.
Tom Noyes is the author of two collections of stories from Dufour Press: Spooky Action at a Distance (2008), which was a finalist for both The Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and the Richard Sullivan Prize; and Behold Faith (2003), which was short listed for Stanford Library’s William Saroyan Prize and reviewed favorably in The New York Times Book Review. His stories have won such awards as The John Gilgun Award for Prose and The Whetstone Prize, and been a finalist for The Flannery O’Connor Award, The Bakeless Award, and The Sandstone Prize.
The movie rights for Behold Faith have been purchased and Noyes is currently serving as a consultant on the writing of a script for a movie based on one of the stories in that collection. Noyes teaches in the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie.
Questions regarding specific workshops and general festival information can be addressed to the festival’s co-director, George Looney.
