Writers' Festival 2010
Thursday, June 17, through Sunday, June 20, 2010

**Download the 2010 Writers' Festival brochure**
2010 Writers' Festival Schedule

FICTION

Aimee Bender is the author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, and Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She's received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005. She lives in Los Angeles, and teaches creative writing at USC.

>Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. His most recent publication is the novel Await Your Reply, published in 2009 by Ballantine Books.

NONFICTION

Jacob Levenson’s work has appeared in The Oxford American, Mother Jones, the Utne Reader and other publications. He teaches narrative nonfiction at Columbia University and is a faculty member of Goucher College's MFA program in creative nonfiction. He is the author of "The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America" a work that joins creative nonfiction with the tools of social history to explore the contemporary intersection race and social crises. He is currently at work on two book projects: a memoir about the year he spent caring for his dying father, while becoming a father to his own son, after his wife was injured in childbirth; and a book on the global food economy, which will marry travel writing, personal essay, and reported narrative to explore the social implications of the future of the food system. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

Thomas French, a veteran reporter, author and teacher, has spent the past quarter century exploring the possibilities of nonfiction storytelling. Now on the journalism faculty at Indiana University, he previously worked for 27 years at the St. Petersburg Times, writing book-length narratives published one chapter at a time. In 1998, he was awarded the Pulitzer prize for feature writing for Angels & Demons, a series on a triple homicide. Over the decades he has also written about the secret lives of seventh graders, about drunken college students cavorting through spring break, and about an exorcist who also happened to be a mother of five children. French is the author of Unanswered Cries, an account of a court case, and South of Heaven, which follows a handful of teenagers through a year of high school. His newest book, Zoo Story, chronicles life and death inside Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo and is due to be published this summer by Hyperion. French also teaches at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and has led writing workshops across the U.S. and around the world, from Dubai to Johannesburg to Helsinki.

POETRY

Michael Waters’ eight books of poetry include Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize), and Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997) from BOA Editions, and Bountiful (1992), The Burden Lifters (1989), and Anniversary of the Air (1985) from Carnegie Mellon UP. His several edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry Review and Rolling Stone. In 2004 he chaired the poetry panel for the National Book Award. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and four Pushcart Prizes, he teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program. He lives in Ocean, NJ.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian civil war survivor, immigrating to the United States in the 1990s. She is the author of three books of poetry: The River is Rising (Autumn House Press, 2007), Becoming Ebony, (SIU Press, 2003) and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Press, 1998). Her second book, Becoming Ebony won 2nd Place in the 2002 Crab Orchard Award’s Second Book Open Competition. Patricia’s fourth collection of poetry, tentatively titled, “Love Songs and Other Taboos,” is forthcoming from Autumn House Press. Her other awards include a World Bank Fellowship, The Irving S. Gilmore Emerging Artist Grant from the Kalamazoo Foundation, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, the 2006 College of West Africa (CWA) Alumni Association Crystal Award for Achievement in the Arts, a 2008 Pushcart Prize nomination and a 2008 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award nominations for The River is Rising. Her work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies in Europe, Central America, Africa, and across the United States. Patricia has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English (Poetry Dissertation) from Western Michigan University, a Master of Science in English Education from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a BA in English from the University of Liberia in Monrovia, Liberia. Patricia is currently working on her memoir of her Liberian civil war experiences. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Penn State University’s Altoona campus.