Summer Writers Seminar Faculty

Graphic Novel

Alexander Chee is the author of the award-winning novel Edinburgh. He is a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and the NEA Fellowship in Fiction, and has contributed stories and essays to TriQuarterly, Tin House, The Morning News, and Lapham's Quarterly, among others. He has taught fiction writing at Wesleyan University and The Iowa Writers' Workshop, and comics and the graphic novel at Amherst College and Columbia University's MFA in Writing. His new novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming in from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014. He lives in New York City.

Fiction

David Hollander is the author of the novel L.I.E., a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous print and online forums, including McSweeney's, AGNI, Post Road, The New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Brooklyn Rail, and Gastronomica. His work has been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, most recently in Best American Fantasy. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the writer Margaret Hundley Parker, and their two children. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Nonfiction

Lawrence Weschler was for over 20 years (until 2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is the author of 15 books, including Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award); Vermeer in Bosnia; and Everything that Rises (2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism recipient). Both a Lannan and a Guggenheim fellow, he is the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and served as the artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. He is a contributing editor to McSweeney's, Threepenny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and curator-at-large of Wholphin. Weschler has taught at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence College, and NYU, where he is currently distinguished writer in residence at the Carter Journalism Institute.

Poetry

Thomas Lux is the author of 10 books, including two published in 2012—From the Southland (nonfiction) and Child Made of Sand (poems)—as well as New and Selected Poems (1975-1995), The Street of Clocks, The Cradle Place and God Particles. The recipient of numerous awards, he is Poet-in-Residence at Sarah Lawrence College and Bourne Professor of Poetry at Georgia Tech. Photo by Jenny Rainwater.

David Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, won the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in magazines including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, plus over 60 anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of eight other books of poetry, most recently We Almost Disappear, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, an Ingram-Merrill Award, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He has served as the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University and holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. He is the recipient of a 2011 Governor's Award in the Humanities and he served for 12 years as Poet Laureate of Georgia.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar, co-teaching with Kurt Brown, is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief (2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry) and A New Hunger (ALA 2008 Notable Book). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her poems have appeared in many publications including The Washington Post, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, AGNI and Harvard Review, and have been widely anthologized. Garrison Keillor read her poems on NPR's The Writers' Almanac. She is the editor of four anthologies and has taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, and at many conferences including The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Photo by Star Black.

Kurt Brown, co-teaching with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, founded the Aspen Writers' Conference and Writers' Conferences & Centers. He is the author of six chapbooks and six full-length poetry collections, including Time-Bound, and his memoir, Lost Sheep: A Portrait of Aspen in the 70s. He is currently an editor for the online journal MEAD: The Magazine of Literature and Libations and has edited 10 poetry anthologies, most recently Killer Verse: Poems about Murder and Mayhem. He taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and now lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Young Adult

Cynthia Hand is the New York Times bestselling author of the UNEARTHLY series with HarperTeen. She has graduate degrees in creative writing from Boise State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A native of southeastern Idaho, she currently lives with her husband and two small children in Southern California, where she teaches writing at Pepperdine University.