Thursday, February 26, 2004

UNCW Department of Creative Writing

2004 WRITERS’ WEEK

March 15-19, 2004

VISITING WRITERS’ BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Julianna Baggott received her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1994. She has published in numerous literary journals and has received fellowships from the Delaware Division of Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her works include the national bestseller Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, which hit the Boston Globe’s Bestsellers list, This Country of Mothers and The Madam. She makes her home in Newark, Del., with her husband and three children. Visit her Web site at www.juliannabaggott.com.

Valerie Boyd, author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, is also arts editor and book critic at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She is a graduate of Northwestern as well as Goucher College, where she received her MFA in creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Ms. magazine, The Oxford American and The Washington Post. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she is also a founding officer of the Alice Walker Literary Society and co-founder of HealthQuest: The Publication of Black Wellness. For her work, Boyd received a fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation of Brown University in addition to the 2003 Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Find more information about Boyd at www.valerieboyd.com.

Jane Brox is a graduate of the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and is the author of three books of nonfiction. In 1996, Here and Nowhere Else won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and Five Thousand Days Like This One was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been anthologized and published in numerous magazines such as The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Best American Essays 1996 and Pushcart Prize XXVIII. Her most recent book, Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm, is forthcoming from North Point Press. She currently resides in Massachusetts.

Mark Doty has written six books of poetry, including My Alexandria, which won the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Award and which was selected for the 1992 National Poetry Series by poet Philip Levine. In addition to poems, he has also published an autobiography, Firebird (HarperCollins, 1999), and Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (1996), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Doty's poetry has appeared in such magazines as Ploughshares, Poetry, Mid-American Review and Missouri Review. He is also the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Whiting and Ingram Merrill foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts, Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Doty teaches at the University of Houston, and divides his time between Provincetown and Houston. For spring 2004, he is teaching a poetry workshop as a distinguished visiting professor in UNCW's Master of Fine Arts Program.

Vince Gotera presently teaches at the University of Northern Iowa, and serves as editor of North American Review. With an MFA degree from Indiana and two Ph.D. degrees in English and American Studies, his work has been published in literary magazines such as Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review and The Asian Pacific American Journal. Gotera was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, the American Academy of American Poets Prize and the 1998 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in Poetry. His books include Dragonfly, Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans, Ghost Wars, and Fighting Kite. Read more about Gotera at www.uni.edu/~english/GoteraVince.htm.

Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine, makes his home in Massachusetts and is a contributing editor of The Atlantic. After graduating from Harvard College in 1967, Kidder served in Vietnam and received the Bronze Star. He has won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award for The Soul of a New Machine. His other works include Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, House, Among Schoolchildren, Home Town and Old Friends.

Suji Kwok Kim was a Fulbright Scholar at Seoul National University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the Blakemore Foundation for Asian Studies. Her work is published in numerous literary journals including Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review and Ploughshares. Her first poetry book, Notes from the Divided Country, received the 2002 Walt Whitman Award.

Paul Lisicky graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received numerous awards, some of which are the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award and the James Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship. With fiction published in Mississippi Review, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast and Boulevard, Lisicky teaches at the University of Houston and is a Writer-in-residence at Houston’s High School for the Performing Arts. His first novel, Lawnboy, appeared in 1999 from Turtle Point Press, and he is currently working on a new novel.

John Sullivan, current editor-at-large at GQ, was former senior editor at Harper’s and The Oxford American. His first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son, braids memoir with history and is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Sullivan makes his home in New York City.