Glenn Kurtz (US, Poetry/Nonfiction) March 18-April 14. Glenn is the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Knopf 2007; Vintage 2008), which the New York Times called “a thoughtful and fluid meditation,” and Newsday hailed as "the book of a lifetime.” His essays and reviews have been published in the New York Times, ZYZZYVA, Artweek, and Southwest Review, and he is the host of “Conversations on Practice,” a discussion series about how artists accomplish their daily work, held at McNally-Jackson Books in New York City.
Glenn graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music-Tufts University Double Degree Program and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. He has taught at San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts, and Stanford University.
Craig Taylor (UK, Fiction/Nonfiction) March 18-April 21. Craig is the author of two books, Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, which began life as a column in the Guardian newspaper. Both have been adapted for the stage. He is the editor of the literary magazine, Five Dials. His third book, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London as Told by Those Who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Long for it, Have Left it and Everything In-between will be published this autumn by Granta in the UK and HarperCollins in the US. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, he grew up on Vancouver Island. He now lives in London.
Wang Gang (China, Fiction/Film) March 18-April 28. Wang was born in Shihezi, Xinjiang Uyger Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. He is one of the most renowned novelists and screenwriters in China. His major work, English, won numerous prizes in China and was translated into several languages. The English edition has been published by the Penguin Press.
David Samuel Levinson (US, Fiction) March 18-April 28.David is the author of the story collection, Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will, and a forthcoming novel, Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence. He has received fellowships for his fiction from Yaddo and Jentel. His stories have appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Prairie Schooner, and West Branch, among others.
Teju Cole (Nigeria, Fiction/Nonfiction) March 18-April 28. Teju was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and came to the US at the age of seventeen. He is a professional historian of sixteenth-century Netherlandish art, and is the author of the novella “Every Day is for the Thief” and the novel “Open City.” He is also a street photographer. Teju is this year’s Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, and is at work on a non-fiction narrative of contemporary Lagos.
Suzanne Jill Levine (US, Translation) March 25-April 14. Jill is a translator of Latin American literature and director of Translation Studies at the University of California. Her books include a literary biography of Manuel Puig (FSG, 2000) and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Most recently she edited five Penguin paperback classics of poetry and essays by Jorge Luis Borges (2010).
Rick Hilles (US, Poetry) March 25-April 21. Rick, a 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award recipient, is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press) and named 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. He’s had work in: Harper’s, Hudson Review, Poetry, The Nation, and New Republic. His next book, Boundary Waters, will appear in 2012 (also with the Pitt Poetry Series). He lives in Nashville and teaches in the MFA Program at Vanderbilt University.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Sweden, Fiction) March 28-Aprl 25 Born in Sweden, Jonas is the author of two novels and one collection of plays and short stories. His first novel, One Eye Red, received the Boras Tidning Award for best literary debut. His second, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, won several awards including the Swedish Radio Award for best novel of the year. Khemiri has also received the PO Enquist Literary Prize for the most promising young European writer. He currently divides his time between Stockholm and Berlin.
Christine Richter-Nilsson (Germany, Theater/Translation) April 1-28
Born in Stuttgart, Christine holds an MFA in Rhetorics and Cultural Studies from the University of Tuebingen. From 2000 – 2010 she was a dramaturge at the State theaters in Stuttgart, Dresden, Bremen, Bielefeld and Berlin. Since 2006 she has been translating numerous theater plays for major German publishers. She is the Artistic Director of the American-German theater festival VOICES OF CHANGE that she initiated in 2008 and 2010. She is married to Bo Magnus Nilsson and lives in Berlin, Germany.
Andrea Scrima (Germany/US, Fiction/Nonfiction) April 15-May 5
Andrea is the author of the fictionalized memoir A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil Press, Brooklyn, New York; June 2010). She has won a writer's fellowship from the Berlin Council on the Arts and a National Hackney Literary Award, and her literary criticism appears regularly in The Brooklyn Rail (The Political Eisenberg; Nov. 2010) and The Rumpus (Something That Can Never Be Said With Words, on Jon Fosse's Aliss at the Fire; Sept. 2010). The opening excerpt of a new novel-in-progress has recently won Second Prize in Glimmer Train's Fall 2010 Fiction Open.
Anna Nemes (Hungary, Translation) April 15-May 19
Anna has an MA in English and Hungarian from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Since 1977, she has been working as an EFL teacher while translating English prose into Hungarian. Her works include novels by Philip Roth, David Grossman and Vikram Seth, as well as pieces by Issac B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Tennessee Williams, Margaret Atwood, John Barth, Truman Capote, Malcolm Bradbury and Susan Sontag. Anna received the Wessely Prize for Literary Translation in 1985.
Jacinta Halloran (Australia, Nonfiction/Fiction) April 22-May 12
Jacinta is a Melbourne family physician and writer. She has written on medical topics for a wide variety of publications, including the Sunday Age and Inside Story. In 2005 her short story, ‘Finding Joshua,’ won the inaugural Australian Doctor GP Writer of the Year Award. In 2007 her novel, Dissection, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript, and was published by Scribe Publications in 2008. Jacinta completed an MA in Creative Writing at RMIT in 2009. In 2010 two of her short stories were published in the anthologies, The Pen and the Stethoscope and New Australian Stories 2.0. She is now close to completing her second novel with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Jenny Hollowell (US, Fiction) April 24-May 5
Jenny’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Scheherezade, and the anthology New Sudden Fiction, and was named a distinguished story by Best American Short Stories. Her debut novel, Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe was published by Henry Holt & Company in June 2010. She received an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction and recipient of the Balch Short Story Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.
David Dephy (Georgia, Ficiton/Poetry) April 29-June 3
David Dephy is a Georgian poet, novelist, performer, multimedia artist, the founder of the first Georgian poetic order “Samkauli” (Jewelry) and an original representative of modern Georgian culture. In 1992 he graduated from Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts (Faculty of Architecture). Since then he has been engaged in various fields of mass media. In 2000, he issued an original collection of dialogues called “Words Words Words.” Since 2001, his seven books of poetry, several books of essays, two audio albums of poetry with orchestra and electronic band and five novels: Let My Twin Find Me, The December Talisman, The Morning Before Miracles, Demna Gedevanishvili, and The Gardens have been published and received very positive reviews.
Oliverio Coelho (Argentina, Fiction) April 29-June 3
Oliverio was born in Buenos Aires. He published five novels and one short story book. Recently he was included in the list of the 22 “Best Young Spanish language novelist” by Granta Magazine. He collaborated as literary critic with several newspapers, such as La Nación, Clarín and El país, and the magazine Inrockuptibles. Their short stories were included in several Argentinean and Latin American anthologies.
Rich Benjamin (US, Nonfiction) May 6-26
Rich is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, winner of a 2009 Editor's Choice Award from Booklist and the American Library Association. His social and political commentary appear regularly in the media, including on MSNBC, CSPAN, NPR, USA Today, CNN.com, and Salon.com. Rich earned a BA in English and political science from Wesleyan University and his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. Please visit him at www.richbenjamin.com.
Lucas Hirsch (Netherlands, Poetry) May 6-June 3
Lucas is the author of two collections of poems, ‘familie gebiedt’ (De Arbeiderspers, 2006) and ‘tastzin’ (De Arbeiderspers, 2009). Hirsch published his poems in several Dutch and Belgian magazines and performed on stages in The Netherlands, Belgium and the USA. Lucas is also a literary agent for the Flemish magazine DWB. In 2007, Lucas founded a small literary production company called ‘Kleine Revolutie Producties,’ with which he organizes literary events around Haarlem. He likes to have his writers and poets to perform at odd places and in combination with soundscapes, singer-songwriters and jazz musicians. Lucas loves to ride his skateboards and works as an advisor for a financial institution.
Deb Olin Unferth (US, Fiction) May 13-June 3
Deb is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies (McSweeney’s), the novel Vacation (McSweeney’s), and the memoir Revolution (Henry Holt). She has received two Pushcart Prizes, the Cabell First Novelist Award, and a Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature.
Tim Woodward (US, Nonfiction/Fiction) May 13-June3
Born in Jackson, Tennessee, Tim was educated at Harvard University and Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He is a gastroenterologist specializing in cancer. His short stories and essays have appeared in Ontario Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Bomb, and The Oxford American, along with several Pushcart nominations. He is the author of the novel, Cadillac Orpheus, and is working on his latest, Viaticum.
Joanna Smith Rakoff (US, Fiction) May 20-June 3
Joanna’s first novel, A Fortunate Age (Scribner, 2009), was a winner of the 2010 Goldberg Prize for Fiction and the Elle Readers’ Prize, a New York Times Editors' Pick, a selection of Barnes and Noble's First Look Book Club, an IndieNext pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O:The Oprah Magazine, and Marie Claire. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University, University College, London, and Oberlin College.
