Program Director

Michael C. White is the author of five novels: Soul Catcher, A Brother's Blood, The Blind Side of the Heart, A Dream of Wolves, and The Garden of Martyrs. He is also the author of the story collection, Marked Men. He has published fifty stories in national and literary magazines, and was the founding editor of the American Fiction series. He currently teaches at Fairfield University, and is the fiction editor of Dogwood.

Guest Faculty

Winter 2008

Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poetry and four volumes of nonfiction prose; his newest book, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, was published by HarperCollins in 2008. His 2007 memoir Dog Years was a New York Times bestseller. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, and a Whiting Writers Award. He remains the only American poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize in the United Kingdom. He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, New York University, Cornell, and Stanford, and currently is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program in writing at the University of Houston, where he teaches one semester each year. The rest of the time, he lives in New York City.

Anita Shreve has published 13 novels, among them The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, The Last Time They Met, A Wedding in December, and Body Surfing. She has received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. In 1999, The Pilot's Wife became the 25th selection of Oprah's Book Club and an international bestseller. In April 2002, CBS aired the film version of The Pilot's Wife, starring Christine Lahti, and in fall 2002, The Weight of Water, starring Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn, was released in movie theaters.

Summer 2009

Rick Moody, author of several books, short stories and a memoir, most famously, The Ice Storm, is the recipient of the Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir, and the 2994 Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review. His short fiction and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Stories 2001 and Best American Essays 2004. His latest book, three novellas called Right Livelihoods, was published last year. Moody is a member of the board of directors of the Corporation of Yaddo, an artistic community that nurtures the creative process. He is also the secretary of the PEN American Center, and he co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New School for Social Research. Born in New York City, Moody now lives in Brooklyn.

Faculty

Amy Benson's book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize winner in creative nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. It was published by Houghton Mifflin in June 2004. Her poetry and prose has appeared in journals such as Fourth Genre, Quarterly West, Pleiades, and New Orleans Review. She teaches literary nonfiction in the graduate and undergraduate writing program at Columbia University and is at work on a second book of interwoven essays and fiction.

Kim Bridgford is a professor of English at Fairfield University and editor of Dogwood and Mezzo Cammin. Her books include Undone, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Instead of Maps, nominated for the Poets' Prize; and In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, winner of the Donald Justice Prize. She is currently working on a three-book poetry/photography project with visual artist Jo Yarrington, focusing on journey and sacred space in Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan. She has held grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and is the 2007-08 Connecticut Touring Poet.

Pete Duval's short story collection Rear View (Houghton Mifflin) won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize, the Connecticut Book Award and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in a variety of journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Exquisite Corpse, and The Sonora Review. He recently completed a historical novel, Election Day, set along the coast of Buzzard's Bay where he grew up. Duval is a graduate of Boston University's Creative Writing Program.

Roya Hakakian is the author of two collections of poetry in Persian, the first of which, For the Sake of Water, was nominated as Poetry Book of the Year by Iran News in 1993. A recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship in non-fiction writing, she is also a fellow at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center and is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She has appeared on CSPAN-Book TV, CNN International, CBS Early Show, and Now with Bill Moyers. Her memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown), was a Barnes & Noble's Pick of the Week, Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer, Publishers Weekly's Best Book of the Year, and Elle Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of 2004, and has been published in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain.

Nalini Jones was born in Rhode Island, graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her story collection, What You Call Winter, was published in August 2007 by Knopf. She is a Stanford Calderwood Fellow of the MacDowell Colony, and has recently taught at Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y in New York. She has also worked for several years in music, helping produce festivals and concert series in New York, Newport, and New Orleans.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press. His work has appeared in Five Points, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Short Takes, Open House, Flash Fiction, Truth in Nonfiction, and in many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, and at many summer writing conferences. He currently lives in New York City and teaches at NYU. A novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming.

Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA program at Penn State University.

Nicholas Rinaldi is the author of three novels and three collections of poetry. His stories and poems have appeared widely, both here and abroad. He earned a doctorate from Fordham University and currently teaches courses in literature and creative writing at Fairfield University. His poems and fiction have won numerous awards, and he was recently honored as the 2007 Artist of the Year by the Fairfield Arts Council. His poetry and fiction have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, and The International Herald Tribune, as well as in a broad range of magazines and journals, including People, Elle, Time, The Virginia Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Literary Review. He has read his work on radio and TV, as well as at universities, libraries, and museums across the country. Pulitzer-winner Richard Russo has described Rinaldi's latest novel, Between Two Rivers, as "a masterpiece ... a book that will take your breath away." And Richard Bernstein, in the New York Times, compared an earlier novel, The Jukebox Queen of Malta, to works by Heller, Styron, and Mailer, and concluded that "Rinaldi belongs in their company."

Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry and a poetry chapbook. He is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry and the author of a memoir and a collection of short stories. He teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005 and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005.

Editors and Agents

Jennifer Brehl, Vice President and Director of Editorial Development of Morrow and Eos, has edited a variety of books, from fiction to nonfiction, from literary to "lite." She started at Doubleday in 1983, and ultimately moved to Morrow in 1995. Among the authors with whom she has worked are Ray Bradbury (From the Dust Returned), Diana Evans (26a, winner of the Orange Award for New Writers), Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish (How to Talk So Teens Will Listen & Listen So Teens Will Talk), Neil Gaiman (#1 New York Times bestseller Anansi Boys), Joanne Harris (Gentlemen & Players), Paulette Jiles (Enemy Women), Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job), Nicholas V. Perricone (The Perricone Prescription), Elizabeth Peters (Tomb of the Golden Bird), and Neal Stephenson (The Baroque Cycle). Her interests include historical/literary fiction, narrative nonfiction with historical and/or scientific underpinnings, and contemporary/women's issues.

David Highfill, Executive Editor, joined Morrow in 2005 after ten years at G. P. Putnam's Sons and is looking for a range of popular fiction and narrative nonfiction including journalism, history, biography and memoir. Since joining Morrow, he's made several high profile acquisitions, including: The Blue Zone by Andrew Gross; two new novels by Steve Martini; a pre-Civil War historical, Soul Catcher, by Michael White; and several works of nonfiction including a memoir by columnist David Giffels, a dual biography of Abigail and John Adams by Edith Gelles, and a biography of Clarence Darrow by Donald McRae. David has edited novels by Patricia Cornwell, Stuart Woods, Barry Eisler, David Ellis, Lee Child and Greg Iles; and nonfiction by Goldie Hawn, Evan Wright, Christopher Mason (The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal), Gov. Bill Richardson (Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life), and Colby Buzzell (My War: Killing Time in Iraq). Some of his bestsellers are Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper-Case Closed and Predator by Patricia Cornwell, Double Tap by Steve Martini, Two-Dollar Bill by Stuart Woods, Generation Kill by Evan Wright, What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been edited by Robert Crowley, A Lotus Grows in the Mud by Goldie Hawn, and Tears for Water: Songbook of Poems & Lyrics by Alicia Keys.

Sara Nelson has been the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly since January 2005 and writes a widely-read column in each issue. She was previously the publishing columnist for the New York Post. Before that she wrote a column on the book business for the New York Observer. A journalist for 25 years, Nelson reviewed for publications from Glamour magazine to the Chicago Tribune. She was one of the founding editors of Inside.com. Her freelance pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many national magazines. A native of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Nelson graduated from Yale, where she majored in Latin American Studies. She specialized in analyzing and translating the works of obscure, late Latin American poets. Over the years, Nelson wrote and edited stories about everything from private schools to AIDS, as well as celebrity profiles, book reviews, and personal essays. In 2003, she published her memoir/reading guide, So Many Books, So Little Time, which became a BookSense bestseller. In addition to her work as a journalist, Nelson has been a teacher at the Radcliffe Publishing Course, the NYU Summer Publishing Institute, and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism; she has also worked in TV. She has appeared regularly on radio and television networks and programs, including NPR, Air America, CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Today, and Good Morning America. She lives with her son in New York City.