Since she came to New York in 1974 to be a poet, Eileen Myles has produced more than 20 collections of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and libretti, including most recently: Snowflake/different streets; Inferno: (a Poet's Novel), for which she won a Lambda award for lesbian fiction; and The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, which was supported by a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. She has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York and is teaching poetry this semester at New York University.

Heidi Lynn Staples is the author of four collections, including Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake: A Memoir (Caketrain 2012) and the forthcoming Noise Event (Ahsahta 2013). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Women's Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize, she is also the co-founder and co-editor of Poets for Living Waters, an international poetry response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Colum McCann's most recent book, Let The Great World Spin (2009), was described by Esquire as the first major post-9/11 novel. The book received awards in the US, Europe, and Asia, including the 2009 National Book Award in the U.S, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2011 IMPAC International Prize. McCann's other novels include Zoli; Dancer; and This Side of Brightness, a story of building New York's subway tunnels. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, and GQ, and he has written for newspapers and periodicals including The New York Times, The Irish Times, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, and the Guardian.

Tom Perrotta's most recent novels are The Leftovers and The Abstinence Teacher. His novels Election and Little Children were both made into acclaimed movies, and Perrotta received an Academy award nomination for the screenplay of Little Children, which he wrote with director Todd Field. He's currently adapting The Leftovers into an HBO series along with Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost. Perrotta has taught writing at Yale and Harvard, and published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, GQ, and The New York Times. He also edited the 2012 edition of Best American Short Stories.

Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels, The Point of Return (a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times) and An Outline of the Republic (a finalist for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and a book of the year in the Daily Telegraph). The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India was the winner of the PEN Open award in the U.S. and a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harpers, the Guardian, the Observer, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, the Nation, n+1, London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors and the Nation Institute, and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University.

Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman (Wes '89) writes often of the Middle East, approaching it from unusual angles and shedding light on overlooked dimensions of the place, its people, and their cultures. Her books include House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, named one of the best books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the best biographies of the year by Booklist. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for best Jewish book of 2011. A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she lives in Jerusalem and New Haven and is currently a visiting writer in the English department.

Padre Spencer Reece has a BA from Wesleyan University, MTS from Harvard and a MDiv from Berkeley Divinity School, Yale. His first book of poems, The Clerk's Tale, won the Bakeless Prize, selected by Louise Gluck, in 2003. James Franco made a short film from the title poem. His second book of poems The Road to Emmaus will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2013.

Reece has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, the Wytter Bynner Prize from the Library Congress, the Whiting Writers Award and the Amy Lowell Traveling Grant. He will be working in Honduras in 2012-13 with support from a Fulbright grant. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar and The New Republic.

He is currently the chaplain to the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Espaol Reformada Episcopal.

A reading featuring poets whose work appears in Garnet Poems: An Anthology of

Connecticut Poetry Since 1776, including Dennis Barone, Dick Allen, Sophie Cabot Black,

Marilyn Nelson, and Lewis Turco. Co-sponsored with Wesleyan University Press. Event Details: Russell House, [email protected], 860-685-3448. Writing Programs Information: Anne Greene, Director of Writing Programs, [email protected].

Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton (2009) was selected

for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award.

Kearney also is the author of Fear, Some (2006) and a new chapbook, SkinMag (2012).

He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award, and fellowships at

Idyllwild and Cave Canem. He teaches at CalArts and Antioch University.