ETHAN BRONNER is currently the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. He has also held positions as foreign editor, education editor, and editorial page editor at the Times, where he wrote a number of the paper's editorials about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As editor he worked on a series of articles about Al Qaeda that were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Previously at the Boston Globe he served as Supreme Court and legal affairs correspondent. He is the author of Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America, chosen by The New York Public Library as one of the best 25 books of the year.

JOHN BRANDON is one of the nation's most distinguished new fiction writers. He is the author of the novel Arkansas and the forthcoming novel The Semester, both from Sweeney's. His shorter work has been published in Mississippi Review, The Believer, Subtropics, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and other publications. He received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at University of Mississippi.

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN has published eleven books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons, Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses. Her newest book All That Lies Between Us received the American Book Award. She is the editor of the Paterson Literary Review and the founder and the Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ . She is also the Director of the Creative Writing Program and a Professor of Poetry at SUNY Binghamton.

Edward Jones gave the 2009 Annie Sonnenblick lecture on April 17, 2009 at Wesleyan University. Fiction writer Edward P. Jones received the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel The Known World, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. His first book, Lost in the City, was a National Book Award finalist as well, and won the PEN/Hemingway Prize. He has had stories published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and Callaloo. His most recent work is All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a collection of short stories. He is a MacArthur Fellow, and has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Maryland and Princeton University.

Poet, translator, and novelist, Forrest Gander is the author of more than a dozen books, including the poetry collections Eye Against Eye and Torn Awake and the highly acclaimed novel As a Friend. He is the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women Poets, a bilingual anthology, and has translated numerous books of poetry. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His visit is organized by English Department visiting writer Matine Bellen.

Rebecca Brown is an author, teacher, and activist. Her best-known novel, The Gifts of the Body, won the Lambda Literary Award. Among her other books are The End of Youth and The Terrible Girls. Several of her books have been adapted for the stage, and her work has been widely translated. She is the recipient of the Boston Book Review Award for fiction and a Washington State Governor’s Award.

Carlo Rotella is the author of October Cities, Good With Their Hands, and, most recently, Cut Time, which received the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Slate, and his work has also appeared in Harper’s and Best American Essays. He is Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Boston College.

This lecture is part of the Distinguished Writers series. A member of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing, Lisa Robertson is the author of XEclogue (1993, 1999), Debbie: An Epic (1998), The Weather (2002), and The Men (2006). Her essays and collaborative texts for the visual arts have been collected in the book Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, (2003, 2006). Currently she is a visiting artist at California College of the Arts.

Born in Manhattan, poet and translator Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Palmer has worked with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for over thirty years and has collaborated with many visual artists and composers. His most recent collections are Codes Appearing (Poems 1979-1988) and Company of Moths. A prose work, The Danish Notebook, was published in 1999, and his selected essays and talks, Active Boundaries, appeared in July of 2008. Among his awards, Palmer has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, two National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America and, in the fall of 2006, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at various universities in the United States and Europe, and his writings have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Wesleyan University Press presents Rae Armantrout, a prominent American poet, reads from her latest book, Next Life (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), as well as work from unpublished work. Rae Armantrout is the author of nine books of poetry. She is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego and has also taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bard College, Naropa University, San Diego State University, and San Francisco State University. She has been published in many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Scribner's Best American Poetry of 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007, as well as such literary magazines as American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Sponsored by the Wesleyan University Press and the Edward W. Snowden Fund