WRITERS AT CORNELL. - J. Robert Lennon

Brenda

Shaughnessy read from her work on September 26, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Alison Lurie is the author of ten novels, including The Truth About Lorin Jones, Truth and Consequences,  and the Pulitzer-prizewinning Foreign Affairs.  She has also published two collections of essays on children's literature and edited three books of traditional folktales for children, as well as a nonfiction book on the semiotics of dress, The Language of Clothes,  and a forthcoming nonfiction book, The Language of Houses.  She was one of the first women hired by the Cornell English Department and is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita there. 

Lurie read from her work on September 19, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Dana Spiotta is the author of three novels: Lightning Field, Eat the Document (which was nominated for the National Book Award), and Stone Arabia. She teaches writing at Syracuse University.

Spiotta read from her work on February 21, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Claudia Emerson’s books include Late Wife and Figure Studies. Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, she studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for Late Wife, she has also earned two additional Pulitzer nominations, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also served as poet laureate of Virginia. Her new book is Secure the Shadow.

Emerson read from her work on September 20, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Poet David St. John was born in Fresno, California. He received his bachelor’s degree at California State in Fresno and went to the University of Iowa for an M.F.A. His works of poetry include Hush (1976), Terraces of Rain (1991) The Red Leaves of Night (1999), The Face: A Novella in Verse (2004), and The Auroras (2012). He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, the James D. Phelan Award, the Academy Award in Literature, and various grants and fellowships. St. John has taught at Oberlin College and John Hopkins University, and currently teaches at the University of Southern California.

The interview was conducted by Cornell professor and poet Joanie Mackowski, author of the collections The Zoo (2002) and View From A Temporary Window (2010).

St. John read from his work on April 5, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Fiction writer and essayist Edwidge Danticat is best known for her work chronicling the Haitian immigrant experience. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Brown University, and has published or edited more than a dozen books for adult and young readers, including the novel The Farming of Bones, the story collections Krik? Krak! And The Dew Breaker, and the nonfiction books Brother, I’m Dying and Create Dangerously. She has earned many awards, among them a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and, most recently, the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York. Danticat has been a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami, and divides her time bewteen the United States and her native Haiti.

Danticat read from her work on February 23, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, attended college in Chicago, and studied fiction writing at Cornell University, where she earned an MFA; for some years after she lived the life of an itinerant writer, attending conferences and retreats and working on what would become her debut novel, Forgotten Country. That book is to be published in March 2012 by Riverhead. She is also one of Granta’s “New Voices,” a Pushcart nominee, and winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She is a member of the birdsong collective, an indepdent ‘zine publisher in New York, and is on the advisory board of Paris Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Chung read from her work on February 16, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Alexi Zentner is the author of the novel Touch, which was shortlisted for The 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award and The Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new book, The Lobster Kings, is coming out next year. He has also published short fiction in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Walrus, and many other publications. He studied writing at Cornell and presently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Zentner read from his work on February 16, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Ron Hansen is the author of ten works of fiction and a collection of essays. He is particularly known for his meticulous examinations of religious experience, and of the lives of historical figures. Among his best known books are the novels Desperadoes; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Mariette in Ecstasy; Atticus, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner; the short story collection Nebraska; and his latest novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion. Hansen is presently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature.  He is also an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church.

Hansen read from his work on September 22, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Composer Joseph Klein holds a Doctor of Music degree in Composition from Indiana University.  He is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of North Texas College of Music, where he has served as Chair of Composition Studies since 1999.

Klein’s catalogue ranges from solo pieces to works for large ensemble, including instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music, often incorporating intermedia or theatrical elements, and reflecting his interest in systems and musical processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry and chaos theory.  His compositions have been performed and broadcast throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and have been featured at national and international music venues.  He has been a featured guest composer at many institutions worldwide, has won numerous awards, and has released many recordings on the Innova, Centaur, Crystal, and Mark labels.

Klein visited Cornell having written short musical settings for poems written by Cornell’s second-year MFA poets, who performed the pieces with the composer on Friday, April 15, 2011 in McGraw Hall.  This interview took place the previous day, and includes recordings of the four pieces.