WRITERS AT CORNELL. - J. Robert Lennon

Peter Balakian was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and studied at Bucknell, NYU and Brown; he has taught English and Creative Writing at Colgate University since 1980.  His many books include June-tree: New and Selected Poems and the new collection Ziggurat; he is also the author of Black Dog Of Fate, a memoir about his childhood and Armenian family history.  He co-founded and co-edited, with Bruce Smith, the poetry magazine Graham House Review. His prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Balakian read from his work on March 3, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Nicholson Baker is a novelist and essayist, the author of the acclaimed novels The Mezzanine, Room Temperature and Vox, among others; his most recent book, The Anthologist, has been praised as “startlingly perceptive and ardent” by the New York Times Book Review. Baker earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and the Los Angeles Times called his pacifist manifesto Human Smoke “one of the most important books you will ever read.”  For his activist work surrounding issues of text preservation he was honored with the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.  He lives in Maine.

Baker read from his work on February 24, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Speak Low and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006. His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.  He teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Phillips read from his work on October 14, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Lydia Davis is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collections Almost No Memory, Varieties of Disturbance, and Collected Stories, and a novel, The End of the Story; she has also published a number of chapbooks and a large body of French translations, most notably Proust’s Swann’s Way and, just this year, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She is a Macarthur Fellow, has won a Whiting Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pen/Hemingway Award.  She teaches writing at SUNY Albany, where she is also Writer-In-Residence.

Davis read from her work on September 30, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez was born in New York, then spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father’s involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country.  Her novels include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and ¡Yo!; she is also author of the poetry collections The Housekeeping Book, The Woman I Kept to Myself, The Other Side, and Homecoming. Her many other books include essays and fiction for young people.  Many commentators regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers; Alvarez is the current writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.

Alvarez read from her work on September 9, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Philipp Meyer grew up in working-class Baltimore, where he developed the literary ambitions that would lead him to Cornell University, and a BA in English.  Some years, several jobs, and an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers later, Meyer published his first book, the acclaimed novel American Rust. He now divides his time between Texas and upstate New York.

Meyer read from his work on February 18, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Shauna Seliy is the author of the novel When We Get There (Bloomsbury 2007). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; she has also received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. From 2003 to 2004 she was the Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC.  Her work has appeared in Other Voices, Meridian, the New Orleans Review, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Seliy read from her work on September 11, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous day.

Georgian writer, poet, and playwright Irakli Kakabadze has published more than 50 short stories since 1990 in Georgian, Russian and English publications; he’s also published five books.  His celebrated play “Candidate Jokola,” which was published in 2005, is a story of love between a Georgian man and Abkhaz woman.  In his country, he is also known as a political activist; he was one of the first writers in Georgia to write about drugs and violence.  In 1990 Kakabadze was awarded an award by “Tsiskari” magazine for his novel Allegro, and he is presently living in Ithaca as part of the Ithaca City of Asylum Writers Project.

Kakabadze read from his work on September 4, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

Sarah Mkhonza was forced to leave her native Swaziland in 2003 following a campaign of harassment against herself and her family. An outspoken voice for women’s rights under the monarchical Swazi regime, Dr. Mkhonza wrote newspaper columns for The Observer and The Swazi Sun that told of the daily struggles of Swazi women and children ejected from their land. In her columns, she employed a “journalistic fiction” style intended to foster a writing culture among Swazi women. As her popularity as a critic of the government’s repressive policies grew, she was told to stop writing. Her refusal resulted in threats, assaults, and hospitalization. At the University of Swaziland, where she was professor of inguistics and English, her office was robbed and vandalized on two occasions — her computer and diskettes destroyed and tossed in the mud.

Dr. Mkhonza has published two novels, What the Future Holds and Pains of a Maid, and is currently working on a third. She has also published several chapbooks of fiction and poetry with Ithaca’s Vista Periodista press.  She co-founded the Association of African Women, and the African Book Fund Group at Michigan State University, which has sent over 1000 books to the University of Swaziland and other African institutions, and she is presently living in Ithaca through the Ithaca City of Asylum program.

Sarah Mkhonza read from her work on February 28, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall.  This interview took place the following May.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For.  A countercultural institution, the strip is syndicated in dozens of newspapers, translated into several languages and collected in a series of award-winning books. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.” And Comics Journal says, “Bechdel’s art distills the pleasures of Friends and The Nation; we recognize our world in it, with its sorrows and ironies.”  In 2006, Houghton Mifflin published Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The bestselling coming-of-age tale has been called a “mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection” and a “rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature.”  Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.

Alison Bechdel read from her work on April 10, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall.  This interview took place the following day.