WRITERS AT CORNELL. - J. Robert Lennon

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon received her B.A. from Washington and Lee University and her M.F.A. from Penn State. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattapallax, and Shenandoah, and in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page and Role Call. A semi-finalist in the “Discovery”/The Nation Contest in 1999 and 2001, she was one of 20 writers featured in the 2005 PSA Festival of New American Poets.  Her first book, Black Swan, was awarded the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Ernesto Quiñonez is the author of the novels Bodega Dreams, which was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title as well as a Borders Bookstore Original New Voice selection, and Chango’s Fire.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of six novels, including Happyland, serialized in Harper’s in 2006, and the forthcoming Castle. He is also the author of Pieces For The Left Hand, a collection of 100 anecdotes.

All three writers are members of the Cornell University Creative Writing faculty. They delivered the Richard Cleveland Memorial Reading on March 28, 2008, at the Hollis Auditorium in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall.  This interview took place the following day.  Leading the conversation were three Cornell Lecturers in English: Stephanie Gehring, Jon Hickey, and George McCormick.

Paul Lisicky is the author of a novel, Lawnboy, and Famous Builder, a collection of essays. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Short Takes, Open House, Boulevard, Flash Fiction, and 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, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City, and has taught at Cornell University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Houston, and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming.

Paul Lisicky read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall.  This interview took place two weeks later.

Today’s podcast features two writers: novelist and short story writer Lee Smith, and journalist and essayist Hal Crowther.  Smith is author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including the recent nove On Agate Hill; she has won numerous awards for her work, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Lila Wallace / Reader’s Digest Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction.  Hal Crowther has written three books of nonfiction, and his work has appeared in a great number of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Oxford American, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time, and Newsweek.  His most recent book is Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-Millennial South. The two live in North Carolina.

Crowther and Smith read in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall on November 15, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in central Connecticut, and her poems have appeared in The New England Review, Ninth Letter, and The Paris Review (which awarded her the Bernard F. Connors Prize for the Long Poem).  A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she has been both a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.  She lives in Los Angeles, California, and her first book is called The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.

Calvocoressi read in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall on September 27, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Heather McHugh was born to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, in 1948. She was raised in Virginia and educated at Harvard University. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference (1981); and Dangers (1977).

She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and two books of translation: Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris, 1989) and D’après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981).

Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

McHugh read in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2007. This interview took place the following day.

Emily Rosko was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in the Midwest, and later taught English in Siberia. A recipient of the Stegner, Ruth Lilly, and Javits fellowships, she holds degrees from Cornell and Purdue universities. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Another Chicago Magazine,The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Denver Quarterly, and her new book is Raw Goods Inventory.

Rosko read in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall on April 5, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.