About SLS

SLS is premised on the not-so-novel idea that one's writing can greatly benefit from the keen sense of temporary displacement created by an immersion in a thoroughly foreign culture and street vernacular; that one's removing himself/herself from the routine context of his/her life, of one's own free will, tends to provide for a creative jolt, as it were?by offering up a wholly new perspective, new angle of looking at the customary and the mundane.

SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, was first held in 1999. We've prided ourselves on bringing together the finest American, Canadian, European, and African writers and literary scholars with their Russian counterparts in a four-week flurry of writing related activities in the midst of the literary landscape that is St. Petersburg.

In 2001 SLS launched its new sister program, SLS-Kenya. For many years, however, because of local and global circumstances, the program had to be postponed. In 2005 we held our first large scale program hosting a dozen faculty members and nearly fifty North American and East African participants. We now hold the program annually, using the capitol of Nairobi and the medieval stone town of Lamu as our primary locations.

Summer Literary Seminars is a charitable, Non-Profit corporation as organized under section 501(c)3 of the IRS tax code. Our Tax ID is 57-1179618; our exemption determination letter is kept on file and copies are available upon request. We're affiliated with Herzen University in St. Petersburg and a number of universities within the US which provide graduate and undergraduate credit for students taking our courses. Other affiliations include the largest circulation Canadian general interest magazine The Walrus, which publishes our contest winners and cosponsors the contest. In the past we have worked with the online anthology Russianpoetry.net, which we partnered with to record videos of Russia's leading contemporary poets during SLS 2002; the literary publisher Dalkey Archive Press, which used SLS as a homebase to assess the landscape of contemporary Russian literature for its Russian Literature series; the literary journal Fence which published the winners of our 2004 and 2005 contests; Tin House magazine which published the winners and many finalists for our 2002 and 2003 writing contests. See our Friends and Affiliates section on our links page for more.

The SLS Board of Directors includes:

David Beaty (Independent Writer)
James Boobar (University of Redlands)
Thomas Burke (University of Massachusetts)
Thomas Hill (Project Harmony)
Elizabeth Hodges (St. Petersburg Review)
Mikhail Iossel (Concordia University)
Lucy Jilka (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars)
Joshua Knelman (The Walrus magazine)
Linda Leith (Blue Metropolis Foundation)
Sam Lipsyte (Columbia University)
Phillip Lopate (Hofstra University)
Fiona McCrae (Graywolf Press)
Josip Novakovich (Pennsylvania State University)
Jeff Parker (Eastern Michigan University)
Catherine Tice (New York Review of Books)
Binyavanga Wainaina (Kwani? Literary Trust/Journal)

The following are the key officers and employees:

Mikhail Iossel, CEO and Director. Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR, where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to a circle of underground ("samizdat") writers, and emigrated to the United States in 1986. After receiving an MA degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Hampshire, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner fellowship in fiction at Stanford University. He subsequently taught creative writing, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels, at the University of Minnesota, New York University, the New School, St. Lawrence University, Union College – and currently is on the faculty of the Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) writing program. Numerous publications in samizdat magazines in the former Soviet Union. Author of Every Hunter Wants to Know, a collection of stories (W.W. Norton) and co-editor (with Jeff Parker) of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004). a book of essays. Stories published in literary magazines in the US and abroad, translated in several foreign languages, anthologized in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. Recipient of the NEA (1993) and the Guggenheim Foundation fellowships (1999). Founder (in 1998) and executive director of the Summer Literary Seminars, Inc., program--one of the world's largest international literary conferences (St. Petersburg, Russia; Nairobi-Lamu, Kenya).

Jeff Parker, Chief Operations Officer and Russia Program Director. Jeff Parker’s fiction, nonfiction, and hypermedia have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, Hobart, The Iowa Review, and other publications. His novel Ovenman will be published by Tin House Books in Summer 2007, and his cycle of stories The Back of the Line in collaboration with artist William Powhida will be released by DECODE Art Publishers in the Fall. For his work in hypermedia, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. He co-edited the essay collection Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) with Mikhail Iossel. He has a BA in Journalism from the University of Florida and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University, where he directs the interdisciplinary MA program. He sits on the Boards of Directors for 826michigan and SixBillion.org. He has worked with SLS since 1999 and is the Russia Program Director and Chief Operations Officer. He lives in Ypsilanti and Toronto.

Thomas Burke, Kenya Program Co-Director and Russia Program Assistant Director. Mr. Burke grew up outside Chicago and writes fiction and nonfiction. He received a BA from Union  College and an MFA from UMASS Amherst. He has lived in Asia and Europe, and spent time in South America, Central America, and Africa . He teaches writing and lives in New York City.

Thomas Hill, Board Secretary. Thomas Hill studied for a Master's in Public Administration, specializing in nonprofit management, at San Francisco State University and holds a Bachelors degree in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been with SLS for five years now. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, he is an international development manager working primarily on community, IT, and professional development throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union. He lives in Moscow and works for Project Harmony where he is Country Director of Russia operations, working with funders such as the US Department of State, USAID, Microsoft, and Intel. He also oversees and helps coordinate Project Harmony's management of the USAID Community Connections program in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine. Mr. Hill has seven years experience with development, program, organizational, and event management, including five years international experience.

Nathan Deuel, Print Designer. Nathan Deuel, Print Designer. Nathan Deuel designs print ads for SLS and first attended the St. Petersburg program in 2002. Mr. Deuel is a staff editor at Rolling Stone magazine and is a founding editor of SixBillion.org, an online magazine of narrative journalism.

Mariya Gusev, Staff. 2007 will be her fifth year with SLS. Ms. Gusev is an editor for St. Petersburg Review, and formerly an editor for The Literary Review (2004-2006). She has received her BFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and has taught writing there. Her translation work includes poems by Dana Gioia and Nancy Willard for BibliObraz Literary Festival in Moscow, and street interviews with William T. Vollmann for the Russian chapters in Poor People (2007). Most recently her poetry can be found in In Posse Review. She lives and works in NYC.

John Goldbach, Program Assistant. John received his MA from Concordia University in Montreal, where he lives.

Sachiko Murakami, Webmaster and Program Assistant. Ms. Murakami holds a MA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University (Montreal). Her writing has appeared in various Canadian journals and her first collection of poetry, The Invisibility Exhibit, is forthcoming with Talonbooks in 2008. She lives in Vancouver.

Anna Bitkina, Representative of SLS in Russia. Ms. Bitkina coordinates SLS's projects for Russian writers: the literary contest "Tamizdat" and SLS's Russian creative writing seminars. She also works for the international arts service organization CEC ArtsLink as a project coordinator. Anna worked in the American Councils for International Education in St.Petersburg and finished the MA program in arts management at the International Center for Culture and Management (ICCM) in Salzburg, Austria. In 2003 she successfully graduated from Smolny College of Liberal Arts in St.Petersburg and she holds a BA degree in visual arts. In 2003-2004 Anna studied at the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin. She currently lives and works in St.Petersburg.

For further information on SLS contact us.