Summer Literary Seminars

2012 FACULTY AND GUESTS
Arielle Bernstein Laimonas Briedis Peter Cole John Coy Jonathon Garfinkel Eric Goodman Adina Hoffman Pierre Joris Ilya Kaminsky Sergey Kanovich Claudia Keelan	Kerry Shawn Keys Fiona McCrae Andrew Miksys Ander Monson Eileen Myles Josip Novakovich Dawn Raffel Donald Revell Steve Stern Quintan Ana Wikswo Meg Wolitzer

Poetry
Eileen Myles is a poet and writer based in New York City. She has published over twenty books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, plays, and libretti, including Inferno (a poet’s novel), Skies, Cool for You, School of Fish, and Not Me. The Importance of Being Iceland (2009) travel essays on art was awarded a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. She contributes to numerous journals including Art in America and Artforum, Parkett, and Bookforum, The Nation, and The Believer.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former USSR, and arrived in the United Stated in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, Whiting Writers Award, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Dorset Prize, and the Lannan Foundation Fellowship. Dancing In Odessa was named Best Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine. Poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, won Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. Kaminsky is also co editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010). He lives in San Diego, where he teaches at San Diego State University.
Claudia Keelan is the author of six books of poetry including Refinery (Cleveland State University Poetry Prize), The Secularist (University of Georgia Press), Utopic(Alice James Books), and Missing Her from New Issues Press (2009.. In the preface to The Body Electric ,The American Poetry Review’s Best Poetry critic Harold Bloom wrote: “Claudia Keelan, new to me, is very welcome…she is endlessly enigmatic, again almost always what one hopes for in poems.” Of Utopic , the late poet Robert Creeley wrote:”This profoundly moving book is fact of a consummate skill and the human possibilities it works to realize and to honor. In these poems Claudia Keelan keeps the faith for us all.” Born in California, Keelan has taught in universities in Iowa, Boston, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Colorado. Since 1996, she has been at the University of Nevada, where she is Professor of English and Creative at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and affiliate to the Black Mountain Institute, as well as editor of the literary journal Interim (www.interimmag.org.) Her honors include the Jerome Shestack prize from The American Poetry Review, the Beatrice Hawley award from Alice James Books, a Creative Achievement award from UNLV, a Silver Pen award from the Library Board of Nevada, and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Under the auspices of Interim, she is partner to www.lyrikline.org, an online poetry archive founded in Berlin, whose mission is to serve poetry through translation.
Donald Revell is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently of A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell’s critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He lives with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their two children in the desert south of Las Vegas and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNLV.
Fiction
Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose books include "The Wife"; "The Position"; "The Ten-Year Nap"; and "The Uncoupling." A book for young readers, "The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman," has recently been published. Wolitzer's short fiction has appeared in "The Best American Short Stories" and "The Pushcart Prizes." She has taught writing at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, Columbia University, Skidmore College, Stonybrook Southampton, and the 92nd St Y. She lives in New York City with her family.
Dawn Raffel's newest book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. She is also the author of a novel, Carrying the Body and a previous collection, In the Year of Long Division. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOONand numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University. She now works part time at Readers Digest as Editor at Large, Books, and is completing a memoir. She lives outside New York City with her husband and sons.
Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at Bard, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State, and now, Concordia University in Montreal.
Steve Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of several novels and story collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American fiction, and The Wedding Jester, which received the National Jewish Book Award. He has been the recipient of grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations and teaches at Skidmore College. His most recent book is the novel The Frozen Rabbi.
Non Fiction
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (Steerforth Press and Broadway Books) and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press). A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness won the UK's 2010 Jewish Quarterly- Wingate Prize. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, written with Peter Cole, has recently been published by Schocken / Nextbook. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the TLS, Raritan, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. Formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post, Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, and NYU as well as the Franke Fellow at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions and lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.
Ander Monson is the author of a number of paraphernalia including a website, a decoder wheel, several chapbooks, as well as five books, most recently Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2010) and The Available World (Sarabande Books, 2010). He lives in Tucson where he teaches at the University of Arizona and edits the journal DIAGRAM <thediagram.com> and the New Michigan Press.
Poetry/Translation
MacArthur Fellow Peter Cole's most recent book of poems is Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions). His previous volumes--Rift and Hymns & Qualms--were collected as What Is Doubled: Poems, 1981-1998. Cole's many translations from Hebrew and Arabic include the anthology The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, which is forthcoming from Yale University Press; The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492; Taha Muhammad Ali's So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005; Aharon Shabtai's War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems; Avraham Ben Yitzhak's Collected Poems; and fiction by Yoel Hoffmann. He is the editor of Hebrew Writers on Writing and, with Adina Hoffman, is the author of a volume of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. In addition to fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, and a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
Playwriting
Jonathan Garfinkel is an award-winning author. He has written a book of poetry, Glass Psalms (Turnstone Press, 2005). His book of literary non-fiction, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide, has been published in five countries to wide critical acclaim. He has written a number of plays produced in North America and Europe, including The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret, and the Governor-General's Award nominatedHouse of Many Tongues. His journalism has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and published in "The Best New Canadian Non-Fiction". Jonathan divides his time between Berlin and Toronto.
Writing for Children
John Coy is the author of the picture books Night Driving, Strong to the Hoop,Vroomaloom Zoom, Two Old Potatoes and Me,and Around the World. Strong to the Hoop is also available in Spanish as Directo Al Aro and Two Old Potatoes and Me is available in Chinese. John is a member of the NBA Reading All-Star Team as part of the Read to Achieve program. Crackback, his first young adult novel,is about high school football and his second, Box Out, is about high school basketball. He is working on a middle-grade series and the first two books, Top of the Order andEyes on the Goal are now out. He lives in Minneapolis and visits schools nationally and internationally.
Vilnius: City of Strangers
Laimonas Briedis is a native of Vilnius and a long-time resident of Vancouver (Canada). He received a doctoral degree in cultural geography at the University of British Columbia and conducted his postdoctoral research at the History Department of the University of Toronto. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book, Vilnius: City of Strangers, which narrates the history and geography of the city’ s centuries long encounter with foreigners. The book has been on the bestseller list in Lithuania and was widely reviewed in the local and global press: Slavic Review described the author’ s narrative of Vilnius as “ an informative and engaging story” and The Economist called it “ a subtle and evocative book.” Currently, Briedis is working on the creation of a literary map of Vilnius and the cultural cartography of the diasporic Lithuania. He is also a guest editor of Lituanus, the Lithuanian quarterly journal of arts and sciences, published in Chicago.
Photography
Andrew Miksys is a native of Seattle, Washington. His photography has been shown internationally including exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre, and De Appel Contemporary Arts Centre in Amsterdam. In 2002 he was selected by Photo District News (PDN) as one of the "top 30 emerging photographers to watch" and in 2006 he was featured in Slate magazine as Slate's "Artist of the Month". In 2007 he published, BAXT, a book of photographs from his series about the Lithuanian Roma (Gypsy) community. Poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu wrote the introduction to BAXT. Miksys has also been the recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000), the J. William Fulbright Program (1998 and 2002), the Aaron Siskind Foundation (2009) and Light Work (2011). His photography has been published in many publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Exquisite Corpse, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. He currently divides his time between the US and Vilnius, Lithuania.
Editor/Publisher in Residence
Fiona McCrae has been publisher of Graywolf Press since 1994, following eleven years at Faber and Faber where she was a director and executive editor. She began at Faber and Faber, Ltd., in London, where she worked with such authors as Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, and Howard Norman. In 1982, she moved to Boston to work with Faber and Faber USA. While there, McCrae taught publishing courses at Harvard University and Emerson College. Authors that McCrae has published at Graywolf include Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Baxter, Per Petterson, Salvatore Scibona, Percival Everett, and Binyavanga Wainaina. She currently serves on the board of Books for Africa and is an advisor for Open Letter Press. She became an American citizen in 2003 and is married to the writer John Coy. Fiona travels frequently to New York City, where Graywolf keeps an office, to meet with agents, authors, and other publishing colleagues.
Writers in Residence
Arielle Bernstein is a writer living in Washington, DC, She received her BA in Philosophy and English Literature from Brandeis University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. She teaches writing at George Washington University and American University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The Millions, the St. Petersburg Review and The Rumpus and she is a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown. She was listed as a finalist in Glimmertrain's Family Matters Short Story contest for 2009.
Eric Goodman is a second-generation Ukrainian-Jewish-American writer. His fifth novel, Twelfth and Race, which takes as its intersecting themes love, race and history, will be published in March, 2012. He has published more than 100 features on culture, food and travel in publications including Saveur, Travel & Leisure, GQ, and L.A. Times Traveling in Style. He served on this year's literature panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, helping to award fellowships in fiction and creative nonfiction. His own work has won residencies and awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council. During the academic year, he directs the creative writing program at Miami University.
Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Europe & North Africa for 50 years, publishing over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations. Just out is Cartographies of the In-between: The Poetry & Poetics of Pierre Joris, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays by, among others, Mohamed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Regina Keil-Sagawe, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff & Nicole Peyrafitte (Literaria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, 2011). Forthcoming in 2012 are Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems) from Chax Press; Diwan Iffrikya: An Anthology of North African Writings from Prehistory to Today, co-edited with Habib Tengour from the University of California Press & Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader edited, introduced and translated by Joris from Black Widow Press. Recent publications include his translation of The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan. (Stanford U.P. 2011) & Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 which came out in 2009 (SALT Publishers.) In 2007 & 2008 he published Aljibar and Aljibar II (poems, Editions PHI, Luxembourg) & the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta’wil Productions). Other translations include Paul Celan: Selections (UCal Press) & 3 volumes of Paul Celan translations, Breathturn, Threadsuns & Lightduress (the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award) currently o.p. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with his wife, the performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte & teaches poetry & poetics at the State University of New York, Albany. Check out his Nomadics Blog.
Kerry Shawn Keys’ roots are in the Appalachian Mountains. From 1998 to 2000, he taught translation theory and creative composition as a Fulbright lecturer at Vilnius University. He has dozens of books to his credit, including translations from Portuguese and Lithuanian, and his own poems informed by rural America and Europe, and Brazil and India (Peace Corps) where he lived for considerable time. His work ranges from theatre-dance pieces to flamenco songs to meditations on the Tao Te Ching, and is often lyrical with intense ontological concerns. Of late, he has been writing prose wonderscripts, and monologues for the stage. A children’s book, The Land of People, received a Lithuanian laureate in 2008 for artwork he co-authored. He performs with the free jazz percussionist and sound-constellation artist, Vladimir Tarasov – Prior Records released their CD in 2006. His most recent book is Transporting, a cloak of rhapsodies (2010). Keys received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1992, and in 2005 a National Endowment For The Arts Literature Fellowship. He received a Translation Laureate Award from the Lithuanian Writers Union in 2003. He was a Senior Fulbright Research grantee for African-Brazilian studies, and is a member of the Lithuanian Writers Union and PEN. Selected poems have appeared in Czech, English, and Lithuanian.
Jewish Lithuania Faculty
Jewish Lithuania Co-DirectorSergey Kanovich (Sergejus Kanovičius) is Vilnius poet and essayist. He is a member of Lithuanian Writers Union. Sergey is an author of 2 poetry books "Writings On The Snow" and "The Scrip". As kind of continuation of his famous father Jewish novelist Gregory Kanovich (www.gkanovich.com), Sergey's poetry and essays are mainly dealing with the fate of Jewish cultural heritage in Lithuania as well as issues related to perception of Holocaust by nowadays Lithuanian society. Born in Vilnius in 1962 Sergey moved to Israel in early 90-ies. For the past 14 years he is residing in Brussels, Belgium.
Quintan Ana Wikswo is a multidisciplinary Litvak artist and writer whose projects integrate literature, visual art, photography, multichannel and projected film and video, new media and live performance collaborations with composers and choreographers. Working with salvaged Fascist battlefield cameras and military typewriters, she creates portraits of sites where crimes against humanity have taken place. Her projects are exhibited, performed, and published widely at major institutions throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. A major solo museum survey of her multi-panel photography, text installation, video projections, assemblages and live performance works appears in New York City in 2011-12 at the Smithsonian-affiliated Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History. A regular contributor to magazines including Tin House, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and New American Writing, she is the author of six limited- edition artist books of her visual art and text, and three DVD collections of her award-winning short films and video installations. The 2011 Pollock-Krasner Artist-in-Residence at Yaddo and Visiting Artist in the Honors College at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, she has received fellowships and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Cultural Innovation, ARC/Durfee, Djerassi, the Puffin Foundation and more. She divides her time between New York City, Los Angeles, and Europe.

Latest news: