Summer Literary Seminars

PAST FACULTY

The faculty for the SLS Lithuania 2009 Program was as follows:

Fiction
Antanas Sileika	Antanas Sileika's novel, Woman in Bronze, set in Paris and Lithuania in the 1920s, was named one of the 100 best books of the year in Canada by the Globe and Mail book pages. He is the author of two other books of fiction as well as hundreds of book reviews, and newspaper and magazine articles. A freelance broadcaster, he appears on radio and television to talk about literature. Antanas Sileika is the artistic director of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Canada. He is working a new novel, a love triangle set in postwar Eastern and Western Europe.
Lynne Tillman	Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fifth novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2006. Her other novels are Hunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease On Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tillman has published three nonfiction books, including The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67; and three story collections, most recently, This Is Not It, stories and novellas written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her writing has appeared in journals, such as Tin House, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Bomb, Aperture, Conjunctions; her criticism and essays in Bookforum, Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, The Guardian, and The New York Times Arts and Leisure and the Times Book Review. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence at The University at Albany. In 2006 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; her papers were acquired by New York University’s Fales Library. She is the fiction editor of Fence magazine and is on the board of Housing Works Bookstore and Cafe, The International Advisory Committee for the Wexner Prize, and is a Trustee on the board of The PEN American Center.
Non-Fiction
Phillip Lopate	Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections -- Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best non-fiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood , and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.
Travel Writing
Laima Vincė	Laima Vincė is a graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts MFA program in Creative Writing. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Fulbright lectureships, a PEN Translation grant, and an Academy of American Poets award among other honours. Writing under Laima Sruoginis, she is the editor and translator of three anthologies of contemporary Lithuanian literature: The Earth Remains (Columbia University Press), Lithuania In Her Own Words (Tito Alba), and Raw Amber (Poetry Salzburg). She has translated four books of literary non-fiction from Lithuanian into English. Her novel for children, The Ghost in Hannah's Parlour was translated into Lithuanian and published by Gimtasis Zodis and was well received in Lithuania. In Autumn 2008, the Lithuanian Writers' Union Press will publish in English and Lithuanian Lenin's Head on a Platter (available for purchase here), a memoir of her year as a student at Vilnius University in 1988-1989 during the time of Lithuania's singing revolution. Laima Vincė also writes as a journalist on contemporary social issues in Lithuania. This March Central European Univeristy Press will publish Laima Vincė's translation of the Lithuanian freeedom fighter, Juozas Lukša's account of Lithuania's post-war armed resistance against the Soviet Union. The book Forest Brothers includes authentic photographs from the post-war era, a detailed historical introduction written by Laima Vincė, and an afterword in which Laima Vincė describes Lukša's activities after his return to Lithuania in 1950 - 1951. The afterword depicts how fifty-five years after Lukša's death, his widow Nijolė Brazėnaitė meets for the first time the woman who hid and sheltered him after his return to Soviet-occupied Lithuania.
Poetry
Peter Cole	Peter Cole is a MacArthur-winning American poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem. Born in 1957, in Paterson, NJ, he is the author of three books of poems, including What Is Doubled: Poems 1981–1998 and a new collection, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled, which was recently published by New Directions. His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s J’Accuse (New Directions), So What: New & Selected Poems, by Taha Muhammad Ali (Copper Canyon), and Hebrew Writers on Writing (Trinity). Cole, who co-edits Ibis Editions, has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Middlebury College. Apart from the 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, he has received numerous honors for his work, including the PEN Translation Prize, a TLS Translation Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Erín Moure	Erín Moure is a poet and translator from French, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish to English. Her work bridges, and explodes the bridges, between creation and translation. 6 of her books and translations have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award, 3 for the Griffin Prize, and her books have won the Governor General’s Award, the AJM Klein Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her recent titles: O Cadoiro (2007), Little Theatres (2005), O Cidadán (2002), and Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001), a translation from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa. Moure has also translated Chus Pato’s Charenton (Shearsman, 2007) from Galician; Andrés Ajens’s Quase Flanders, Quase Extramadura from Chilean Spanish (Left Hand Books, 2008), and with Robert Majzels, three books by Nicole Brossard from French. She has given readings, seminars and workshops in English, French and Galician in Canada, USA, England, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany and Japan. A book of essays, My Beloved Wager, will appear from NeWest Press in 2009, as will her translation of Chus Pato’s m-Talá from Shearsman in the UK. Moure is a contributing editor to The Capilano Review (Vancouver) and serves on the editorial board of the Galician Review (Birmingham, UK). She lives in Montréal.
Playwriting
Mac Wellman	Mac Wellman’s recent plays are: Bitter Bierce, at P S 122; Jennie Richee, with the Ridge Theater, at The Arts at St Ann; Anything's Dream at Mulhenberg College; and Antigone, with Big Dance Company at Dance Theater Workshop. He has published two novels with Sun & Moon Press: The Fortuneteller and Annie Salem; Sun & Moon also published A Shelf in Woop's Clothing, a book of poems, From the Other Side of the Century II, an anthology of plays (co-edited with Douglas Messerli), Two plays: The Land Beyond the Forest, and Crowtet 1 and 2, the latter two volumes under the Green Integer imprint. Roof Books has recently published his Miniature, a book of poems. He has received numerous award: NEA, NYFA, Rockefeller, McNight and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1990 he received an Obie for Best American Play (Bad Penny, Crowbar and Terminal Hip). In 1991 He received another Obie for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Writers Award, and most recently the 2003 Obie for Lifetime Achievement. He is the Donald I. Fine Professor of Play Writing at Brooklyn College. Visit his website for more information.
SLS Jewish Lithuania Program Director
Dovid Katz	Dovid Katz, professor at Vilnius University, and research director at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, is a specialist on Yiddish linguistics, literature and stylistics, and Lithuanian Jewish culture and literature. He has been developing Yiddish cultural programs for three decades. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1956, he is the son of Lithuanian-born Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz. He did his doctorate on the origins of the Yiddish language at the University of London, and founded the Yiddish program at Oxford, which he led for eighteen years. After a stint at Yale, he cofounded the Center for Stateless Cultures (1999) and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute (in 2001). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Manger Award for Yiddish Literature and the John Marshall Prize in Comparative Philology. His books include Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2004), Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2007), Windows to a Lost Jewish Past: Vilna Book Stamps (2008) and Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks (2009). He has published dozens of papers in Yiddish linguistics, and on Yiddish stylistics. He also writes short stories in Yiddish; three collections have appeared to date, and a fourth is ready for the press. An anthology of stories in English, selected, edited and translated by Dr. Barnett Zumoff of New York, is near completion. For several years in the 1990s, he edited the world’s only literary Yiddish monthly, and he continues to contribute non-fiction and fiction to the New York weekly Algemeyner Zhurnal. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he has been leading expeditions to find, interview and support the last prewar Jews of Eastern Europe. One academic product is his language and culture atlas, a work in progress. He has also completed a memoir, Back to the Old Country (vol. 1 of a projected series), which he is hoping to have published soon. He is a passionate advocate for Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe. His 1999 op-ed on the poverty of the last survivors was quoted extensively in the Swiss banks settlement. He helped inspire the establishment of the LA based Survivor Mitzvah Project (SMP), and works closely with the Jewish Community of Lithuania (JCL) and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). He has sought to define and expose the new “Holocaust Obfuscation Movement,” a topic he lectured on this academic year at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, Rutgers, and University College London. He is about halfway through writing a book on the subject. In Yiddish studies, he is at work on the volume Yiddish and Power (Palgrave Macmillan). Dovid divides the year between Vilnius and his home in the mountains of North Wales.
ADJUNCT FACULTY
Ivan Fuller	Ivan Fuller is in his 20th year as a professor of theatre at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where he currently serves as chair of the Performing & Visual Arts Department. He is the founder and artistic director of the Bare Bodkins Theatre Company, producing summer Shakespeare in Sioux Falls. For the past six summers he has spent time in Russia, leading students on study abroad trips or simply being inspired for his various writing projects. In addition to his work as a director and theatre educator, Ivan is a playwright and is currently in the process of writing a new play about Soviet poet, Olga Berggolts. His play, Eating into the Fabric, was chosen for the Mainstage Reading Series at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in May 2009. He has also written and had productions of a long one-act, Sensitive Scar Tissue.
Laurynas Katkus	Laurynas Katkus was born in 1972 in Vilnius. He has studied Lithuanian and Comparative literature in Vilnius, Leipzig and Berlin. Since the early Nineties he has published widely in Lithuanian literary press, and has two books of poetry on his account – "Balsai, rašteliai" (Voices, Notes, 1998), and "Nardymo pamokos" (Diving lessons, 2003). At the moment, Katkus is finishing the manuscript for a third poetry book. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Polish, Slovenian, German, English; books of poems in English "October Holidays"(2001) and in German "Tauchstunden" (2003) have appeared. Katkus writes essays and critique and translates from English, German, and Spanish. In 2006 he defended a PhD thesis on exile in modern poetry at the University of Vilnius. In 2008 he became a fellow of artist academy Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart. Katkus lives in Vilnius with his wife and three children.
Kerry Shawn Keys	Co-director Kerry Shawn Keys’ roots are in the Appalachian Mountains. He lives in Vilnius, where 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 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 often performs with the free jazz percussionist and sound-constellation artist, Vladimir Tarasov – Prior Records released their CD in 2006. His most recent books are Broken Circle (2005), The Burning Mirror (2008) and Book of Beasts (2009). 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 and Lithuanian.
Michael Kimmage	Michael Kimmage is an assistant professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He regularly teaches American studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and has taught U.S. history at the Free University of Berlin. His first book, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, was published by Harvard University Press in 2009. Kimmage has also published essays in the New York Times Book Review, Commentary, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has a strong interest in Yiddish literature and in European-Jewish intellectual life, especially where these subjects connect with American cultural and intellectual history.
Darius J Ross	Darius J Ross is a Canadian transplant to Vilnius who, over the course of the past decade, has written and reported extensively on Lithuania for local and international English-language news media and leisure publications. His freelance assignments have covered a wide array of topics – from reviews of Leonid Brezhnev's dacha on the Baltic coast (now a 5-star hotel) to magazine articles on Lithuanian heraldry and op-ed columns on the need for more public lavatories in the country. During a three-year hiatus from his much loved but dysfunctional life as freelance Bohemian, he served as the Reuters reporter for Lithuania, a job that had him covering Europe's only successful impeachment of a head of state, interviewing government ministers and central bankers, and buttonholing visiting European dignitaries. He has translated many texts and excerpts of Lithuanian literary prose, for the Vilnius Review and the annual 'Nordic Summer' literary forum, as well as for other events and publications. He is currently living a Dickensian life of genteel poverty in the rough-and-tumble, working-class district of Karoliniškės where, during frequent and enjoyable walks with Bonnie, his beloved mongrel bitch, he basks in the wonders of Soviet urban planning, and where he has yet to encounter a single tourist.
Catherine Tice	Catherine Tice is the Associate Publisher of the New York Review of Books. Since starting at the Review in 1983, she has occasionally contributed to other publications, most recently a short memoir of Tennesee Williams for the current Berlin Schaubühne production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and observations on the 2008 US Presidential election for Le Monde Diplomatique. A native of North Carolina, she grew up in New Orleans, and lives in New York City.
Max Winter	Max Winter's book The Pictures was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2007. He was the winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Pleiades, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Yale Review, Boulevard, The Iowa Review, Jacket, The Quarterly, Parthenon West, and other publications previously. He was also included on Salon.com in a set of recordings of Paris Review authors, in New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) (as you know), and in Under the Rock Umbrella (Mercer University Press, 2007). He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006. In addition to reviewing fiction and poetry for Publishers Weekly intermittently for several years, he has published reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Boston Review, Bookforum, The Denver Post, The Boston Book Review, The Boston Phoenix, The San Francisco Chronicle, Bomb, Poets and Writers, and Kirkus Reviews, among other publications. He is currently a Poetry Editor of Fence and a Senior Editor at a leading educational publisher.

Additional faculty will be announced at a later date.

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