visiting writers

Summer 2007 Residency

	Robert Olen Butler is the author of ten novels and three collections of short stories. A former sergeant in the Army Military Intelligence, Butler served in Vietnam and has used those experiences in some of his works. His writing has been published in Best American Short Stories, Esquire, The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. His numerous awards include the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his collection of short stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Butler received a M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1969. Currently, he holds a Frances Eppes Professorship at Florida State University.

	Catherine Wald’s recent book,The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph from 23 Top Authors (Persea Books 2005), won the 2006 Outstanding Book Award in the service category from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). Her web site rejectioncollection.com, has been featured in The New York Times, Writer’s Market, wirednews.com, The Writer, Writer’s Digest and The Artist’s Magazine. Cathy leads seminars on writing, self-promotion and overcoming rejection such organizations as Manhattanville College, Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY Purchase, National Writers Union, International Association of Business Communicators, NYU School of Publishing, Flushing Arts Council, Journalism & Women Symposium, and Bronx Writers Center. She has moderated panels for Associated Writers and Writing Programs, The New School and ASJA, and she teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. In 2006 she was named to the Westchester Arts Council’s Artist Roster. Cathy has been published in Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, The New York Times, Woman’s Day, The Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune; and in several anthologies. She was awarded three artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation. The author of a rejected novel, she is also the translator from the French of Childish Things by Valery Larbaud (Sun & Moon 1994). As a corporate communications writer and editor, Cathy held positions at AIG, Philip Morris and Avon Products before going freelance. Since then, she has managed editorial projects for companies such as ADP, American Express, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Ernst & Young, Ogilvy, Pepsi and Prudential. A resident of Yorktown, New York, Cathy is married to a high school science teacher and is the mother of two teenagers.

	Tony Crunk is a poet and the author of two books for children, Big Mama and Grandpa’s Overalls. His first collection of poetry, Living in the Resurrection, was the 1994 selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and his work has appeared in such journals as Paris Review, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest. Crunk received an MA in philosophy from the University of Kentucky and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He has taught at the University of Virginia, James Madison University, Murray State University and the University of Montana. He has also served in administrative and instructional capacities with a number of community arts organizations, including Hellgate Writers, Inc. and The Writer’s Voice/Billings, MT Center. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

	Silas House is the author of the novels Clay’s Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves and The Coal Tattoo as well as the play The Hurting Part. He has received the Award of Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Award for Literature, two Kentucky Literary Prizes for Novel of the Year and the fiction prize from the National Society of Arts and Letters. House is a two-time finalist for both the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize and the SEBA Book of the Year. House is writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, where he also directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Currently, House is collaborating with actress Ashley Judd on a screenplay that will be filmed this year.

Past Visiting Writers

	Andrew Hudgins is the author of several poetry collections, including Saints and Strangers (1985), which was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize; The Never-Ending (1991), a finalist for the National Book Award; and his most recent, Ecstatic in the Poison (Overlook Press, 2003). His book-length poem After the Lost War: A Narrative (1988), a narrative in the voice of Georgia-born poet and civil war soldier Sidney Lanier, won the Poets’ Prize. Hudgins is also the author of a book of essays, The Glass Anvil (1997). Mr. Hudgins’s honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University.

	Leigh Anne Couch lives in Tennessee and is the managing editor of the Sewanee Review. She has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the KHN Center for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Verse Daily, with work forthcoming in the Western Humanities Review and the Louisville Review. Her first book of poems Houses Fly Away will be published by Zone 3 Press this fall.

	Erin McGraw is the author of four books, most recently The Good Life (Houghton-Mifflin, 2004). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Good Housekeeping, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and many other publications, and she has received fellowships from Stanford University, the Macdowell Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at the Ohio State University and is currently working on a novel set in Hollywood in 1924.

	Daniel Anderson's work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Harper's, The New Republic, The Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry, among other places. His first book of poems, January Rain, was published in 1997. His second collection, Drunk in Sunlight, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006. He also edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov which was listed as a New York Times “Notable Book” in 2003. He is the recipient of a 2005 Pushcart Prize and has received fellowships from the NEA, the Bogliasco Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University. Most recently, he has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Presently, he is the Nancy and Rayburn Watkins Endowed Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Murray State.

	Eric Gansworth is the author of three novels, including Indian Summers (1998) Smoke Dancing (2004), both from Michigan State University Press, and Mending Skins (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). He is also the author of a collection of poetry and paintings, Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon (Michigan State UP, 2000). Gansworth is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation and was born and raised on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in western New York. He has a Master of Arts in English from the State University College at Buffalo and is an Associate Professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.

	Nancy Reisman, author of House Fires and The First Desire, received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts , Amherst . Her short story collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her novel The First Desire won the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize for Jewish Fiction. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has won an O.Henry Award and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Her stories have been included in numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Award Stories, and Jewish in America.

	Philip Stephens's first collection of poems, The Determined Days (Sewanee Writers' Series/The Overlook Press), appeared in 2000 and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA West Award. His chapbook, The Signalmen, received the Hanks Chapbook Award from the St. Louis Poetry Center in 1999. His writing has appeared in The Oxford American, Southwest Review, North American Review, and The Journal, among other places, and his poetry has been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000) and Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets (Word Press, 2004). His essay, "Fate and a Jukebox," appeared in Best Music Writing 2004 (Da Capo Press, 2004).

	Dianne Aprile is the author of four books, including two on the Abbey of Gethsemani, the monastery home of the writer/peace activist/Trappist monk Thomas Merton. A former staff writer for The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, she has received numerous awards for her work in journalism, including the National Society of Newspaper Columnists top award in 1996 and a shared staff Pulitzer in 1989. Her work has also appeared in a number of publications, including Conversations with Kentucky Writers, The New Southerner Anthology, and Southern Living. An excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, The Thickness of Water, will appear in the fall issue of The Louisville Review. Aprile teaches creative nonfiction at Spalding University, leads writing workshops throughout the region, and is a contributing editor to Pitch magazine.

	A native of Murray, Kim Trevathan is the author of Paddling the Tennessee River: A Voyage on Easy Water, the account of the 652-mile canoe trip he took with his dog Jasper, in 1998, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2001. Recently, UT Press published Coldhearted River: A Canoe Odyssey Down the Cumberland, based on a slightly longer trip with a photographer, Randy Russell, instead of the dog. Trevathan has published fiction and essays in New Delta Review, The Texas Review, New Millennium Writings (Spring 1999 fiction prize), The Distillery, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee.