NER Ulysses Reading Series: National Poetry Month Edition - April 17, 7 PM, Humanities House, Middlebury College

DOMINIQUE AURY (1907–98) was the general secretary of Nouvelle Revue Française from 1953 until her death in April 1998 and an influential figure in postwar French publishing. She was also a distinguished translator from English into French. Her critical essays—whose subjects range from Chrétien de Troyes to Albert Camus—were collected in Lecture pour tous (1958), which won the Grand Prix de la Critique, and in Lecture pour tous, 2 (1999).

JEREMY BASS’s poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review OnlinePleiadesSpoon River Poetry ReviewCortland Review, and other journals. He lives in New York City, where he works as a private tutor and professional guitarist.

TRACI BRIMHALL is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins, selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize and forthcoming from W. W. Norton, and of Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon ReviewSlateVirginia Quarterly ReviewNew England ReviewMissouri Review, and elsewhere. She was the 2008–09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

DAVID CASTRONUOVO, visiting assistant professor of Italian at Skidmore College, has authored a number of articles on the poet Giacomo Leopardi, including “‘Ignorance of the Whole’: Iconographic Affinities Between ‘L’infinito’ and the Transfiguration of Lorenzo Lotto” (with Guerrino Lovato). His translation of Arrigo Boito’s “The Black Bishop” appeared in the New England Review in 2004.

MARK DOTY is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins), which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York.

S. L. FERRARO’s fiction has appeared in the Long StoryDalhousie Review, and New Orphic Review; her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Times MagazinePoets & WritersAmericana, the NY Daily News, and other places. She has published two books of nonfiction on language and lives in Copperopolis, California, not far from where Mark Twain wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

SAMAR FARAH FITZGERALD is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, where she was the recipient of the August Derleth Prize in fiction and the Friends of Creative Writing award. She now lives in Staunton, Virginia, and teaches creative writing at James Madison University. Her fiction has appeared in the Southern ReviewStory Quarterly OnlineCarolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel.

CASTLE FREEMAN JR. is the author of four novels and many stories, five of which have been published in the New England Review. His most recent novel, All That I Have, was published in 2009 by Steerforth Press (Hanover, New Hampshire). He lives in Newfane, Vermont.

THOMAS GOUGH is the pen name of Thom Conroy, a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand. His fiction has appeared in various journals, including AgniAlaska Quarterly ReviewPrairie SchoonerColorado Review, and New England Review. He is currently finishing work on a novel, An Ark of Specimens,featuring the German naturalist Dr. Ernst Dieffenbach and his 1839 expedition to New Zealand.

DEBORA GREGER is the author, most recently, of Men, Women, and Ghosts (Penguin, 2008). By Herself, a new collection of poems, will be published next year.

RACHEL HADAS is Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. The latest of her many books is a memoir, Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry (Paul Dry Books, 2011); her most recent poetry collection is The Ache of Appetite (Copper Beach Press, 2010). She is coeditor of an anthology of translations of Greek poetry, The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2009).

ELLEN HINSEY is the author of Update on the Descent (University of Notre Dame, 2009), The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan, 2002), and Cities of Memory (Yale, 1996), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She has edited and translated (with Constantine Rusanov) The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (Bloodaxe, 2009), and her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New YorkerPoetry, and New England Review. Her recent awards include a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Lannan Foundation Award. At present she is working on a collection of poems and a book of essays about Eastern Europe. She lives in Paris.

KIMBERLY JOHNSON is the author of two collections of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook (Persea Books, 2002) and A Metaphorical God (Persea Books, 2008), and of a translation of Virgil’s Georgics (Penguin, 2009). She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and recent work by her has appeared in the New YorkerSlate, and Literary Imagination.

LUKE JOHNSON is the author of After the Ark (NYQ Books, 2011). His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Epoch, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where he is working on a second collection.

JAMES LONGENBACH’s most recent books are The Iron Key (Norton, 2010) and The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2007). He teaches in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers and at the University of Rochester, where he is the Joseph Gilmore Professor of English.

HENRY [JAMES] SUMNER MAINE (1822–88) was an English legal scholar and one of the founding editors of the Saturday Review, to which he contributed numerous articles on literary and political subjects. His most famous and influential book, Ancient Law, appeared in 1861, followed by Village Communities in the East and West (1871), Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1875), Dissertations on Early Law and Custom (1883), and Popular Government (1885). Maine was knighted as Sir Henry in 1871, and died in 1888 in France.

MELINDA MOUSTAKIS won the 2010 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction for Bear Down, Bear North,a linked story collection about a family in Alaska, which includes “What You Can Endure” and will be published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2011. She has stories published or forthcoming in ConjunctionsAlaska Quarterly ReviewKenyon ReviewAmerican Short FictionMassachusetts ReviewHobart, and elsewhere.

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867–1936) was an Italian author known for his plays, novels, and short stories. His masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author, revolutionized modern concepts of theatricality and is still regularly performed throughout the world. In 1934 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

LYNDA PIZZUTO is a full-time artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She attended the Otis Art Institute and has an Associate’s of Arts degree from Santa Monica School of Design, Art and Architecture. She has held artists’ residencies in Pont Aven, France, and Auvilar, France. Her work is shown in the United States and Europe and is in collections in the United States, China, Japan, and Europe.

GLEN POURCIAU’s collection of stories, Invite, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2008. His fiction has appeared in Antioch Review, Epoch, New England Review, Paris Review, and other magazines.

MELISSA RANGE’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Originally from East Tennessee, she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri.

DAVID RODERICK’s first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize. He is a recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and he currently teaches in the M.F.A. Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

FRANCIS-NOËL THOMAS and the cognitive scientist Mark Turner were awarded a Prix du royonnement de la langue et la littérature françaises by the Académie française in 1996 for their study of classic prose style, Clear and Simple as the Truth. Princeton University Press published a second edition of this book in traditional and digital formats in spring 2011.

DEBBIE URBANSKI’s work has appeared in the Southern ReviewGulf CoastVerse, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She lives with her husbandand two children in Syracuse, New York.

ANNE PIERSON WIESE’s first poetry collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a “Discovery”/The Nation Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Ploughshares, Hudson ReviewRaritan, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Literary Imagination.

SNOO WILSON has written novels, plays, screenplays, and scripts for television and radio. Lovesong of the Electric Bear was performed at Middlebury College and in New York in collaboration with the Potomac Theatre Project, directed by Cheryl Faraone. His other plays, which include The Pleasure Principle, Vampire, The Number of the Beast, MoonshineThe Glad Hand,and Darwin’s Flood, have been produced in the U.S. and in England, by the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Royal Court Theatre, the Bush Theatre, and the Hampstead Theatre. The playwright will be more than happy to discuss further productions of his work via a communications system directly descended from Turing algorithms: snoowilson@email.com.

Subscribe to Read More