Beck Lecture Series - Spring 2011
Visiting Writers
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Biographies
Josh Weil was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia to which he returned to write the novellas in his first book, The New Valley (Grove, 2009). A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. Weil's short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and Glimmer Train, among other journals; he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Granta Online, Oxford American and Poets & Writers. Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, a Tickner Fellowship from Gilman School, a Writer’s Center Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Dana Award in Portfolio, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.
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Michael Collier has published five books of poems: The Clasp and Other Poems; The Folded Heart; The Neighbor; The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and most recently, Dark Wild Realm. A sixth collection, An Individual History, will appear in 2012. He is also co-editor, with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, of A William Maxwell Portrait. His translation of Euripides’s Medea appeared in 2006 and a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back, in 2007. Collier has received Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Catonsville, Maryland.
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Marjorie Welish, an artist, poet, painter and critic, received her M.F.A. degree from Vermont College, Norwich University. She has just completed a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship teaching at the University of Frankfurt, Germany and Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland. This past summer, she was an artist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to work toward her exhibition at Inverleith House, Edinburgh, in 2011.
Her writing on art has appeared in Art in America, Art Monthly, Bomb, Partisan Review, Salmagundi, and Textual Practice, as well as in the anthology The Studio Reader (University of Chicago Press). A collection of her art criticism is entitled Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Foundation, 2003) consists of papers given at a conference on her writing and art at the University of Pennsylvania. Coffee House Press has published her most recent collections of poetry, including Word Group and Isle of the Signatories. She regularly teaches at Brooklyn College, Columbia University and Pratt Institute.
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Laura Munson '88 is the author of The New York Times and international bestselling memoir, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam 2010), which Book of the Month Club named one of the best books of 2010. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, ("Those Aren't Fighting Words, Dear"), The New York Times Magazine Lives column, O. Magazine, Woman's Day, Whole Living, Ladies Home Journal, iVillage, The Week, The Huffington Post, The Sun, Big Sky Journal and others. She lives in northwest Montana with her husband and children.
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Ernesto Cardenal - Twice Nobel Prize nominated author of more than thirty-five books, the Nicaraguan writer, priest, and activist, Ernesto Cardenal has always considered poetry as a powerful agent for constructive social change. His poetry gives voice to the voiceless, speaking out against oppression. His English translation poetry volumes include Marilyn Monroe and Other Poems (1965), The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation (1967), To Live is to Love (1970), In Cuba (1974), Apocalypse and Other Poems (1977), Nicaraguan New Time (1988), Cosmic Canticle (1993), and The Doubtful Strait (1995). Choice Magazine calls Cardenal "one of the world's major poets."