Beck Lecture Series Fall 2009

Fall 2009 Beck Visiting Writers Bios:

Jill Bialosky is a native of Cleveland and works as Senior Editor at W. W. Norton in New York City. She is author of three books of poetry, recently Intruder (Knopf, 2008), and two novels, including The Life Room (Harcourt, 2007). She is also co-editor of Wanting a Child (FSG, 1999). Nancy Zafris is author of several novels and collections of short fiction, recently Lucky Strike (Unbridled Books, 2005). She served for ten years as fiction editor of The Kenyon Review and now directs the Flannery O'Connor Fiction Prize for the University of Georgia Press. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

David Baker is Professor of English at Denison University and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing. The latest of his 9 books of poetry is Never-Ending Birds (W.W. Norton, 2009). His three critical books are Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (with Ann Townsend, 2007), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (2000) and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996). Dr. Baker's poems and essays have appeared widely in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review. For his work he has received fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Society of Midland Authors. Dr. Baker also is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. Born in Zuerich, Switzerland and raised in Kingston, Canada, he completed his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader and has published academic essays in Transition,Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Asian American Studies, and other places. His writings have also appeared in The Nation, The London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay "Disco Inferno", originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection Best Music Writing 2006. From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of the Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Salon.com and on National Public Radio. He lives in Brooklyn.

Kazim Ali teaches creative writing and literature at Oberlin College. The most recent of his two books of poems is The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008) and the latest of his two novels is The Disappearance of Seth (Etruscan Books, 2009).

Don Waters has received numerous fellowships and honors for his writing, including the Pushcart Prize, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in fiction. His stories have appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, the Santa Monica Review, the Southwest Review, and other literary magazines. Other writing is forthcoming in Tin House, The Believer, and Best of the West 2009. He was born and raised in Reno, Nevada and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his girlfriend, author Robin Romm.