Beck Lecture Series Spring 2012

Michael Griffith’s new novel, Trophy (Triquarterly), was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best 25 Books of Fiction for 2011. His previous books are Bibliophilia (2003) and Spikes (2001), both from Arcade. Griffith’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Salmagundi, Oxford American, New England Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Five Points, Blackbird, The Washington Post, and other periodicals. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2004) and the Louisiana Division of the Arts (2001). He is the founding editor of Yellow Shoe Fiction, an original fiction series from LSU Press, and serves as the Fiction Editor at Cincinnati Review. An Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, he also teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters.

Nick Lantz’s first book, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, was selected by Linda Gregerson for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize and was published in 2010 by Graywolf Press. It also won the 2011 GLCA New Writers Award, the Council for Wisconsin Writers Posner Award, and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. His second book, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Felix Pollak Prize and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press, also in 2010. Nick Lantz is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  His work has appeared in journals such as Mid-American Review, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, FIELD, Indiana Review, and Prairie Schooner. He was the 2010-2011 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin, Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, and the Queens University Low-Residency MFA. He currently teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.

C. K. Williams has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, The Singing, which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998, and his essays on the poetry of Walt Whitman, On Whitman, appeared in 2010. His most recent collection of poetry, Wait, was published in 2010. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

Steven Millhauser is one of America's most distinguished writers. The author of Edwin Mullhouse, The Barnum Museum, and Little Kingdoms, among many other books, Millhauser won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. He is a recipient of the Lannan Award and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection is We Others: New and Selected Stories, released in August by Knopf. Steven Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and teaches at Skidmore College.

Modhumita Roy is associate professor of English and director of the Women’s Studies program at Tufts University. Her recent publications include Some Like It Hot: Class, Gender and Empire in the Making of Mulligatawny Soup, for which she received a Sophie Coe Memorial prize. She is currently working on the issue of outsourcing reproductive labor (“womb renting”) to India. She is the editor, with Fred Pfeil, of The Pledge of Intellect: Selected Writings of Michael Sprinker (Verso Press, 2003).

Jerry Ward is a poet, scholar, and author, and is professor of English and African American World Studies at Dillard University in New Orleans. Ward spent twenty years as the Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the co-editor of The Richard Wright Encyclopedia, the editor of the anthology Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry, and, most recently, The Katrina Papers.

Richard Burgin is a fiction writer, editor, composer, critic and teacher. Burgin is the author of fifteen books, including the novels Rivers Last Longer and Ghost Quartet, and the short story collections The Spirit Returns, Fear of Blue Skies, Private Fame, and Man Without Memory. The latter three books were each listed as a Notable Book of the Year by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Johns Hopkins University Press published Burgin's recent story collections, Shadow Traffic and The Conference on Beautiful Moments. His most recent book, The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Songs, was listed in The Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2006, and in The Huffington Post as one of the forty best books of fiction of the last decade. Burgin was the founding editor of Boston Review, and New York Arts Journal, and is the founder and editor of the internationally distributed literary journal Boulevard, now in its 27th year of continuous publication. He is currently a professor of Communication and English at Saint Louis University.