Beck Visiting Writers - Fall 2007
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in1970 and has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review,The Journal,The Kenyon Review,Mid-American Review,The New Yorker,Pleiades and Xantippe. His book of poems, Green Squall, was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at University of South Florida.
Poet, professor, and performer, Karen Alkalay-Gut has published over 20 books of poetry and has read her poetry in places as diverse as Oxford University, the Nuyorican Café in New York, the UN, the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, the Arab and Druze towns of Tarshiha and Mghrar, synagogues, churches, and Jerusalem night clubs and poetry centers. She has been teaching English literature at Tel Aviv University for over thirty years, and still hasn’t had enough.
Jack Wilkins is one of the world’s premier jazz guitarists and music educators. He currently teaches at The New School, NYU, and Manhattan School of Music. He has played and recorded with Mel Torme, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Manhattan Transfer, the Brecker Brothers, and many more, and he has won an NEA grant in recognition of his work and contribution to the guitar. His latest CDs include “Reunion” and “The Benedetto Players in Concert.” Wilkins will teach a three-day course on “The American Songbook” at Denison and will serve as the headline guitarist for Tom Carroll’s Jazz Guitar Festival from October 6-7.
Margot Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her short stories and essay have appeared or are forthcoming in such magazines as Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, The North American Review, The Sun, and many others. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Thomas H. Carter Award for the Essay.
Margot Singer is a graduate of the University of Utah (Ph.D. 2005), OxfordUniversity (M.Phil.1986) and Harvard University (B.A. 1984). From 1986 until 1997 she worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she was a Principal in the New York Office. An Assistant Professor of English at DenisonUniversity, she lives with her husband and two children in Granville, Ohio.
Kevin McIlvoy teaches at New Mexico State University where he has been editor in chief of Puerto del Sol magazine for twenty-seven years. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College and serves on the Board of Directors of the Associated Program of Writers and Writing Conferences. He has published four novels, Hyssop and Little Peg. His short story collection, The Complete Story of New Mexico, includes stories published in Harper's, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares magazines. He is at work on a new novel, Singin’in the Juvies, and a story collection, 57 OctavesBelowMiddle C.
Meghan O’Rourke was born in Brooklyn in 1976. She is the literary editor of Slate and a poetry editor at The Paris Review, and her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and other venues. She is the recipient of the 2005 Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Award from Poetry Magazine. Her first book of poems, Halflife, was recently published by W. W. Norton.
Ted Genoways, editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, is author of Bullroarer, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. His other awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2003 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two Guy Owen Poetry Prizes from Southern Poetry Review. He is the editor of numerous books, including The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández and The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence,Volume VII.