Past Readings
Sunday, October 7th, 2018 - 4 PM --- Sam Anderson
Sunday, June 24th, 2018 - 4PM --- Benjamin Taylor
Sunday, May 20th, 2018 - 4PM --- Joshua Ferris & Eliza Kennedy
Sunday, November 19th, 2017 - 4PM --- Author and Singer-Songwriter Dar Williams
Sunday, October 29th, 2017 - 4PM --- Author and Journalist Ted Conover
Sunday, October 1st, 2017- 4PM --- Novelist Jenny Offill
Sunday, May 21st, 2017- 4PM --- Novelists and Short Story Writers Jim and Karen Shepard
Sunday, October 16th 2016 - 4PM --- poets Terrance Hayes and Edward Hirsch
Sunday, September 25th 2016 - 4PM --- authors D. Nurkse, Tea Obrecht & Alex Cuadros
Sunday, June 12th 2016 - 4PM --- poets Patricia Smith & Natalie Diaz and novelist Bethany Ball
Saturday, November 14th, 2015 - 4PM --- Rick Moody
Saturday, October 17th, 2015 - 4PM --- Melissa McGill | Constellation
Sunday, October 4th, 2015 - 4PM --- Susan Choi
Sunday, May 3, 2015 - 4PM --- Victoria Redel & Sarah Yaw
Sunday, October 12, 2014 - 4PM --- Jeffrey McDaniel
Saturday, June 7, 2014 - 4PM --- Galadrielle Allman
Sunday, April 6, 2014 - 4PM --- Max Watman
Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - 7PM --- T.C. Boyle
Sunday, September 8, 2013 - 4PM --- Lily Tuck and Joan Silber
Sunday, May 5, 2013 - 4PM --- E.L. Doctorow
Sunday, April 7, 2013 - 4PM --- Amber Dermont and James Hoch
Sunday, June 24th, 2018 - 4PM --- Benjamin Taylor
Sunday, May 20th, 2018 - 4PM --- Joshua Ferris & Eliza Kennedy
Sunday, November 19th, 2017 - 4PM --- Author and Singer-Songwriter Dar Williams
Sunday, October 29th, 2017 - 4PM --- Author and Journalist Ted Conover
Sunday, October 1st, 2017- 4PM --- Novelist Jenny Offill
Sunday, May 21st, 2017- 4PM --- Novelists and Short Story Writers Jim and Karen Shepard
Sunday, October 16th 2016 - 4PM --- poets Terrance Hayes and Edward Hirsch
Sunday, September 25th 2016 - 4PM --- authors D. Nurkse, Tea Obrecht & Alex Cuadros
Sunday, June 12th 2016 - 4PM --- poets Patricia Smith & Natalie Diaz and novelist Bethany Ball
Saturday, November 14th, 2015 - 4PM --- Rick Moody
Saturday, October 17th, 2015 - 4PM --- Melissa McGill | Constellation
Sunday, October 4th, 2015 - 4PM --- Susan Choi
Sunday, May 3, 2015 - 4PM --- Victoria Redel & Sarah Yaw
Sunday, October 12, 2014 - 4PM --- Jeffrey McDaniel
Saturday, June 7, 2014 - 4PM --- Galadrielle Allman
Sunday, April 6, 2014 - 4PM --- Max Watman
Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - 7PM --- T.C. Boyle
Sunday, September 8, 2013 - 4PM --- Lily Tuck and Joan Silber
Sunday, May 5, 2013 - 4PM --- E.L. Doctorow
Sunday, April 7, 2013 - 4PM --- Amber Dermont and James Hoch
Authors
Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Endarkenment (University of Pittsburgh Press). His fifth book, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy, is coming out in 2013 from Pitt Press. Individual poems have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1994 and 2010, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. He is a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence and a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Joan As Police Woman - Born in Maine, adopted at infancy and raised with her adopted brother in Connecticut before joining New York’s art/music fraternity, Joan Wasser started distorting the pure tones of her classically trained violin through massive speakers, amid the roaring sound of her formative band years in The Dambuilders, Black Beetle and Those Bastard Souls. “Anger only arises from other feelings that you’re not dealing with,” Joan said in 2006. “I’m trying to get deeper.”
She’d already got broader by playing in Antony’s Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright’s band, and being band-leader for musical director Hal Willner’s projects, from his Sea Shanties album to the Neil Young tribute (which was performed again at February’s Vancouver Olympics concert). But Joan’s own music has taken center stage, with its glowing, sultry pulse, but always with a palpable tension and turbulence beneath the apparent serenity. Real Life was a soulful, torchy universe that aligned her with the likes of Annette Peacock, PJ Harvey, Dusty (In Memphis era) Springfield, and Laura Nyro, but also the soulful glow of Al Green. The rapturously acclaimed debut made The Word Magazine’s Best Albums of the Naughties among other accolades), was followed up by 2008’s To Survive, which began the process of digging deep to the place where The Deep Field , her latest album, starts.
‘I Was Everyone’ closes that album on an ecstatic high, which makes sense given the inspiration was Joan of Arc, who Joan was named after. It’s sung from Joan Of Arc’s perspective, of the self-doubt and self-worth she experienced when receiving visions. As the music reaches boiling point, the lyrics nail the same core as ‘Human Condition; “What if I woke up tomorrow not afraid? / I could decide to trust the voices and take courage…For a moment I could feel it / I could feel it / For a moment I was everyone who had never been quiet / How would I spend my whole life?”
“This idea is very important to me,” Joan concludes. “What if Rosa Parks hadn’t spoken up? What if people didn’t say what they thought? I have to trust myself. It’s a song about honouring oneself.”
Corinna Vallianatos's story collection, My Escapee, won the 2011 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Jhumpa Lahiri, and is forthcoming in October from the University of Massachusetts Press. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, A Public Space, Epoch, the Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Burlington, VT.
Kevin Moffett is the author of two books, Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the Believer, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. He has received the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. The Silent History, a collaborative multi-part narrative he's written with Matt Derby and Eli Horowitz, will be released as an app for mobile devices in fall 2012.
Andrew Blackwell is a journalist and filmmaker living in New York City. He is a 2011 fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. VISIT SUNNY CHERNOBYL is his first book.
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1998); and What the Living Do (1997), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic(1994). Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University.
Monica Youn is the author of Barter (Graywolf, 2003), and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York, where she is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, focusing on election law issues. Her political commentary has appeared in Slate, Roll Call, and The Huffington Post. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. For her work on Ignatz, she has been awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlcle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, was published byTin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, will be published by McSweeney's in 2010. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.
Sam Anderson is Critic at Large at the New York Times Magazine. He was formerly the Book Critic at New York Magazine, where he won the National Book Critics Circle's Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His work has also appeared in Slate, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Oxford American and “The Best Technology Writing 2010.” He lives in Beacon and posts the best sentence he reads every day at twitter.com/shamblanderson.
Gwendolyn (Wendy) Bounds is a writer for The Wall Street Journal and anchor of the noon news & lifestyle show “WSJ Lunch Break” on WSJ.com. She can often be found wielding a chainsaw, weed-whacker or maul while reporting her first-person column called“About the House.” Bounds is an on-air contributor to ABC News and a speaker and moderator of panels on environmental issues, entrepreneurship and the arts. Her second non-fiction book, "Little Chapel on the River," was published in 2005 and chronicles her experiences at an old Irish pub in New York's historic Hudson River Valley after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She is a native of North Carolina and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2010, Bounds was awarded the Next Generation Leadership Award from the N.C. Halls of Fame, which recognizes individuals representing leadership in their fields. Bounds currently lives in the Hudson River Valley and is a member and officer of the board of trustees for the Putnam County Historical Society & Foundry School Museum.
Frank Ortega has had work published by The Madison Review, Colorado Review, Ferro-Botanica, Seneca Review, Z Miscellaneous, Downtown, Amicus Journal, Paragraph, and most recently in the latest issue of Oberon as well as by Lost Horse Press in I Go to the Ruined Place, an anthology of human rights poetry. He has been awarded writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Edward F. Albee Foundation, Karolyi Foundation (France), Dorland Mountain Colony and Millay Colony for the Arts, and a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has read in New York City at the Poetry Society of America, Knitting Factory, New York Public Library, Brecht Forum, CB’s 313, and Barrow Street Poets. His most recent performance readings were Fifty States at Cornelia Street Café (NYC) and Louisiana Voices at Time & Space Limited (Hudson, NY) and he was recently awarded a performance grant from Poets & Writers, Inc. In March of 2010 he was invited to London as a Commendation Winner in the annual contest sponsored by The Poetry Society of the United Kingdom and in August was awarded a writing residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. In September he was invited to read at the University of Missoula in Montana. His poem, "Searching for an Affordable Crossbow", has just been published by the British literary journal BRAND, and another, "Laundry", was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize and appears in their latest issue.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collection Venus Drive and three novels: The Ask, a New York Times Notable book for 2010, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Open City, The Paris Review,The Quarterly, Tin House, Noon, and many other places. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” and “Veronica,” as well as the story collections “Bad Behavior,” “Because They Wanted To” and “Don't Cry.” Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She has taught at U-C Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown and Syracuse University. Her novel “Veronica” was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005; it was also nominated for the National Critic’s Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. She is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
David Hollander is the author of the novel L.I.E., a finalist for the New York Public Library’s “Young Lions” Award. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Post Road, The New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Brooklyn Rail, Swink, Unsaid, The Black Warrior Review, and many other venues less impressive-sounding but equally well-intentioned. His work has been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, most recently in Best American Fantasy 2 and the forthcoming The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. Hollander teaches in the graduate fiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, where he is revered as a God.
Max Watman is the author of Race Day, which was an editors’ choice in the New York Times Book Review. He was the horse racing correspondent for the New York Sun and has written for various publications on books, music, food, and drink. In 2008, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Max a literary fellowship. His latest book Chasing the White Dog about moonshine was praised by many, including Publishers Weekly and NASCAR legend Junior Johnson. He lives in the Cold Spring.
Erika Wood is the author of the novel The Colorman (Tatra Press) released in 2009. She lives in Cold Spring where she is also an artist, a website designer and the first lady.
Jeffrey Yang is a poet, translator, and an editor at New Directions Publishing. He is the author of the poetry books An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Poetry Award) and the forthcoming Vanishing-Line, both with Graywolf Press. He has translated Su Shi's East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse) and a collection of classical Chinese poems called Rhythm 226 (Tioronda Books). An anthology of nature poems from New Directions he edited--Birds, Beasts, and Seas--will be published in Spring 2011; and the new issue of the world literature anthology Two Lines: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is edited by Natasha Wimmer (fiction) and Yang (poetry).
Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth, and a forthcoming novel. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Scott Spencer is the author of nine novels, including Endless Love (National Book Award Finalist 1980), Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper (National Book Award Finalist 2003), and Willing. His nonfiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, O, Harper's, and The New York Times. He has a new book coming out in September.
Thomas Lux is the author of ten books of poetry including The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of 4 books of poetry, most recently The Endarkenment from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His previous three books are The Splinter Factory (2002); The Forgiveness Parade (1998); and Alibi School (1995). Individual poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other literary magazines and anthologies.
Amber Tamblyn is an Emmy and Golden Globe Award–nominated actor and poet. She came to fame on the soap opera General Hospital followed by starring roles on the television series Joan of Arcadia and The Unusuals and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Her publications include the collections Free Stallion (2005) and Bang Ditto (2009) and she is the winner of a Borders Choice Award for Breakout Writing.
Aimee Bender is the author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, and Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She's received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005.
This program is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program. In Putnam County, the Decentralization Program is administered by the Putnam Arts Council.
Joan As Police Woman - Born in Maine, adopted at infancy and raised with her adopted brother in Connecticut before joining New York’s art/music fraternity, Joan Wasser started distorting the pure tones of her classically trained violin through massive speakers, amid the roaring sound of her formative band years in The Dambuilders, Black Beetle and Those Bastard Souls. “Anger only arises from other feelings that you’re not dealing with,” Joan said in 2006. “I’m trying to get deeper.”
She’d already got broader by playing in Antony’s Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright’s band, and being band-leader for musical director Hal Willner’s projects, from his Sea Shanties album to the Neil Young tribute (which was performed again at February’s Vancouver Olympics concert). But Joan’s own music has taken center stage, with its glowing, sultry pulse, but always with a palpable tension and turbulence beneath the apparent serenity. Real Life was a soulful, torchy universe that aligned her with the likes of Annette Peacock, PJ Harvey, Dusty (In Memphis era) Springfield, and Laura Nyro, but also the soulful glow of Al Green. The rapturously acclaimed debut made The Word Magazine’s Best Albums of the Naughties among other accolades), was followed up by 2008’s To Survive, which began the process of digging deep to the place where The Deep Field , her latest album, starts.
‘I Was Everyone’ closes that album on an ecstatic high, which makes sense given the inspiration was Joan of Arc, who Joan was named after. It’s sung from Joan Of Arc’s perspective, of the self-doubt and self-worth she experienced when receiving visions. As the music reaches boiling point, the lyrics nail the same core as ‘Human Condition; “What if I woke up tomorrow not afraid? / I could decide to trust the voices and take courage…For a moment I could feel it / I could feel it / For a moment I was everyone who had never been quiet / How would I spend my whole life?”
“This idea is very important to me,” Joan concludes. “What if Rosa Parks hadn’t spoken up? What if people didn’t say what they thought? I have to trust myself. It’s a song about honouring oneself.”
Corinna Vallianatos's story collection, My Escapee, won the 2011 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Jhumpa Lahiri, and is forthcoming in October from the University of Massachusetts Press. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, A Public Space, Epoch, the Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Burlington, VT.
Kevin Moffett is the author of two books, Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the Believer, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. He has received the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. The Silent History, a collaborative multi-part narrative he's written with Matt Derby and Eli Horowitz, will be released as an app for mobile devices in fall 2012.
Andrew Blackwell is a journalist and filmmaker living in New York City. He is a 2011 fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. VISIT SUNNY CHERNOBYL is his first book.
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1998); and What the Living Do (1997), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic(1994). Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University.
Monica Youn is the author of Barter (Graywolf, 2003), and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York, where she is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, focusing on election law issues. Her political commentary has appeared in Slate, Roll Call, and The Huffington Post. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. For her work on Ignatz, she has been awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlcle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, was published byTin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, will be published by McSweeney's in 2010. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.
Sam Anderson is Critic at Large at the New York Times Magazine. He was formerly the Book Critic at New York Magazine, where he won the National Book Critics Circle's Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His work has also appeared in Slate, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Oxford American and “The Best Technology Writing 2010.” He lives in Beacon and posts the best sentence he reads every day at twitter.com/shamblanderson.
Gwendolyn (Wendy) Bounds is a writer for The Wall Street Journal and anchor of the noon news & lifestyle show “WSJ Lunch Break” on WSJ.com. She can often be found wielding a chainsaw, weed-whacker or maul while reporting her first-person column called“About the House.” Bounds is an on-air contributor to ABC News and a speaker and moderator of panels on environmental issues, entrepreneurship and the arts. Her second non-fiction book, "Little Chapel on the River," was published in 2005 and chronicles her experiences at an old Irish pub in New York's historic Hudson River Valley after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She is a native of North Carolina and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2010, Bounds was awarded the Next Generation Leadership Award from the N.C. Halls of Fame, which recognizes individuals representing leadership in their fields. Bounds currently lives in the Hudson River Valley and is a member and officer of the board of trustees for the Putnam County Historical Society & Foundry School Museum.
Frank Ortega has had work published by The Madison Review, Colorado Review, Ferro-Botanica, Seneca Review, Z Miscellaneous, Downtown, Amicus Journal, Paragraph, and most recently in the latest issue of Oberon as well as by Lost Horse Press in I Go to the Ruined Place, an anthology of human rights poetry. He has been awarded writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Edward F. Albee Foundation, Karolyi Foundation (France), Dorland Mountain Colony and Millay Colony for the Arts, and a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has read in New York City at the Poetry Society of America, Knitting Factory, New York Public Library, Brecht Forum, CB’s 313, and Barrow Street Poets. His most recent performance readings were Fifty States at Cornelia Street Café (NYC) and Louisiana Voices at Time & Space Limited (Hudson, NY) and he was recently awarded a performance grant from Poets & Writers, Inc. In March of 2010 he was invited to London as a Commendation Winner in the annual contest sponsored by The Poetry Society of the United Kingdom and in August was awarded a writing residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. In September he was invited to read at the University of Missoula in Montana. His poem, "Searching for an Affordable Crossbow", has just been published by the British literary journal BRAND, and another, "Laundry", was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize and appears in their latest issue.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collection Venus Drive and three novels: The Ask, a New York Times Notable book for 2010, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Open City, The Paris Review,The Quarterly, Tin House, Noon, and many other places. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” and “Veronica,” as well as the story collections “Bad Behavior,” “Because They Wanted To” and “Don't Cry.” Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She has taught at U-C Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown and Syracuse University. Her novel “Veronica” was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005; it was also nominated for the National Critic’s Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. She is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
David Hollander is the author of the novel L.I.E., a finalist for the New York Public Library’s “Young Lions” Award. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Post Road, The New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Brooklyn Rail, Swink, Unsaid, The Black Warrior Review, and many other venues less impressive-sounding but equally well-intentioned. His work has been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, most recently in Best American Fantasy 2 and the forthcoming The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. Hollander teaches in the graduate fiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, where he is revered as a God.
Max Watman is the author of Race Day, which was an editors’ choice in the New York Times Book Review. He was the horse racing correspondent for the New York Sun and has written for various publications on books, music, food, and drink. In 2008, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Max a literary fellowship. His latest book Chasing the White Dog about moonshine was praised by many, including Publishers Weekly and NASCAR legend Junior Johnson. He lives in the Cold Spring.
Erika Wood is the author of the novel The Colorman (Tatra Press) released in 2009. She lives in Cold Spring where she is also an artist, a website designer and the first lady.
Jeffrey Yang is a poet, translator, and an editor at New Directions Publishing. He is the author of the poetry books An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Poetry Award) and the forthcoming Vanishing-Line, both with Graywolf Press. He has translated Su Shi's East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse) and a collection of classical Chinese poems called Rhythm 226 (Tioronda Books). An anthology of nature poems from New Directions he edited--Birds, Beasts, and Seas--will be published in Spring 2011; and the new issue of the world literature anthology Two Lines: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is edited by Natasha Wimmer (fiction) and Yang (poetry).
Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth, and a forthcoming novel. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Scott Spencer is the author of nine novels, including Endless Love (National Book Award Finalist 1980), Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper (National Book Award Finalist 2003), and Willing. His nonfiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, O, Harper's, and The New York Times. He has a new book coming out in September.
Thomas Lux is the author of ten books of poetry including The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of 4 books of poetry, most recently The Endarkenment from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His previous three books are The Splinter Factory (2002); The Forgiveness Parade (1998); and Alibi School (1995). Individual poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other literary magazines and anthologies.
Amber Tamblyn is an Emmy and Golden Globe Award–nominated actor and poet. She came to fame on the soap opera General Hospital followed by starring roles on the television series Joan of Arcadia and The Unusuals and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Her publications include the collections Free Stallion (2005) and Bang Ditto (2009) and she is the winner of a Borders Choice Award for Breakout Writing.
Aimee Bender is the author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, and Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She's received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005.
This program is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program. In Putnam County, the Decentralization Program is administered by the Putnam Arts Council.
