Interview: Laura Furman

Writer and editor Laura Furman was born in New York and educated at Hunter College High School and Bennington College. For many years, she taught in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing. While at UT Austin, she founded the literary journal American Short Fiction. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976, and since then fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Mademoiselle, Preservation, Mirabella, and House & Garden, among others. Her books include four collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir, and she is the ninth series editor of The PEN/​O. Henry Prize Stories, published annually by Anchor Books. Each year, she picks the twenty winning stories and writes an introduction for the volume. Her new book is The Mother Who Stayed: Stories.

Furman read from her work on April 21, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (24MB MP3)

Interview: Joseph Klein

Composer Joseph Klein holds a Doctor of Music degree in Composition from Indiana University. He is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of North Texas College of Music, where he has served as Chair of Composition Studies since 1999.

Klein’s catalogue ranges from solo pieces to works for large ensemble, including instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music, often incorporating intermedia or theatrical elements, and reflecting his interest in systems and musical processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry and chaos theory. His compositions have been performed and broadcast throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and have been featured at national and international music venues. He has been a featured guest composer at many institutions worldwide, has won numerous awards, and has released many recordings on the Innova, Centaur, Crystal, and Mark labels.

Klein visited Cornell having written short musical settings for poems written by Cornell's second-year MFA poets, who performed the pieces with the composer on Friday, April 15, 2011 in McGraw Hall. This interview took place the previous day, and includes recordings of the four pieces.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (25MB MP3)