Writers At Cornell

Interview: Robert Hass

2011-10-20T14:08:00.003-05:00

Robert Hass is the author of many books of poetry, including The Apple Trees at Olema; Time and Materials, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood; Human Wishes; Praise; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River, and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, whom you may find in our podcast archive, and he teaches at UC Berkeley.

Hass read from his work on October 20, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (29MB MP3)

Interview: Daniel Alarcón

2011-09-29T10:21:00.004-05:00

Daniel Alarcón is author of the story collection War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru, and a Contributing Editor to Granta. Alarcón was awarded the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin, and was recently named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under 40. His fiction, journalism and translations have appeared in A Public Space, El País, McSweeney’s, n+1, and Harper’s. Alarcón lives in Oakland, California, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.

Alarcón read from his work on September 29, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day. The audio was plagued by technical problems, so I've transcribed this interview to be read as text.

J. ROBERT LENNON: You're starting a new radio show, Radio Ambulante—can you tell me about it?

DANIEL ALARĆON: Like you, I'm sort of a junkie for microphones and recording stuff—in 2007 I was asked to do a long radio documentary for the BBC about Andean migration to Lima. It was a great project, but I was disappointed that some of the best voices didn't make it to the final edit. They were in Spanish, and you can't have an entire hour of radio in English with voiceovers; it doesn't sell. So for a bunch of years I had the idea I'd like to do a project like this in Spanish, and my wife and I finally decided to give it a shot. The idea is to have something like This American Life, but transnational, and in Spanish. We want to collect stories from all over the US and Canada, and also Mexico and South America and beyond. Our idea is that the Americas are a very large and diverse cultural region united by Spanish. At a time when a lot of people are trying to harden the concept of borders, we believe the opposite. We're very excited, and getting a lot of amazing stories—more than 50 pitches from a dozen counties.

JRL: This leads me to some questions about your ficiton—you've said in interviews that the city in Lost City Radio is inspired by Lima, but you chose not to identify it in the novel. As a result it feels as if you're trying to universalize some of the problems of the developing world. Is this so? What other reasons did you have for making it anonymous? Your novel-in-progress is also set there, isn't it?

DA: Yeah, it's a place I go back to again and again. It wasn't so much to universalize, but to make it specific to my imagination, as opposed to the reality of Lima. I took liberties with the geography and culture—I didn't want to be beholden to what actually happened to the actual city. An unintended benefit is that it does make it more universal. One of the greatest and most exciting things about all this was going to different countries and seeing how they interpreted it—in Germany the book became about World War II and the legacy of the Nazis; in Chile the book is about Pinochet; in Spain it's about the Franco era. And in Peru, of course, it's about us.

JRL: Do readers in Peru think of you as a Peruvian writer? In America we think of you as an international writer—are you a local writer at home?

DA: I think! I go to Peru a lot, I spend a lot of time in Lima; I try to stay involved in discussions there—which is easier now than it used to be. But I also consider myself an American writer. I don't think there's any kind of contradiction between the two.

JRL: Do you see yourself the way Nabokov might have seen himself? As a transplant who can see perhaps more about his adopted country than people who have never been elsewhere?

DA: Any comparison to Nabokov I will retreat from! Of course not, John, how could you possibly say something like that. [laughs] I do think there are benefits to being an outsider everywhere, if I can get at the part of your question I can accept.

JRL: Well, I think of you as being a cultural chameleon, the way Nabokov was, or Haruki Murakami—

DA: You have any more big names I can try to live up to?

JRL: [laughs]—these are writers, I mean, whose international appeal depends upon their ability to straddle boundaries, to say something relevant to many at once.

DA: That's certainly an important thing to ask of international writers. But the fact of being incredibly specific—like, say, Faulkner—doesn't mean that Faulkner isn't an international writer. There are just different ways of being international.

JRL: I read in the acknowledgements of Lost City Radio, and in interviews, that you gathered a lot of stories from people for the book—when you research a novel, do you go out looking for ideas for stories, or do you know what you want to write about and search for the material that will enable you to do it? What's the relationship between the research and the fiction?

DA: That's a good question. I've done a lot of research by accident. I hear a lot of stories, and I just follow the things I'm interested in. When I went to go live in San Juan de Lurigancho, a district on the outskirts of Lima, I wasn't necessarily expecting that I would write a novel about that place, or that it was going to be a setting for fiction for years to come—I was just fascinated by this developing culture, and how Andean communities were integrating into the quote-unquote “city.” The tension between rural and urban playing out in a metropolitan area—I thought it was interesting. It ended up being a theme in my first two books. Nowadays I've been doing a lot of journalism about the prison system in Peru, so there's a lot of that in the new book. But when I started going to the prisons five or six years ago, for three years I didn't write a word about it. I was daunted by the idea. It's only in the last year or so that I have managed to write about what I've been seeing.

JRL: Can you talk a little bit about the novel you're working on?

DA: Very little, actually! Considering that I've been working on it for five years, it's remarkable how little I have to say about it. Excerpts have been published, there's some stuff that's out there—but it's been changing so much. I finished a draft of the book in December and read it, and I was pretty unsatisfied. I spent a bunch of time, five months or so, thinking about it, and then decided I was seeing the characters from the wrong point of view, that I'd chosen to narrate the least interesting part of their story. I know the characters very well, but sometimes you make an early misstep, and you find yourself writing about the wrong material. I have this real commitment to not leave money on the table: if the material's there, and it's speaking to you, you gotta go where the heat is. So I've done a complete reformulation of the book in the last few months.

JRL: Was the process that led to the published version of Lost City Radio similarly intricate?

DA: No, Lost City Radio was much, much different—the published version is almost the version I first wrote. I have no idea how it happened.

JRL: It'll probably never happen again!

DA: I tell this to my students—it's not like riding a bike. The fact that you've written one book doesn't mean you can write another—instead, it's like having to engineer a new bike out of materials you find in this new universe that has different laws of physics. And then creating this bicycle, and then pedaling as hard as you can and trying not to fall over. There's very little that you can take from one project to the next, and then say, lesson learned, now I know how to do it. Maybe it's different if you've written twenty novels, but having written one that's done, and five that are abandoned along the way, I'm pretty certain that this is going to be my process until I'm too old to type.

JRL: If you do learn a lot from a novel that you can carry to the next one, maybe it isn't the novel you ought to be writing. Or, as I always tell my students, if you know what you're doing, you should do something else.

DA: I agree—the only novels worth writing are the ones that seem impossible when you start. Maybe there's a time and place to set yourself achievable goals, but it's a great feeling to look at the mountain, to see the size of it, and say to yourself, there's no way I'm going to get to the top of that.

JRL: Do you find short stories more straightforward to write?

DA: Not at all. The process is much the same—a mixture of intuition and momentum. The times I've set myself an achievable goal, I've failed miserably. Other times, when I've stepped aside from the work and let things happen, it's worked. It's rare that I say to myself “I'm going to write a story,” and it happens—it's more like, whatever is going to happen, happens. It's not in my control.

JRL: Could you describe the relationship between story and language in your work? You mostly write in English, right?

DA: I do. I've written some in Spanish, have have sort of a medium-term project to continue to do so as a secondary literary language. For Radio Ambulante, I'm doing a lot in Spanish—scripts and stuff.

JRL: Do different ideas, narrative forms, naturally assume the shape of one or the other language, for you? Do they inform each other?

DA: If so, it isn't particular to the language so much as to my command of the language. My Spanish is fluent, but it's different from my English—my command of English is better. If I have an idea and ten ways to phrase it occur to me in English, in Spanish there will be five, or maybe three. Or maybe I simply can't say it, and have to play with the idea until I can. I do find that to be an interesting lesson—it's nice, you have to be sharp, trying to write with half the words pulled out of the dictionary. Stylistically, my voice in English is very different from my voice in Spanish—which makes you wonder how much of your style is your style, and how much is due to your limitations.

JRL: I think about this when I'm reading translations, to what extent it's even possible to evoke the feel of the original.

DA: I have a very good friend, a brilliant friend in fact, who once said to me that he didn't read anything that was translated, because he thought of himself as wanting to be a prose stylist, an aesthete of prose. His prose is exceptional in English, and he felt like reading in translation was a waste of time, for his particular literary goals. But I find that self-defeating—there are so many amazing writers you would be depriving yourself of. It doesn't seem like a great way to learn any kind of aesthetics.

JRL: I suppose you have to treat a translation as a separate kind of literary artifact. I read the recent translations of Proust—a different writer did each one. And they were fairly different—I was very surprised at how they felt like, though they were of a piece, they were filtered so differently. It was disconcerting, but interesting.

DA: What was the famous quote? Borges said that Don Quixote was not faithful to the translation? He thought the English was better. Some things are just better in translation!

JRL: I read that you've been working on a graphic novel project, based on a story of yours. Has this come to fruition, and can you talk about the process of repurposing a narrative of yours for a different form of art?

DA: Yes, it was published last year in Peru, and is available in the United States, in Spanish only. I hope we'll be able to release it in English at some point. The project was an idea I had, and I had an illustrator in mind, Sheila Alvarado. Sheila and I worked together at Etiqueta Negra for a while, she's a good friend of mine, and an incredibly talented artist. And I was intrigued by the possibilities of the visual language, and really excited by the idea of publishing the first graphic novel in Peru—and that's what it was.

JRL: Really?

DA: Really! Peru has a long history of illustrators—the Vargas girls were Peruvian—and there is a great comic book tradition. But there hadn't been a graphic novel, in the sense of an American graphic novel—Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, books that are not for children and are not pornographic. We thought it would take us six months; it took a year and a half. We started working on it in Argentina, and we worked on it in Lima, and then while I was Oakland and she was in Lima, on Skype. I would do a sketch and hold it up to the camera, and she would do the real sketch, because I can't draw. It was a true collaboration.

JRL: So you didn't just give her the text, and she added pictures...

DA: No, no. We composed all of those pages together. We had the idea that every double—every two facing pages—we wanted to be able to put in a frame and hang on the wall. I think that's what we achieved. We actually have an exhibition coming up, of the pages from Ciudad de Payasos—City of Clowns—in Lima, I think next month. It was well received, but I don't think people know what to do with it yet, in Peru—the genre is not yet understood, I don't think.

JRL: Are you going to continue working in that form?

DA: There's a question of time—I would love to work with Sheila again, to do another one of these. But it was a very long process, and she is also incredibly busy. But at some point, I'd love to.

Interview: Ron Hansen

2011-09-22T14:13:00.002-05:00

Ron Hansen is the author of ten works of fiction and a collection of essays. He is particularly known for his meticulous examinations of religious experience, and of the lives of historical figures. Among his best known books are the novels Desperadoes; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Mariette in Ecstasy; Atticus, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner; the short story collection Nebraska; and his latest novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion. Hansen is presently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is also an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church.

Hansen read from his work on September 22, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Laura Furman

2011-04-21T14:54:00.004-05:00

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

2011-04-14T15:13:00.004-05:00

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)

Interview: Peter Balakian

2011-03-04T08:19:00.002-05:00

Peter Balakian was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and studied at Bucknell, NYU and Brown; he has taught English and Creative Writing at Colgate University since 1980. His many books include June-tree: New and Selected Poems and the new collection Ziggurat; he is also the author of Black Dog Of Fate, a memoir about his childhood and Armenian family history. He co-founded and co-edited, with Bruce Smith, the poetry magazine Graham House Review. His prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Balakian read from his work on March 3, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (30MB MP3)

Interview: Nicholson Baker

2011-02-25T08:34:00.002-05:00

Nicholson Baker is a novelist and essayist, the author of the acclaimed novels The Mezzanine, Room Temperature and Vox, among others; his most recent book, The Anthologist, has been praised as “startlingly perceptive and ardent” by the New York Times Book Review. Baker earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and the Los Angeles Times called his pacifist manifesto Human Smoke "one of the most important books you will ever read." For his activist work surrounding issues of text preservation he was honored with the James Madison Freedom of Information Award. He lives in Maine.

Baker read from his work on February 24, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (26MB MP3)

Interview: Stewart O'Nan

2011-02-17T16:14:00.003-05:00

Note: the enclosure link for this post was initially incorrect--it has now been fixed.

Stewart O'Nan is the author of ten novels, including Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying, as well as the recent Songs For The Missing and the forthcoming Emily, Alone, a sequel to his novel Wish You Were Here. He has also written nonfiction, including the bestselling book with Stephen King on the Boston Red Sox, Faithful. Granta named him one of the twenty Best Young American Novelists in 1995, he's a graduate of the Cornell MFA program in fiction writing, and is a visiting writer here this semester.

O'Nan read from his work on February 17, 2011, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)

Interview: John Murillo

2010-11-04T14:39:00.002-05:00

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. He is a visiting lecturer this semester at Cornell.

Murillo read from his work on November 4, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (17MB MP3)

Interview: Michael Silverblatt

2010-10-26T18:14:00.002-05:00

A New York native, Michael Silverblatt graduated from the State University of New York in Buffalo and later took advanced courses at Johns Hopkins. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, and in 1989 created the literary talk show "Bookworm" for KCRW-FM. The show continues to air today.

Norman Mailer has called Michael Silverblatt "the best reader in America." Susan Sontag called him "a national treasure." Joyce Carol Oates once called him the “reader writers dream about,” and his podcasts are so popular that New York’s independent bookstores describe a “Silverblatt ripple effect” on book sales.

As a student, he came under the influence of such cutting-edge author-teachers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth; as a radio talk-show host, he learned to appreciate a much wider range of writing--making him, he hopes, "a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect."

Silverblatt gave a talk on October 26, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (27MB MP3)

Interview: Carl Phillips

2010-10-14T14:33:00.002-05:00

Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Speak Low and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006. His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. He teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Phillips read from his work on October 14, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)

Interview: Lydia Davis

2010-09-30T14:12:00.003-05:00

Lydia Davis is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collections Almost No Memory, Varieties of Disturbance, and Collected Stories, and a novel, The End of the Story; she has also published a number of chapbooks and a large body of French translations, most notably Proust's Swann's Way and, just this year, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. She is a Macarthur Fellow, has won a Whiting Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pen/Hemingway Award. She teaches writing at SUNY Albany, where she is also Writer-In-Residence.

Davis read from her work on September 30, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (21MB MP3)

Interview: Bonnie McEneaney

2010-09-16T13:31:00.003-05:00

Nonfiction writer Bonnie McEneaney holds a BA from Brown University and an MPS from Cornell. She had a long, successful career as a senior executive in the financial services industry and, more recently, has changed her focus to writing. After losing her husband, Eamon, on 9/11, she published A Bend in the Road, which is a compilation of his poetry. Her new book is Messages: Signs, Visits, and Premonitions from Loved Ones Lost on 9/11. McEneaney lives with her four children in New England and is a board member of Voices of September 11th, a group dedicated to serving the needs of 9/11 families, survivors, and rescue and recovery workers.

McEneaney read from her work on September 16, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (xxMB MP3)

Interview: Julia Alvarez

2010-09-09T14:03:00.002-05:00

Poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez was born in New York, then spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father's involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country. Her novels include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and ¡Yo!; she is also author of the poetry collections The Housekeeping Book, The Woman I Kept to Myself, The Other Side, and Homecoming. Her many other books include essays and fiction for young people. Many commentators regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers; Alvarez is the current writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.

Alvarez read from her work on September 9, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (27MB MP3)

Interview: Téa Obreht

2010-07-08T10:06:00.005-05:00

Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her M.F.A. in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, will be published by Random House in 2011. Her fiction debut—-an excerpt of The Tiger’s Wife in The New Yorker-—was selected for the 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her second publication, the short story "The Laugh," was published in the summer 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic, and will be anthologized in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Obreht read from her work on April 22, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place two months later.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (18MB MP3)

Interview: Paul Muldoon

2010-04-08T13:47:00.002-05:00

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.

Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. He has also received the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and many others. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

Muldoon read from his work on April 8, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (28MB MP3)

Interview: Billy Collins

2010-03-11T16:09:00.002-05:00

Billy Collins is the author of ten collections of poetry, including the recent Ballistics and Sailing Alone Around The Room: Selected Poems; He has also edited several anthologies, including two collections of 180 poems for everyday reading, and, most recently, Bright Wings, an anthology of bird poems. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and has taught at Lehman College in New York for more than thirty years. His many awards and honors include the Mark Twain Prize, Poetry magazine's Poet Of The Year, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition, he has appeared on the radio program “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Collins read from his work on March 11, 2010, in Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Philipp Meyer

2010-02-18T16:01:00.002-05:00

Philipp Meyer grew up in working-class Baltimore, where he developed the literary ambitions that would lead him to Cornell University, and a BA in English. Some years, several jobs, and an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers later, Meyer published his first book, the acclaimed novel American Rust. He now divides his time between Texas and upstate New York.

Meyer read from his work on February 18, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (18MB MP3)

Interview: Martha Collins

2010-02-17T16:00:00.005-05:00

Martha Collins is the author of five books and two chapbooks of poetry, and has translated two volumes of poems from the Vietnamese, one in collaboration with Thuy Dinh. Her most recent book is Blue Front, published by Graywolf Press; it is a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. The book won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library. Her most recent publication is a chapbook, Sheer.

Collins has also been the recipient of many other awards and honors; they include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant. A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005; other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.

Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. She read from his work on February 11, 2010, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following week.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (17MB MP3)

Interview: Kenneth McClane

2009-11-12T15:27:00.004-05:00

Kenneth McClane is the author of eight books of poetry, including a volume of collected poems entitled Take Five; he has also written two collections of essays, the second of which, Color, came out earlier this year from University of Notre Dame Press. The recipient of numerous awards for teaching and writing, McClane received his B.A., M.A. and M.F.A. from Cornell, and has taught there since 1976. He earned a Clark Teaching Award in 1983 and become a full professor in 1989. He now lives in Ithaca, NY, and plans to start a non-fiction publishing series, focusing on the works of the disenfranchised.

McClane read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (29MB MP3)

Interview: Robert Morgan

2009-11-12T15:20:00.004-05:00

Poet, novelist, short story writer, and historian Robert Morgan was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He is the author of many books; highlights include the novels Gap Creek, Brave Enemies and This Rock, the poetry collections The Strange Attractor and October Crossing, and the nonfiction book Boone: A Biography. Morgan has taught at Cornell since 1971, and presently lives in Ithaca, NY.

Morgan read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)

Interview: Manuel Muñoz

2009-10-15T13:29:00.003-05:00

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is a recipient of a 2008 Whiting Writers' Award and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award for his story "Tell Him About Brother John."

Muñoz is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review, and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts. A native of Dinuba, California, he graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell. He has joined the faculty of the University of Arizona's creative writing program as an assistant professor, and currently lives in Tucson.

Muñoz read from his work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (21MB MP3)

Interview: Lydia Peelle

2009-10-15T12:54:00.004-05:00

Lydia Peelle is the author of a collection of short stories, Reasons For And Advantages Of Breathing. Peelle was born in Boston; her fiction has appeared in Granta, One Story, Orion, Epoch, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and two Pushcart Prizes, and her stories have twice appeared in Best New American Voices. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a graduate of Cornell University and the MFA program at the University of Virginia, she now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Peelle read from her work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (17MB MP3)

Interview: Sharon Bryan

2009-09-24T14:20:00.004-05:00

Sharon Bryan is a nationally recognized award-winning poet and editor. Her newest collection, Sharp Stars (BOA, 2009), was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009. She is also the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Prize awarded by The Nation, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as other literary prizes. She has published three previous poetry collections, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, both with Wesleyan University Press, and Flying Blind with Sarabande Books. She is the co-editor of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande), and the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton). Additionally, she has held positions as poet-in-residence and visiting professor at more than 20 colleges and universities, and is currently the Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, in Storrs, Connecticut.

Bryan read from her work on September 24, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (16MB MP3)

Interview: Gina Franco

2009-09-24T14:15:00.005-05:00

Gina Franco received a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. in poetry writing, and an M.A. in English from Cornell University. Her collection of poems, The Keepsake Storm, was published by the University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol Latina/o Literary Series in 2004. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. She received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Chasen Poetry Prize, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry. She divides her time between Galesburg, Illinois, where she teaches English and creative writing at Knox College; the Arizona desert where she grew up; and the Texas border, her mother's home.

Franco read from their work on September 24, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (19MB MP3)

Interview: Susan Choi, David Friedman, Charity Ketz

2009-09-10T13:20:00.007-05:00

Susan Choi is the author of the celebrated novel A Person of Interest. Her previous novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She is also the author of The Foreign Student, winner of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and is co-editor with David Remnick of the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she was born in 1969 and lives in Brooklyn.

David Friedman was born and raised in Washington, D.C, and educated at Cornell (B.A., English) and Columbia (M.A., English Literature) Universities. Friedman won the 2004 National Poetry Series open competition, selected by Pulitzer Prizewinner Stephen Dunn; his book of prose poems, The Welcome, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He presently lives and teaches in New York.

Charity Ketz was born in Roanoke, Virginia and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from Penn State University, an M.F.A. from Cornell University, and has held lectureships at both universities. Her first book of poems, The Narcoleptic Yard, was published this year by Black Lawrence press; she has also published a chapbook, Locust in Bloom. A former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ketz is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

The three read from their work on September 10, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)
Note: our apologies, the sound quality of this week's podcast isn't very good. The usual fidelity should be restored next time around.

Interview: Crystal Williams

2009-05-07T07:04:00.003-05:00

Note: due to a scheduling problem, this interview and two others are text-only. Audio podcasts will return in the fall.

Crystal Williams’ third collection of poems, Troubled Tongues, was chosen by Marilyn Nelson for the 2009 Long Madgett Poetry Award and was short-listed for the Idaho Prize. It is forthcoming in January 2009. Her poetry appears in the American Poetry Review, 5AM, Callaloo, Court Green, Luna, Fourth River, The Indiana Review, and in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation, Poetry Nation, Sweet Jesus, and Beyond the Frontier, among others. Raised in Detroit, Michigan and Madrid, Spain, she is currently working on two plays and a collection of essays. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell. Williams is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and lives with her adopted standard poodle Oliver. They spend as much time as they can in Chicago, Illinois, roaming the lake front and keeping tabs on the stars. Williams read at Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2009, and answered J. Robert Lennon's questions via email the previous week.

Though your second book came close on the heels of the first, I see a real transformation between the two--"Lunatic" seems less tentative, more free with the rhythms of natural speech, more comfortable with long lines and snatches of dialogue. It seems as though the poet is allowing herself to be more obscured, to serve as a conduit for the sounds of the world. Do you see it this way?

The short answer is: Yes. I do see it that way. I think what you’re describing is growth and hope that in each of my books growth—artistic, intellectual, spiritual--is evident.

It is true that in my second book, Lunatic, my interest in and fascination with various modes of storytelling began to crystallize in such a way that I was more conscious of and deliberate with the types of languages I employed. And it is also true that prior to the publication of that second collection, I’d been labeled a “code-switcher,” which, from the labeler was meant to be pejorative. And yet, I do code-switch. I do it purposefully and all day and every day. And so that was of interest, the ways in which African-Americans in particular, or perhaps more broadly, minority communities in this country, move back and forth between what I’ll call a “home language” and an “away language.” Investigating, challenging, and documenting that duality is of deep interest to me. There is so much about American identity to be found in those crossings. So the poems in Lunatic were a beginning of sorts. In Troubled Tongues, that same fascination with modes of telling is more overtly addressed and is, really, the book’s primary goal. Another goal of the third book was to challenge myself to become more artistically agile and to become better able to cross aesthetic boundaries.

It's easy to make a facile comparison of your poems, with their elevated colloquial language, political engagement, and of course all the ampersands, to the work of Amiri Baraka. But I was listening to the radio show "Bookworm" the other day and heard a group of poets talk about their relationship to Walt Whitman, and now I can't help hearing something of his long, wild litanies in your poems, too. What's your relationship to Whitman, and for that matter the many other seminal American poets who could never have conceived of such a thing as a forceful black woman writer?

Well, first, thanks for thinking I’m a forceful writer. That’s great. Secondly, it’s an interesting thing to think about Baraka as a forefather. I don’t really place myself firmly in his continuum, though I admire his artistic trajectory, and the power of the BAM. Of Baraka’s work, I am most enthralled by “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” which I think is a gorgeous, gorgeous poem. To your question to do with seminal poets: Margaret Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez influenced me in my early-reading life. As an adult reader (and a poet) I find deep lessons in Clifton, Gilbert, Gluck, Everwine, any poet, really, who deals masterfully with metaphor. I also value tenderness and compassion in poems. So I often find lessons/poems to do with grace and generosity the most helpful as I think about what I’m driven to say. But that list of seminal American poets is too long to engage, I think.

There is a thing we poets sometimes do: We pontificate, typically over some sort of liquor, about who our forefathers and foremothers are. Sometimes this can get pretty rowdy, especially if it’s a group of my friends and we’re at, oh, I don’t know, a conference or something. Mostly, Whitman and Dickinson seem to be the two folks talk about most commonly. And though I’d love to be really clever or interesting, Whitman is the poet upon whose door I most consistently knock. It’s true. So in those conversations or jonesing sessions (whichever you like to call it), I just say “Whitman’s my guy” and leave it at that.

The title of "Lunatic" puts me in the mind of the oft-cited connection between madness and art. I certainly don't think you've got to be crazy to be a good writer, but it seems to me the poet needs to be able to break conventional patterns of language and thought--to rip them apart, down to their rudiments, and reassemble them in new and surprising ways, which outside the confines of art could be construed as lunacy. Do you feel that you have access, when you write, to some small kind of madness?

Yes. But lunacy is triggered and manifests multifariously. For me, a heightened state of emotion is a tremendous artistic catalyst. If I am annoyed or disturbed or joyful, then I am gnashing and gnashing means thinking and that means a poem isn’t far away.

The poems in "Kin" are full of physicality: bodies touching, kissing, eating, dancing; there are lots of mentions of hair, and hips, and skin. "Lunatic," while still aware of the body, seems more inward, more about consciousness. Can you comment on this shift in focus?

Kin was a book that tried to document a group of people, a series of relationships from whom I often felt alienated. In order to document I needed to describe. So the bodies were a way of describing fully the external world. Lunatic is exactly about interiority versus exteriority, consciousness manifested in either realm. As a writer I am much more interested and invested in interiority than exteriority. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never written fiction. I could care less what the body is doing in the room or how it gets from the door to the car. I’m much more interested in the internal machinations, which is why my favored poets are people who write, principally, in metaphor.

In Troubled Tongues, the body reemerges as a focal point. But here, a focal point by which I try to get at the more spiritual sense of who we are. Questions to do with race and beauty, for example, depend on the external because the external is the primary means by which we define one’s racial identity or one’s aesthetic value. Part of the book’s project is calling into question the value in the external and relating that to our use of language, as language is the manifestation of the internal.

In "Lunatic" you write, "We are a conglomeration of memories--some real, many not." I like the notion of the writer as a person who takes this natural process of self-mythologization and bends it to her will. To what extent is your writerly impulse an exercise in elevated self-expression, and how much of it is focused outward? And has the balance between the two changed over time?

Aren’t all writers simply engaged in the act of “elevated self-expression”? I’m not sure I understand this question fully other than to say that my work is projective work. That is, I approach the page in an attempt to say something to someone other than myself. This, however, doesn’t mean that I’m not also speaking to myself or that I don’t often surprise myself. But the reason I approach the page isn’t, primarily, self-reflection. I’ve done most of that work prior to saying, “Okay, I’m going to write a poem about this.”

I know there are writers who do not have this outwardly impulse. I have friends like this and we have rich conversations. But I’m just not one of them. I am an outwardly focused writer. Indeed. This is a result of many colliding factors—the fact that I come from an artistic heritage that suggests art should be functional, the fact that the writers I read when little were deeply engaged in social justice and political movements, and the fact that I was trained in theatre and engaged performance before being published. Combined those factors made it almost impossible for me to be anything other than a projective poet. (Is that even a thing, really? Yikes, making stuff up, John.)

I don’t think the balance has changed over time and it may well never change. This is, fundamentally, at least to me, to do with what I think art is and is for. However, the way in which I express myself outwardly has changed and probably will continue to change. This has to do with temperament, maturity, interests, etc. The older I get, the less likely I am to stomp and shout for example.

Nothing wrong with making stuff up, not on my podcast anyway! One last question. There are lots of students and teachers in your poems, and this leads me to as you what I've been asking all writers visiting as part of our "centennial plus five" celebration: what impact has your schooling at Cornell, and your connection to academia, had on your work?

I had a great time at Cornell. In the first week I got to Cornell I met A.R. Ammons. Archie, though he had just retired, was tremendously influential to the way I thought about writing as a career, something that has a trajectory and is changeable. Archie was able to assuage my fears and related to me, I think, as an outsider-to-the-academy—he from the South, me from Detroit--though he was clearly not an outsider at that point. The fears I had to do with leaving the community from which I gathered artistic impulses was something we frequently talked about. We talked about what it meant to be a writer among scholars. His viewpoint was incredibly helpful in giving me context and the authority to say to folks, “Back off.” On the other side of things was Ken McClane who really did serve as my primary mentor; he showed me ways of seeing and hearing my work that I had not. And, he’s just a tremendous human being and so served as a model for the kind of teacher and person one can be in and outside of academia. So, firmly settled between those two beacons, I found Cornell to be a tremendous place.

As for my connection to academia: I enjoy teaching. I enjoy being surrounded by people who are engaged in the life-of-the-mind. I like my students. Though, I do sometimes worry that the poems I want to write aren’t as easily found walking the halls of Reed College as they might otherwise be if I were, oh, I don’t know, doing some other sort of work. And yet, “aren’t as easily found,” is not “cannot be found.” And so, I stay until something more interesting comes along.

Interview: Stewart O'Nan

2009-04-09T09:10:00.003-05:00

Note: due to a scheduling problem, this interview and two others are text-only. Audio podcasts will return in the fall.

Stewart O'Nan is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novels Snow Angels, A Prayer For The Dying, Last Night At The Lobster, and Songs For The Missing. He is a 1992 graduate of the Cornell MFA, and presently lives in Connecticut. He read at Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2009, and answered J. Robert Lennon's questions via email the previous week.

You've entered a period of great popularity and critical success after years of slaving away in the midlist. I wonder if it's taken so long because your books are so different from one another--sometimes you almost seem like a new writer every time. Is this a conscious effort on your part? And do you think there is, beneath the diverse range of styles and approaches you've tried, a consistent underlying aesthetic?

I just try to find the best approach to whatever I happen to be writing about. In the fiction, I'm in service to the characters, bringing their emotional world across to the reader, so it only makes sense that I use different forms and voices and points of view. That may confuse editors and marketing people more than it confuses readers. Across the books, I think there's a focus on the American soul--innocence and optimism colliding with atrocity and failure, the lone/strange individual vs. the ruling social group. I'm sure it stems from growing up in the late '60s/early '70s in Pittsburgh.

Like a lot of writers I like, you've borrowed a bit from genre fiction, particularly crime and horror--you even wrote one novel in which Stephen King plays an important role, and later collaborated with him on a nonfiction book. Maybe you could talk a bit about the overlap of literary and genre fiction, in your work and in general.

Hey, thanks. I grew up reading widely and enthusiastically, enjoying horror comics and Ray Bradbury and Stephen King and Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harlan Ellison before I ever heard of Woolf, Kafka, Joyce, etc., so when I started reading what we call serious work, it naturally bonded with the stuff that was in my head already. The earlier novels owe their big, bloody climaxes and Gothic excess to that marriage of low and high art, while the later books seem to be moving towards a quieter, less crazy place.

You've had the fortunate--or perhaps horrifying--experience of having your work transformed into film. I think film is the dominant narrative form of our era, but it doesn't serve the same purpose as the novel, and has different strengths and weaknesses. How did you feel about the transformation of your narratives (if I'm not mistaken, Snow Angels and now Lobster) into film, and did you learn anything new about them, and about narrative, as a result?

I was very lucky. I like David Gordon Green's movie of Snow Angels very much. I'd read an early script, so I knew it would share little with the book. And that's right--it has to stand on its own. Like The Shining. Stephen King has never liked Kubrick's version, because it's not his book. I love the book and I love the movie, and I'm glad both exist, but I'd never confuse the two. I guess the worry is that most people will, or do.

What I learned about narrative is that that framed and cross-cut between two mostly-separated storylines is almost impossible to pull off in film, while in novels it's absolutely natural. Simultaneity, or the illusion of simultaneity, is far easier to produce on the page. Moving time or stopping time is easier on the page, you can go deeper on the page--basically, it reminded me of how flexible the novel is.

If most of your books have one thing in common, perhaps it's that they share an interest in "ordinary" people and their sometimes extraordinary struggles. I put that in quotes because, if I'm reading you right, you don't necessarily subscribe to the whole notion of ordinariness--that perhaps your mission as a writer is to show the strangeness in the ordinary. True?

True. Everyone's life is deep and broad and strange. On top of that, some people are asked to bear more than others. But of course, I've worked with a wide range of people. Certainly no one would call Marjorie in The Speed Queen or Jacob in A Prayer for the Dying ordinary.

Fair enough. Actually, A Prayer For The Dying is probably my favorite book of yours. It's a midwestern literary-horror experiment that draws from the great nonfiction book Wisconsin Death Trip to create a highly unusual and gripping second-person narrative. Do you continue to experiment with unusual narrative techniques? If so, how often do they grow into novels?

Some of the later books have been experimental in that they haven't been plotted. While they appear to have storylines, they're actually fitted together by juxtaposition--by tone and point of view, by dynamics (loud-soft-loud) and tempi--rather than the old set-up, build-up, pay-off of conventional fiction. The idea is from John Gardner: that if a character is worthy of and capable of love, the reader will follow them anywhere. I'm hoping that in letting the reader become intimate with the characters in moments of great stress and stillness that I'm bringing the reader closer to their own private emotions. Or, as I often joke with writing students: dare to be boring. I think there's a thinness to a lot of fiction out there--experimental and mainstream--because it's too concerned with surface busyness and thematic bookkeeping rather than the much more elusive human heart.

Since you're reading here as part of the Cornell writing program's "centennial plus five" celebration, could you talk a little bit about Cornell's impact on your life and career?

Simply by sharing their favorite books, my professors and fellow students at Cornell led me to other authors whose work transformed my own--James Salter, William Maxwell, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Richard Yates (thanks, Lorrie Moore!). Before I came to Cornell, I was working in aerospace and had little contact with other writers. Once I got here, everything accelerated, everything fed into the writing. I was here for three years and wrote three novels, two of which (Snow Angels and A World Away) were eventually published. So, thank you, everyone!

Interview: Lisa M. Steinman

2009-02-26T09:58:00.003-05:00

Lisa M. Steinman's fifth volume of poetry is Carslaw's Sequences, from the University of Tampa Press. Steinman teaches at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and for twenty years has co-edited the poetry magazine Hubbub. She has received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships and has also published two books about poetry, Made in America (1987), and Masters of Repetition (1998). Her poems have been published in The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Steinman read from her work on February 26, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Helen Schulman

2009-02-26T09:53:00.006-05:00

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day At The Beach, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P.S. was also made into a feature film starring Laura Linney, with a script co-written by Schulman. She co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child, and her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review. She is presently the Fiction Coordinator at The Writing Program at The New School, and she lives in New York.

Schulman read from her work on February 26, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (17MB MP3)

Interview: Julie Schumacher

2009-02-20T12:10:00.004-05:00

Julie Schumacher is the author of many works of fiction, novels and stories for adults young and old; these include The Body is Water, An Explanation for Chaos, Grass Angel, and her newest novel, Black Box. Her stories have appeared in both the O. Henry Awards anthology and Best American Short Stories. She's a graduate of Oberlin College and of Cornell's MFA program, and currently lives in St. Paul, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota.

Schumacher read from her work on February 20, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (16MB MP3)

Interview: Melissa Bank

2009-02-12T10:15:00.007-05:00

Melissa Bank is the author of the international bestseller The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) and The Wonder Spot (2005). Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Epoch, Glamour, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Seventeen, and The Washington Post, and has been broadcast on NPR, PRI and the BBC. She is the 1993 recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for the Short Story, and her work has been translated into 30 languages. Bank is a graduate of Cornell's MFA program in creative writing, and is also Visiting Writer in that program during the spring semester of 2009.

Bank read from her work on February 20, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous week.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (16MB MP3)

Interview: Alice Fulton

2008-11-20T14:17:00.004-05:00

Alice Fulton is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including her first story collection, The Nightingales of Troy (2008). Her most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her collection Felt was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, and Palladium. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, and she's been included both in Best American Poetry and Best American Short Stories. She is presently the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)

Interview: Brenda Hillman

2008-11-07T09:28:00.005-05:00

Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), all from Wesleyan University Press, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). She teaches poetry at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.

Hillman read from her work on November 6, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (24MB MP3)

Interview: Terrance Hayes

2008-10-30T12:42:00.006-05:00

Terrance Hayes is the author of three books of poetry: Muscular Music, Hip Logic, and Wind in A Box. He has received a Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship; he has also been selected for the Best American Poetry anthology. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.

Hayes read from his work on October 30, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Charles Simic

2008-10-02T14:22:00.003-05:00

Charles Simic is the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. He was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New Hampshire, where until his retirement he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. A poet, essayist and translator, he has been honored with Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. His nearly thirty books include The World Doesn't End, Walking the Black Cat, and the recent The Monster Loves His Labyrinth.

Simic read from his work on October 2, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day. (Note: the audio contains a few accidental clicks and pops--sorry about that.)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (23MB MP3)

Interview: Patrick Somerville

2008-09-18T14:20:00.005-05:00

Patrick Somerville grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later earned his MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. He has taught writing at Cornell University, Auburn State Correctional Facility, and The Graham School in Chicago. His work has appeared in One Story, Epoch, GQ, Esquire, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his book of short stories, Trouble, was named by Time Out Chicago, as 2006's Best Book. His first novel, The Cradle, will be published by Little, Brown in March of 2009, when he will also be serving as the Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Somerville read from his work on September 18, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (26MB MP3)

Interview: Shauna Seliy

2008-09-11T10:16:00.002-05:00

Shauna Seliy is the author of the novel When We Get There (Bloomsbury 2007). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; she has also received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. From 2003 to 2004 she was the Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in Other Voices, Meridian, the New Orleans Review, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Seliy read from her work on September 11, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Irakli Kakabadze

2008-09-05T09:17:00.008-05:00

Georgian writer, poet, and playwright Irakli Kakabadze has published more than 50 short stories since 1990 in Georgian, Russian and English publications; he's also published five books. His celebrated play “Candidate Jokola,” which was published in 2005, is a story of love between a Georgian man and Abkhaz woman. In his country, he is also known as a political activist; he was one of the first writers in Georgia to write about drugs and violence. In 1990 Kakabadze was awarded an award by “Tsiskari” magazine for his novel Allegro, and he is presently living in Ithaca as part of the Ithaca City of Asylum Writers Project.

Kakabadze read from his work on September 4, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (24MB MP3)

Interview: Sarah Mkhonza

2008-05-08T12:39:00.004-05:00

Sarah Mkhonza was forced to leave her native Swaziland in 2003 following a campaign of harassment against herself and her family. An outspoken voice for women’s rights under the monarchical Swazi regime, Dr. Mkhonza wrote newspaper columns for The Observer and The Swazi Sun that told of the daily struggles of Swazi women and children ejected from their land. In her columns, she employed a “journalistic fiction” style intended to foster a writing culture among Swazi women. As her popularity as a critic of the government’s repressive policies grew, she was told to stop writing. Her refusal resulted in threats, assaults, and hospitalization. At the University of Swaziland, where she was professor of inguistics and English, her office was robbed and vandalized on two occasions -- her computer and diskettes destroyed and tossed in the mud.

Dr. Mkhonza has published two novels, What the Future Holds and Pains of a Maid, and is currently working on a third. She has also published several chapbooks of fiction and poetry with Ithaca's Vista Periodista press. She co-founded the Association of African Women, and the African Book Fund Group at Michigan State University, which has sent over 1000 books to the University of Swaziland and other African institutions, and she is presently living in Ithaca through the Ithaca City of Asylum program.

Sarah Mkhonza read from her work on February 28, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following May.

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Interview: Eavan Boland

2008-04-25T10:30:00.003-05:00

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, and is the author of many books of poetry, including The Lost Land, Code, Against Love Poetry, Domestic Violence, and the new New Collected Poems. Her other work includes a collection of prose writings, Object Lessons; and she has edited two poetry anthologies. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters, she is currently Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, and divides her time between California and Dublin.

Eavan Boland read from her work on April 25, 2008, in Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following day.

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Interview: Alison Bechdel

2008-04-11T10:51:00.004-05:00

Alison Bechdel is the author of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For. A countercultural institution, the strip is syndicated in dozens of newspapers, translated into several languages and collected in a series of award-winning books. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.” And Comics Journal says, “Bechdel’s art distills the pleasures of Friends and The Nation; we recognize our world in it, with its sorrows and ironies.” In 2006, Houghton Mifflin published Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The bestselling coming-of-age tale has been called a “mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection” and a “rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature.” Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.

Alison Bechdel read from her work on April 10, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

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Interview: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ernesto Quiñonez, J. Robert Lennon

2008-04-02T08:15:00.007-05:00

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon received her B.A. from Washington and Lee University and her M.F.A. from Penn State. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattapallax, and Shenandoah, and in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page and Role Call. A semi-finalist in the "Discovery"/The Nation Contest in 1999 and 2001, she was one of 20 writers featured in the 2005 PSA Festival of New American Poets. Her first book, Black Swan, was awarded the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Ernesto Quiñonez is the author of the novels Bodega Dreams, which was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title as well as a Borders Bookstore Original New Voice selection, and Chango's Fire.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of six novels, including Happyland, serialized in Harper's in 2006, and the forthcoming Castle. He is also the author of Pieces For The Left Hand, a collection of 100 anecdotes.

All three writers are members of the Cornell University Creative Writing faculty. They delivered the Richard Cleveland Memorial Reading on March 28, 2008, at the Hollis Auditorium in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day. Leading the conversation were three Cornell Lecturers in English: Stephanie Gehring, Jon Hickey, and George McCormick.

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Interview: Paul Lisicky

2008-03-05T12:05:00.004-05:00

Paul Lisicky is the author of a novel, Lawnboy, and Famous Builder, a collection of essays. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Short Takes, Open House, Boulevard, Flash Fiction, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City, and has taught at Cornell University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Houston, and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming.

Paul Lisicky read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place two weeks later.

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Interview: Mark Doty

2008-02-20T13:01:00.005-05:00

Our first interview this semester is with poet and essayist Mark Doty. Doty has written more than ten books of poetry and prose, and for his efforts has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His new and selected poems, Fire To Fire, will be published next month. He lives in New York City, but this spring is one of three visiting writers spending the semester at Cornell.

Mark Doty read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following week.

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Interview: Lee Smith and Hal Crowther

2007-11-15T13:47:00.001-05:00

Today's podcast features two writers: novelist and short story writer Lee Smith, and journalist and essayist Hal Crowther. Smith is author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including the recent nove On Agate Hill; she has won numerous awards for her work, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Lila Wallace / Reader's Digest Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. Hal Crowther has written three books of nonfiction, and his work has appeared in a great number of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Oxford American, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time, and Newsweek. His most recent book is Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-Millennial South. The two live in North Carolina.

Crowther and Smith read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on November 15, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: William Kennedy

2007-11-01T14:41:00.001-05:00

William Kennedy was born and raised in Albany, New York, and later worked as a journalist there, giving him the background for his celebrated works about that city and its history. He has published eight novels and several works of nonfiction and drama; he's also a screenwriter, and the recipient of both a MacArthur grant and a Pulitzer Prize. His books include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983), and Roscoe (2002).

Kennedy read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on November 1, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Gabrielle Calvocoressi

2007-09-27T15:13:00.001-05:00

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in central Connecticut, and her poems have appeared in The New England Review, Ninth Letter, and The Paris Review (which awarded her the Bernard F. Connors Prize for the Long Poem). A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she has been both a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and her first book is called The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.

Calvocoressi read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on September 27, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Willie Perdomo

2007-08-30T11:42:00.001-05:00

Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996) and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), which won the 2004 PEN American Beyond Margins Award. His work has been included in several anthologies including Poems of New York, The Harlem Reader and Metropolis Found. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Bomb, and PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers. He is also the author of Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, illustrated by Bryan Collier. He has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry and has appeared on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" and BET’s "Hughes’ Dream Harlem." Perdomo is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction and Poetry Fellowships. He currently teaches at Friends Seminary and Bronx Academy of Letters.

Perdomo read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on August 30, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Heather McHugh

2007-04-20T12:02:00.001-05:00

Heather McHugh was born to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, in 1948. She was raised in Virginia and educated at Harvard University. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference (1981); and Dangers (1977).

She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and two books of translation: Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris, 1989) and D'après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981).

Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

McHugh read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2007. This interview took place the following day.

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Interview: Alice Friman

2007-04-12T08:36:00.001-05:00

Alice Friman is author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Zoo, winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah, which awarded Friman the 2002 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry. She's received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis and has been awarded residencies at many colonies including MacDowell and Yaddo. She was named Writer in Residence at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in 2003-04. Friman is the winner of three prizes from Poetry Society of America and in 2001-02 was named to the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, she now lives in Milledgeville, GA where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University.

Friman read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 12, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Emily Rosko

2007-04-05T08:07:00.001-05:00

Emily Rosko was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in the Midwest, and later taught English in Siberia. A recipient of the Stegner, Ruth Lilly, and Javits fellowships, she holds degrees from Cornell and Purdue universities. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Another Chicago Magazine, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Denver Quarterly, and her new book is Raw Goods Inventory.

Rosko read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 5, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Sandra Gilbert

2007-03-28T14:58:00.001-05:00

Sandra M. Gilbert, a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including her latest, Belongings. A prose work, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve, was published in 2006. Gilbert has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death, and an anthology of elegies, Inventions of Farewell, along with a number of critical works.

With Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, Gilbert has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination, and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century. In addition, Gilbert and Gubar have coedited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. With poet and novelist Diana O Hehir, she has also edited MotherSongs: Poems By, For, and About Mothers; with poet-critic Wendy Barker, Gilbert coedited The House Is Made of Poetry, a collection of essays on the work of prize-winning poet Ruth Stone.

A former president of the Modern Language Association, Gilbert has taught in the past at Princeton, Indiana, and Stanford universities, as well as Cal. State, Hayward, and Williams College. She has been a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bellagio, and Bogliasco.

Gilbert appeared in Goldwin Smith Hall on March 29, 2007. This interview took place the previous afternoon.

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Interview: David Barber

2007-03-15T09:24:00.001-05:00

David Barber is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. His first book, The Spirit Level, won the Terrence Des Pres Prize. His latest collection, Wonder Cabinet, was published last year. Barber's poetry and criticism have appeared in such publications as Field, The New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Barber appeared in Goldwin Smith Hall on March 15, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: George Saunders

2007-03-08T13:02:00.001-05:00

George Saunders is the author of the story collections In Persuasion Nation, Pastoralia, and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, the short novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and a children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. He lives in Syracuse, New York, where he teaches in the Syracuse Creative Writing program; last year he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship for his work.

Saunders appeared in the Hollis Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall on March 8, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Yvette Christiansë

2007-03-01T11:17:00.001-05:00

Yvette Christiansë was born in South Africa under apartheid and emigrated with her parents via Swaziland to Australia at the age of 18. She is the author of the poetry collection Castaway, and a new novel, Unconfessed. In addition to writing, Christiansë teaches English and postcolonial studies at Fordham University.

She appeared in Goldwin Smith Hall on March 1, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Junot Diaz

2007-02-21T16:13:00.001-05:00

Fiction writer Junot Diaz is the author of the celebrated story collection Drown, as well as stories published in Story, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and African Voices. His long story "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" will serve as part of a novel of the same same, to be published in Fall 2007 by Riverhead Books. Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and now teaches fiction writing at MIT.

He appeared at the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall on February 22, 2007. This interview took place the previous day.

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Interview: Elizabeth Alexander

2007-02-05T08:51:00.001-05:00

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has read her work across the U.S. and in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, and her poetry, short stories, and critical prose have been published in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. She has received many grants and honors, most recently the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.” She is a professor at Yale University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Alexander appeared at the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall on February 8, 2007. This interview took place earlier that morning.

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