Visiting Writers

Spring 2008

Kaui Hart Hemmings

Thursday, March 6, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Kaui Hart Hemmings, a former Wallace Stegner fellow, is author of House of Thieves and The Descendents. Her work has appeared in the Sun, StoryQuarterly, Zoetrope, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American New Voices, and the L.A Times. She has degrees from Colorado College and Sarah Lawrence College. Hemmings works at the Writer's Grotto, a cooperative workspace of writers and filmmakers in downtown San Francisco. She lives with her daughter and her husband, Andy Lautenbach.

Peter Everwine

Thursday, March 27, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Peter Everwine was born in Detroit and grew up in western Pennsylvania. His most recent collection of poems is From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems. Previous collections include Collecting the Animals, a Lamont Selection and a nominee for the National Book Award; Keeping the Night; and Figures Made Visible In the Sadness Of Time. His translations include The Static Element, selected poems of Natan Zach, and two collections of Aztec poetry. Everwine has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and was a Fulbright Visiting Poet at Haifa University, Israel. He lives in Fresno, California.

Patricia Smith

Thursday, March 27, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Patricia Smith's latest poetry book, Teahouse Of the Almighty, was chosen as a 2005 National Poetry Series winner, and was also awarded the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. She is also the author of three collections of poetry, Close to Death; Big Towns, Big Talk; and Life According to Motown. Her poetry has appeared in the Paris Review, the Chautauqua Literary Journal, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Smith is four-time national individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She wrote a companion volume to the groundbreaking four-part PBS history series, Africans in America, and her first children's book, Janna and the Kings, a New Voices Award winner, was published in 2003. Currently she is at work on a biography of Harriet Tubman, Fixed on a Furious Star, and a poetry collection about the human toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina, Blood Dazzler.

Lee Montgomery

Thursday, October 4, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Lee Montgomery is author of The Things Between Us: A Memoir; Whose World Is This?; and Searching For Emily: Illustrated. Whose World Is This? received the John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award in 2007. Montgomery's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Story Magazine, the American Book Review, the Antioch Review; and the anthology, The Honeymoon is Over. Editorial director of Tin House Books and executive editor for Tin House magazine, she is also the founding director for the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. She received her undergraduate degree in biology from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she was the fiction editor for the Iowa Review. She lives with her husband and their two "bizarre" dogs in Portland, Oregon.

Shin Yu Pai

Thursday, October 4, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Shin Yu Pai is the author of several poetry books, including Works On Paper, Sightings: Selected Works, The Love Hotel Poems, and Equivalence. Haiku, Not Bombs is forthcoming from the Brooklyn Artists Alliance. Shin Yu has exhibited her visual work at the MAC, the Paterson Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Three Arts Club of Chicago. She is currently a doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Washington, where she is also studying museology and curatorial practice, and has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Taipei Artist Village, the Ragdale Foundation, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Soul Mountain. Shin Yu received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional graduate level studies conducted at the Naropa Institute.

Yiyun Li

Thursday, November 15, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and came to the United States in 1996. She began writing in her late twenties, and has published stories and essays inthe New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Prize, among many other awards. She received a Whiting Writers' Award and a residency fellowship from Lannan Foundation, and was recently chosen by Granta magazine as one of the best young American novelists. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and two sons, and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Mills College.

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Ross Gay

Thursday, November 15, 8 p.m.
Psychology 105

Ross Gay's book, Against Which, was a finalist for ForeWord magazine's poetry book of the year. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, among other journals. He is also co-author of a number of artists’ books, made in collaboration with painter Kimberly Thomas. Ross is a Cave Canem fellow and editor with the chapbook press, Q Avenue. He is assistant professor of poetry at Indiana University in Bloomington.

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