Jonathan Coleman, author of At Mother's Request, Exit the Rainmaker, and Long Way to Go: Black and White in America, will be reading from his work-in-progress, What He Stood For: The Many Worlds of Angus Cameron.  Cameron, a 1930 graduate of DePauw, was a famous book editor who was blacklisted in the 1950s and became a mentor of the author's.

 

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Tracie Morris is a multi-disciplinary poet who has worked in theater, dance, music and film.  Her awards include:  New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Creative Capital Fellowship, National Haiku Slam Championship and Asian Cultural Council Fellowship.  Her poetry has been anthologized in several publications, including: 360 Degrees:  A Revolution of Black Poets, Listen Up!, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet's Café, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Soul.  Morris teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

 

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From the Introduction . . . This short book dovetails the new with the old, the imagined with lived experiences, cementing this mosaic of possibilities. Some terrifying moments are encased in chrysalises of beatific clarity and certainty. . . . These poems lead us as readers to search for answers in ourselves. I am not talking about profundity (though there are numerous profound moments here); in essence, I am speaking about how those simple overlooked glimpses at our common lives tend to rise to the troubled surface of the poetry.  . . Gotera paints the score in brilliant, bold, and brave strokes across an encompassing canvas. . . . A tension through juxtaposition is what Vince Gotera's Dragonfly achieves in a miraculous light that sobers the mind. Characters ease into each other's dreams, taking us along with them, and we are better and more complete because we have humbled ourselves long enough to peer through the eyes of these sojourners.                                    -- Yusef Komunyakaa

 

 

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Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat, which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories of the Century, The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize. A collection of autobiographical essays, A Little More About Me, was published in the fall of 1999. In 2001 she completed a stage play called Tracking the Pleiades. Houston has edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry called Women on Hunting, and she is at work on a novel called Sighthound. Houston is a licensed river guide and a horsewoman. She is an Associate Professor in the writing program at U.C. Davis, and she appears on CBS Sunday Morning from time to time doing literary essays on the wilderness. She lives in Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

 

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The GLCA winner in poetry is Beth Ann Fennelly for Open House, published by Zoo Press. Beth Ann Fennelly grew up in a suburb north of Chicago. In 1993  she received her B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. The following year, Beth Ann taught English in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border, and returned to the States to earn the M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Arkansas. After graduation, she received the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and lives in Oxford, MS, with her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter, Claire.

Beth Ann has received grants from the State of Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the recipient of the Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from The Carolina Quarterly, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Lily Peter Fellowship, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writer's Conference, a MacDowell Residency, the University of Arizona Summer Residency, and the 1997 Texas Review Breakthrough Award for her chapbook, A Different Kind of Hunger. She has published poems in TriQuarterly,  Shenandoah, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, and Poetry Ireland Review; she was the featured Illinois Poet in The Spoon River Poetry Review, and the New Voices feature of The Kenyon Review with a critical introduction by Robert Hass. Her poems have won a 2001 Illinois Arts Council Grant and been reprinted in Best American Poetry 1996, The Pushcart Prize 2001: Best of the Small Presses, the writing textbook 13 Ways of Looking for a Poem, and several anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Sonnet and Poets of the New Century. Her book, Open House, won The Kenyon Review Prize for Poetry, and is published by Zoo Press. It has been nominated by the judges of the Los Angeles Times Book Awards for the 2002 Poetry Prize. Her second book, Tender Hooks, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in April, 2004.