Debra Spark

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Award, and The Isle of Youth, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the […]

Jo Ann Beard, the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence, reads from her novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in nonfiction, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Whiting Award.

Erika Meitner is the author of four books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, The New Republic, and Tin House. Meitner is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA (Master of Fine […]

In this Ed Kenney Memorial Reading, author J.C. Hallman will read from his work. The author of B & Me (2015), Wm & H’ry (2013), In Utopia (2010), and other novels, Hallman’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize XXXIV. He received a 2009 McKnight Artist Fellowship for his fiction, and a 2013 […]

Author and poet Reginald Dwayne Betts will read from his latest book, Bastards of the Reagan Era, which examines the war on drugs while challenging popular conceptions about its ending and its impact on the black community. Currently a student at Yale Law School, Betts once served nine years in prison for carjacking. A Q&A […]

Richard Ford, born in Jackson, Miss., is the author of eleven books of fiction, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Canada, and Let Me Be Frank With You, and the short story collections Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize, a Carnegie Gold Medal for Fiction, the PEN-Faulkner Award, and the […]

Pushcart Prize-winner Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is Four-Legged Girl from Graywolf Press. Her second book, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), won the Juniper Prize, and she had a poem in The Best American Poetry 2014. Her poetry and brief prose have appeared in literary magazines including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Brevity, Black […]

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poems, most recently Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy, and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together 35 years of work. He has also published five prose books, among them A Poet’s Glossary (2014), a complete compendium, and How to Read […]

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, which received the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. It was a New York Times […]

Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002 she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of […]

Charles D’Ambrosio will deliver this year’s Ed Kenney Memorial Reading. D’Ambrosio is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point, and The Dead Fish Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two essay collections, Orphans and Loitering. He’s been the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Lannan Fellowship, among other honors. His work […]

Colby Professor of English Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a […]