Matthew Dickman

A remarkable young writer, Matthew Dickman won the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem (2008), chosen by Tony Hoagland and published by Copper Canyon Press. A book of great hopefulness, gratitude, and praise, it plumbs the ecstatic nature of daily life, where pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand. The work is expansive and intimate, rushing forth like a river, with a fluid unstoppable energy. Matthew Lippman praises it thus: “The language is a music, and one has to understand that when you jump into the poems they will take you places you could have never imagined.” Dorianne Laux says his poems are “Ravenous for life, for love, for forgiveness.”
His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker and Tin House. He has received fellowships for his work from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Matthew has been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker; with his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Michael Dickman

Michael Dickman began writing poems “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His first collection is The End of the West (2009) from Copper Canyon Press. A brilliant debut, his poetry breathes in the entire world, it’s delights, cruelty, boredom, and griefs, and breathes out a prayer, one that holds both grace and suffering, equally, lightly. “There is only this world and this world // What a relief / created // over and over.” Franz Wright calls him a young poetic genius with a “style like no one else’s” and elucidates, “With the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Michael Dickman’s poems give a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys which bind together the vast human family.”

Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His nonfiction includes The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time. He writes frequently for such publications as the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. He was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, and has taught at Stanford, Princeton, and American universities, as well as the New School, in the United States. His books have been translated into eighteen languages.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her new book of poems, Breach, about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in March 2010. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, came out with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. She also published a novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love, with Regan Books/Harper Collins (1998). She has received a Discovery/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. 

Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, Missouri Review, Pleaides, and Mississippi Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens College—City University of New York where she directs the new MFA program in creative writing and literary translation.

Mihaela Mosculiuc

Part of the South-Central-Eastern Europe: Legacies and Identities Project

Born and raised in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc came to the United States in 1996 to complete graduate work in American literature. She received an M.A. from Salisbury University, an M.F.A. in poetry from New England College, and a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Maryland. Her poetry collection, Father Dirt (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award) appeared from Alice James Books in 2010, and her co-translation of Carmelia Leonte’s Death Searches for You a Second Time was published by Red Dragonfly Press in 2003. She has lectured on Eastern European American immigration literature, Roma/Gypsy culture, and translation theory at universities in the US and in Europe. Her translations of Romanian poetry appear in Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, America, Absinthe,and Mid-American Review. She has published poems, reviews, and articles in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Poetry International,Pleiades, Interculturality and Translation, Soundings, and Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics (Frankfurt: Lang, 2009).

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing. David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras. He is also the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.

“An Evening with Andrei Codrescu: From Transylvania to New Orleans—A Poet’s Journey”

Codrescu will discuss the politics and culture(s) of East and West, the collapse of communism (which he covered for the U.S. media) and its aftermath, and the historical and literary changes that are reshaping Eastern Europe and informing his own relations to spaces of origin or adoption. He will talk about what it means to live simultaneously in several worlds, both chronologically and biographically, and what political sense this nomadism makes (or doesn’t). His talk will draw on his memoir, “The Hole in the Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution,” and recent play, “Ghidul Copilariei Retrocedate” (“Guide to a Recovered Childhood”), which premiered recently at the International Theater Festival in Sibiu, Romania, his birthplace. 

March 23, 2010, 4:30 pm

Wilson Auditorium 

Andrei Codrescu will be reading from his new book, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010). Book description (Princeton UP) The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a “typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik”–one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to The Tools of Poetry (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and The Ten Muses of Poetry (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating… ), and assigns each of them a tutelary “Ghost-Companion” poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn’t actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs’s funeral procession stopped at McDonald’s, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

Jennifer Grotz’s second book of poems, The Needle, is forthcoming in Spring 2011. Her first book of poems, Cusp, was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Bakeless Prize and also received the Natalie Ornish Best First Book Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems, essays and translations from both the French and Polish appear widely in journals such as New England Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, and in anthologies such as Best American Poetry and Legitimate Dangers. She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester and also serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of three collections of poetry, This Strange Land(Alice James Books, April 2011), Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). A fourth book, New & Selected Poems, will be published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in 2012. Her poems have been widely published in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel, have been reprinted in textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and world literatures, and have been translated into Spanish and Romanian. Her personal essays appear in The Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, individual artist grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been a Cave Canem Fellow and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Nick Flynn is the author of two memoirs, The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (Norton, 2010) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and has been translated into 13 languages. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is currently being made into a film, entitled Welcome to Suck City, starring Robert DeNiro as Flynn’s father, due for release in 2011. Flynn is also the author of three books of poetry, The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands(Graywolf, 2011), Some Ether(Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review.

Michael Waters’ ten books of poetry include Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize)—these titles from BOA Editions—Bountiful(1992); The Burden Lifters (1989); and Anniversary of the Air(1985)—these titles from Carnegie Mellon UP. In 2011, Shoestring Press (UK) published Selected Poems. His co-edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, he has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Rolling Stone, and The Pushcart Prize,and has chaired the Poetry Panel for the National Book Award. Waters is Professor of English at Monmouth University.