Episode 068: Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy's most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, from Copper Canyon Press. She’s also the author of Human Dark with Sugar and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate and elsewhere. She is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, and is Assistant Professor of English in the M.F.A. Program at Rutgers-Newark. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Shaughnessy read from her work on September 26, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 067: Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie is the author of ten novels, including The Truth About Lorin Jones, Truth and Consequences,  and the Pulitzer-prizewinning Foreign Affairs.  She has also published two collections of essays on children's literature and edited three books of traditional folktales for children, as well as a nonfiction book on the semiotics of dress, The Language of Clothes,  and a forthcoming nonfiction book, The Language of Houses.  She was one of the first women hired by the Cornell English Department and is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita there. 

Lurie read from her work on September 19, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 066: Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta is the author of three novels: Lightning Field, Eat the Document (which was nominated for the National Book Award), and Stone Arabia. She teaches writing at Syracuse University.

Spiotta read from her work on February 21, 2013, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 065: Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is the author of seven books: the novels The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections (which won the National Book Award), and Freedom; and the nonfiction books How to Be Alone, The Discomfort Zone, and Farther Away. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and has been featured on Oprah’s Book Club. He lives in New York and California.

Franzen read from his work on November 1, 2012, in Cornell’s Sage Chapel. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 064: Don Share

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine. His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), and most recently a new book of poems, Wishbone (Black Sparrow Books), a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems (Faber and Faber), and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions). His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books) were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the PEN/New England Discovery Award; they will appear in a new edition from NYRB Classics. He co-hosts a monthly podcast with Poetry editor Christian Wiman, with whom he has co-edited The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press). He blogs at Squandermania and Other Foibles, and can be found on twitter here.

Share read from his work on October 18, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 063: Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson’s books include Late Wife and Figure Studies. Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, she studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for Late Wife, she has also earned two additional Pulitzer nominations, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also served as poet laureate of Virginia. Her new book is Secure the Shadow.

Emerson read from her work on September 20, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 062: David St. John

Poet David St. John was born in Fresno, California. He received his bachelor’s degree at California State in Fresno and went to the University of Iowa for an M.F.A. His works of poetry include Hush (1976), Terraces of Rain (1991) The Red Leaves of Night (1999), The Face: A Novella in Verse (2004), and The Auroras (2012). He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, the James D. Phelan Award, the Academy Award in Literature, and various grants and fellowships. St. John has taught at Oberlin College and John Hopkins University, and currently teaches at the University of Southern California.

The interview was conducted by Cornell professor and poet Joanie Mackowski, author of the collections The Zoo (2002) and View From A Temporary Window (2010).

St. John read from his work on April 5, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 061: Edwidge Danticat

Fiction writer and essayist Edwidge Danticat is best known for her work chronicling the Haitian immigrant experience. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Brown University, and has published or edited more than a dozen books for adult and young readers, including the novel The Farming of Bones, the story collections Krik? Krak! And The Dew Breaker, and the nonfiction books Brother, I’m Dying and Create Dangerously. She has earned many awards, among them a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and, most recently, the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York. Danticat has been a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami, and divides her time bewteen the United States and her native Haiti.

Danticat read from her work on February 23, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 060: Catherine Chung

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, attended college in Chicago, and studied fiction writing at Cornell University, where she earned an MFA; for some years after she lived the life of an itinerant writer, attending conferences and retreats and working on what would become her debut novel, Forgotten Country. That book is to be published in March 2012 by Riverhead. She is also one of Granta’s “New Voices,” a Pushcart nominee, and winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She is a member of the birdsong collective, an indepdent ‘zine publisher in New York, and is on the advisory board of Paris Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Chung read from her work on February 16, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 059: Alexi Zentner

Alexi Zentner is the author of the novel Touch, which was shortlisted for The 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award and The Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new book, The Lobster Kings, is coming out next year. He has also published short fiction in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Walrus, and many other publications. He studied writing at Cornell and presently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Zentner read from his work on February 16, 2012, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.