Episode 058: Robert Hass

Robert Hass is the author of many books of poetry, including The Apple Trees at Olema; Time and Materials, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood; Human Wishes; Praise; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River, and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, whom you may find in our podcast archive, and he teaches at UC Berkeley.

Hass read from his work on October 20, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 056: Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen is the author of ten works of fiction and a collection of essays. He is particularly known for his meticulous examinations of religious experience, and of the lives of historical figures. Among his best known books are the novels Desperadoes; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Mariette in Ecstasy; Atticus, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner; the short story collection Nebraska; and his latest novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion. Hansen is presently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature.  He is also an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church.

Hansen read from his work on September 22, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 055: Laura Furman

Writer and editor Laura Furman was born in New York and educated at Hunter College High School and Bennington College. For many years, she taught in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing. While at UT Austin, she founded the literary journal American Short Fiction.  Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976, and since then fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Southwest Review, Ploughshares,  Mademoiselle, Preservation, Mirabella, and House & Garden, among others. Her books include four collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir, and she is the ninth series editor of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, published annually by Anchor Books. Each year, she picks the twenty winning stories and writes an introduction for the volume.  Her new book is The Mother Who Stayed: Stories.

Furman read from her work on April 21, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 054: Joseph Klein

Composer Joseph Klein holds a Doctor of Music degree in Composition from Indiana University.  He is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of North Texas College of Music, where he has served as Chair of Composition Studies since 1999.

Klein’s catalogue ranges from solo pieces to works for large ensemble, including instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music, often incorporating intermedia or theatrical elements, and reflecting his interest in systems and musical processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry and chaos theory.  His compositions have been performed and broadcast throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and have been featured at national and international music venues.  He has been a featured guest composer at many institutions worldwide, has won numerous awards, and has released many recordings on the Innova, Centaur, Crystal, and Mark labels.

Klein visited Cornell having written short musical settings for poems written by Cornell’s second-year MFA poets, who performed the pieces with the composer on Friday, April 15, 2011 in McGraw Hall.  This interview took place the previous day, and includes recordings of the four pieces.

Episode 053: Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and studied at Bucknell, NYU and Brown; he has taught English and Creative Writing at Colgate University since 1980.  His many books include June-tree: New and Selected Poems and the new collection Ziggurat; he is also the author of Black Dog Of Fate, a memoir about his childhood and Armenian family history.  He co-founded and co-edited, with Bruce Smith, the poetry magazine Graham House Review. His prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Balakian read from his work on March 3, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 052: Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is a novelist and essayist, the author of the acclaimed novels The Mezzanine, Room Temperature and Vox, among others; his most recent book, The Anthologist, has been praised as “startlingly perceptive and ardent” by the New York Times Book Review. Baker earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and the Los Angeles Times called his pacifist manifesto Human Smoke “one of the most important books you will ever read.”  For his activist work surrounding issues of text preservation he was honored with the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.  He lives in Maine.

Baker read from his work on February 24, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 051: Stewart O'Nan

Stewart O’Nan is the author of ten novels, including Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying, as well as the recent Songs For The Missing and the forthcoming Emily, Alone, a sequel to his novel Wish You Were Here. He has also written nonfiction, including the bestselling book with Stephen King on the Boston Red Sox, Faithful. Granta named him one of the twenty Best Young American Novelists in 1995, he’s a graduate of the Cornell MFA program in fiction writing, and is a visiting writer here this semester.

O’Nan read from his work on February 17, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 050: John Murillo

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. He is a visiting lecturer this semester at Cornell.

Murillo read from his work on November 4, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 049: Michael Silverblatt

A New York native, Michael Silverblatt graduated from the State University of New York in Buffalo and later took advanced courses at Johns Hopkins. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, and in 1989 created the literary talk show “Bookworm” for KCRW-FM.  The show continues to air today.

Norman Mailer has called Michael Silverblatt “the best reader in America.” Susan Sontag called him “a national treasure.” Joyce Carol Oates once called him the “reader writers dream about,” and his podcasts are so popular that New York’s independent bookstores describe a “Silverblatt ripple effect” on book sales.

As a student, he came under the influence of such cutting-edge author-teachers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth; as a radio talk-show host, he learned to appreciate a much wider range of writing—making him, he hopes, “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.”

Silverblatt gave a talk on October 26, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.