Episode 048: Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Speak Low and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006. His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.  He teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Phillips read from his work on October 14, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 047: Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collections Almost No Memory, Varieties of Disturbance, and Collected Stories, and a novel, The End of the Story; she has also published a number of chapbooks and a large body of French translations, most notably Proust’s Swann’s Way and, just this year, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She is a Macarthur Fellow, has won a Whiting Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pen/Hemingway Award.  She teaches writing at SUNY Albany, where she is also Writer-In-Residence.

Davis read from her work on September 30, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 046: Bonnie McEneaney

Nonfiction writer Bonnie McEneaney holds a BA from Brown University and an MPS from Cornell. She had a long, successful career as a senior executive in the financial services industry and, more recently, has changed her focus to writing.  After losing her husband, Eamon, on 9/11, she published A Bend in the Road, which is a compilation of his poetry.  Her new book is Messages: Signs, Visits, and Premonitions from Loved Ones Lost on 9/11. McEneaney lives with her four children in New England and is a board member of Voices of September 11th, a group dedicated to serving the needs of 9/11 families, survivors, and rescue and recovery workers.

McEneaney read from her work on September 16, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 045: Julia Alvarez

Poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez was born in New York, then spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father’s involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country.  Her novels include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and ¡Yo!; she is also author of the poetry collections The Housekeeping Book, The Woman I Kept to Myself, The Other Side, and Homecoming. Her many other books include essays and fiction for young people.  Many commentators regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers; Alvarez is the current writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.

Alvarez read from her work on September 9, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 044: Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her M.F.A. in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009.  Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, will be published by Random House in 2011. Her fiction debut—-an excerpt of The Tiger’s Wife in The New Yorker-—was selected for the 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her second publication, the short story “The Laugh,” was published in the summer 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic, and will be anthologized in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Obreht read from her work on April 22, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place two months later.

Episode 043: Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark ‘21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.

Paul Muldoon’s main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. He has also received the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and many others. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

Muldoon read from his work on April 8, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 042: Billy Collins

Billy Collins is the author of ten collections of poetry, including the recent Ballistics and Sailing Alone Around The Room: Selected Poems; He has also edited several anthologies, including two collections of 180 poems for everyday reading, and, most recently, Bright Wings, an anthology of bird poems.  He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and has taught at Lehman College in New York for more than thirty years.  His many awards and honors include the Mark Twain Prize, Poetry magazine’s Poet Of The Year, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  In addition, he has appeared on the radio program “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Collins read from his work on March 11, 2010, in Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 041: Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer grew up in working-class Baltimore, where he developed the literary ambitions that would lead him to Cornell University, and a BA in English.  Some years, several jobs, and an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers later, Meyer published his first book, the acclaimed novel American Rust. He now divides his time between Texas and upstate New York.

Meyer read from his work on February 18, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 040: Martha Collins

Martha Collins is the author of five books and two chapbooks of poetry, and has translated two volumes of poems from the Vietnamese, one in collaboration with Thuy Dinh.  Her most recent book is Blue Front, published by Graywolf Press; it is a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. The book won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library.  Her most recent publication is a chapbook, Sheer.

Collins has also been the recipient of many other awards and honors; they include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant.  A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005; other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.

Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.  She read from his work on February 11, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following week.

Episode 039: Kenneth McClane

Kenneth McClane is the author of eight books of poetry, including a volume of collected poems entitled Take Five; he has also written two collections of essays, the second of which, Color, came out earlier this year from University of Notre Dame Press.  The recipient of numerous awards for teaching and writing, McClane received his B.A., M.A. and M.F.A. from Cornell, and has taught there since 1976.  He earned a Clark Teaching Award in 1983 and become a full professor in 1989.  He now lives in Ithaca, NY, and plans to start a non-fiction publishing series, focusing on the works of the disenfranchised.

McClane read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.