The 28th Napa Valley Writers’ Conference July 27—Aug 1, 2008

Douglas Bauer

is the author of The Book of Famous Iowans (1997) and two earlier novels; Prairie City, Iowa, a work of nonfiction; and The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft (2000). He also edited the upcoming anthology Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite Television Shows (2004). Bauer has taught creative writing at Harvard University and Bennington College, and currently teaches as the Elizabeth Drew Professor of English at Smith College.

Chang-rae Lee

is the author of the novels Aloft (2004); A Gesture Life (2000), an ALA Best Book of the Year; and Native Speaker (1996), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award and an American Book Award. Granta and The New Yorker named him among the best American novelists and writers under 40 (respectively); Joyce Carol Oates called Lee one of the most talented and promising writers of his generation.

Lee attended the Conference as a fiction participant in 1992. He currently teaches as a professor in the Program in Creative Writing and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Aimee Bender

is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and An Invisible Sign of My Own, both Los Angeles Times bestsellers. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s. She teaches fiction at the University of Southern California.

Jim Shepard

is the author of Project X (2004), Nosferatu (1998), and four earlier novels. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories, and are collected in Love & Hydrogen (2004) and Batting against Castro (1996).

Of Love & Hydrogen, Norman Rush wrote: Jim Shepard’s access to different voices, social types, levels of experience, is truly astonishing. He has observed deeply, and his selection of detail from that observation is brilliant. This is the work of a deft, audacious artist.

Mary Jo Bang

is the author of Apology for Want, which won the Bakeless Prize; Louise in Love, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America; and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. She has also received a Discovery/The Nation prize and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University.

Brenda Hillman

is the author of six volumes of poems, the most recent of which is Loose Sugar. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry from the Poetry Society of America and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Prize.

Harryette Mullen

has published six collections of poems, including Sleeping with the Dictionary, a 2002 finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award in poetry; Blues Baby: Early Poems, and SPeRM*K*T. Her honors and awards include grants from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry.

Arthur Sze

is a poet and translator whose books include The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and The Silk Dragon, winner of the Western States Book Award in Translation. He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, an Asian American Literary Award, and multiple fellowships from both the Witter Bynner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Excerpts

• Chang-Rae Lee, “Sea Urchin” (short story). The New Yorker, Aug 19/26, 2002
• First chapter of Lee’s A Gesture Life.
• First chapter of Douglas Bauer’s Book of Famous Iowans

Reviews

• Kent Shaw, “Understanding the desire to speak”. On Mary Jo Bang’s Apology for Want. The Commonspace, 2001.
• “Tales from the Black Lagoon”: Review of Jim Shepard’s Project X and Love & Hydrogen. Stephen Metcalf, NYT Book Review, Jan 25, 2004.
• “Fitting in perfectly on the outside, but lost within”. Review of Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. Michiko Kakutani, NYT, August 31, 1999.
• “Betrayed and baffled still”. Review of Douglas Bauer’s Book of Famous Iowans. Douglas Unger, NYT Book Review, Sept 28, 1997.

Interviews

• “Our very greatest human thing is wild”. Interview with Brenda Hillman. Sara Rosenthal, Rain Taxi, Fall 2001.
• Interview with Harryette Mullen. Cynthia Hogue, Bucknell University, 1999.
• “Adopted voice”. Interview with Chang-rae Lee, NYT Book Review, Sept 5, 1999.

Author pages

• Arthur Sze (poets.org). Excerpts (right column) and links (bottom).
• Harryette Mullen: Links to poems, writings, interviews, articles on Mullen. From Electronic Poetry Center, University at Buffalo, NY.
• Chang-Rae Lee links from the Princeton Public Library: Interviews, excerpts, reviews, articles