Fall 2013 alumni update: renown from near and far
Conference alumni have been as busy as ever since our last alumni update in January — earning plaudits and publication around the world. Beverly Bie Brahic (2009, 2010, 2011) wrote to let us know her second collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize, the United Kingdom’s top poetry prize. Eavan Boland, […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Yiyun Li
This faculty profile comes to us courtesy of past participant Angela Watrous, who conducted an interview with Li for the Fiction Writers Review. What follows below is an excerpt; read the entire interview on the FWR site. “Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996 to study immunology at […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Jane Hirshfield
Thanks to poetry assistant Iris Dunkle for updating this profile. Poet, essayist, teacher, translator: Jane Hirshfield’s writing persona is multi-faceted, her body of work diverse. But if there is a unifying element in her pursuits, it lies in her formative experience as a student of Zen Buddhism, which has guided her writing and led to […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Peter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies was born to Welsh and Chinese parents and raised in Britain and the U.S., so it’s no surprise that his work concerns itself with the concept of identity. But his works are hardly circumscribed by the labels assigned to him personally. Rather, the liminal figures that people his short stories and novels […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Linda Gregerson
Thanks to poetry assistant Iris Dunkle for writing this profile. The poet and scholar Linda Gregerson begins her spectacular poem, “Bicameral,” with the line: Choose any angle you like, she said, the world is split in two. On one side, health and dumb good luck (or money, which can pass for both), and elsewhere . […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Lan Samantha Chang
This is a re-post of conference media manager Catherine Thorpe’s 2011 profile. Lan Samantha Chang was born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up, she experienced both the Chinese cultural traditions her family upheld and Midwestern sensibilities — a contrast that honed Chang’s powers of observation and yen for writing. In […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Major Jackson
Thanks to conference assistant Kathleen Winter for providing this updated profile. Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (Norton, 2010) and Hoops (Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and […]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Christopher Tilghman
Thanks to fiction assistant Patrick Vogelpohl for penning this profile. Countless writers find inspiration in their family histories. However, no one draws from their lineage quite like Christopher Tilghman, a long-time conference faculty favorite who returns this summer after an eight-year hiatus. “I really don’t write about my family’s history, at least as some coherent […]
Winter 2012-2013 alumni update: an Oprah pick, a Pushcart nomination & more
Oprah announces conference alumna Ayana Mathis’ debut as the second pick for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 Our alumni have hardly been hibernating during the autumn and winter months. Since our last update we’ve received word of publications and accolades galore — rewards for long seasons of toil. On the fiction side, 2011 participant Ayana Mathis‘ […]
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This blog is for the Napa Valley Writers' Conference community: once and future attendees, friends of the conference, faculty and staff. Please contribute comments, which are reviewed before publishing (usually within 24-48 hours of submission). We look forward to the conversation!