The 2012 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference faculty:

FICTION

Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. He has published stories in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology, among other publications. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN USA Award, and an NEA grant.

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang’s second novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, was published in 2010. Alan Cheuse, reviewing for NPR, calls it an unforgettable novel that “begins small, but blossoms into a full and resonant story of the pains and perils, falsehoods and truths of trying to be an American artist, in this case poet, against all odds, psychological and social.” Chang is also the author of Inheritance and Hunger: A Novella and Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Ron Carlson

Ron Carlson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the novel, The Signal (2009). Previous work includes Five Skies, At The Jim Bridger, and The Hotel Eden, a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book. His work is included in many anthologies, including the O’Henry Prize Stories and Best American Stories. Carlson is currently director of the graduate writing program at UC Irivine. In 2006, GQ Magazine called him “one of the great things about America.” In April, 2009, he was the awarded the Aspen Prize in Literature.

Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow, which was published in 2011. Library Journal, O Magazine, Slate and Salon all selected Silver Sparrow as among the best novels of the year. Jones is an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University. Her work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts and The United States Artists Foundation. She is spending the 2011-12 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching her fourth novel.

POETRY

Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland is the author of ten books of poetry, including Domestic Violence, Against Love Poetry, The Lost Land, In a Time of Violence and Night Feed. Boland is also the author of two books of prose, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time and A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet; the translator of After Every War, an anthology of German women poets; and co-editor of the Norton anthologies The Making of a Poem (with Mark Strand) and The Making of a Sonnet (with Edward Hirsch). Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio, and an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin. She is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

Forrest Gander

The author of numerous books of poetry, including Core Samples from the World, Eye Against Eye, and Science & Steepleflower, Forrest Gander is also the author of novels (As a Friend), essays (A Faithful Existence) and translations. His most recent translations are Watchword (which won the Villaurrutia Prize) by Pura López Colomé; Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (co-translated with Kyoko Yoshida); and Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (Finalist, PEN Translation Prize). Gander’s poems appear in many literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad, and have been translated into a dozen languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman’s most recent work is Pieces of Air in the Epic, her eighth volume of poetry. Previous titles include Cascadia and Loose Sugar. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry from the Poetry Society of America and Norma Farber First Book Prize, also from the Poetry Society of America. She edited, with Patricia Dienstfrey, the collection The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. A longtime faculty member of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Iowa, among other universities, and is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s College.

Arthur Sze

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. His most recent work of poetry is The Ginkgo Light. Sze 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. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.