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Visiting Writers & Artists Benedictine University at Springfield Spring 2010
Hip-hop artist and poet A.D. Carson earned a BA in education and creative writing from Millikin University and an MA in English from the University of Illinois. A recipient of the Grace Patton Conant Award, he presently works as an educator. His latest work, Cold, stems from his passion for and interest in blended media, a topic about which Carson frequently presents and also conducts workshops. Carson contributed a chapter in the forthcoming Jay-Z: The Artist, The Man, The Visionary, an academic text focusing on the artistry in the work and career of the Rap mogul.
Janice N. Harrington's first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers. Her children's books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME Magazine's top 10 children's books of 2007 and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library in 2005. Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her poetry appears regularly in American literary magazines. Presently a creative-writing teacher, she has worked as a public librarian and as a professional storyteller, telling stories at festivals around the country, including the National Storytelling Festival. (janiceharrington.com)
Wesley McNeese is a physician, minister, and poet whose most recent book of nonfiction, Can We Do That?, addresses questions about sex and sexuality from both a clinical and biblical perspective. McNeese is the executive assistant to the dean for diversity at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and president of the Ministerial Alliance of Springfield and Vicinity. He completed his residency at Northwestern University School of Medicine in 1990, and he earned his medical degree from Southern Illinois University in 1986. He became a paramedic with the US Air Force in the late 1970s after serving in Vietnam (1968-69). Born and raised in East St. Louis, McNeese’s accomplishments are acknowledged in Eugene Redmond’s anthologized poem “We’re Tight, Soul-Tight—Like Lincolnites,” along with other esteemed natives of East St. Louis—including Miles Davis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Barbara Ann Teer. Fall 2009
Born in St. Petersburg and educated in Paris, Rosina Neginsky is an associate professor of European literature at the University of Illinois. Her works include Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty—A Literary Ambassador between East and West (Peter Lang, first ed. 2004, second ed. 2006), and three books of poetry: Juggler (University Press of the South, 2009), Under the Light of the Moon (Slovo-Word Publishing House, 2002), and Pliaski nad obryvom: stikhotvoreniia (Effect Publishing, 1999). She has published numerous articles on European writers and poets. Spring 2009
Adam Braver is the author of Mr. Lincoln’s Wars (HarperCollins, 2003), Divine Sarah (HarperCollins, 2004), Crows Over the Wheatfield (HarperCollins, 2006), and November 22, 1963 (Tin House, 2008). He holds an MFA from Goddard College and teaches creative writing at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, and at the New York State Summer Writers Institute. “[Adam] Braver is a terrific writer, an observer of the most acute details; throughout [November 22, 1963], he traces the subtle interactions of his characters as they collide and move apart. . . . Braver stays away from much of the principal action [of Kennedy’s assassination], focusing on the edges, the periphery. . . . It's a risky choice, but it pays off because, 45 years later, the only way to see this story afresh may be to observe it on purely human terms.” —David L. Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times Adam Braver writes “with a careful eye on Lincoln scholarship, beginning each story with a Lincoln quotation, while simultaneously breaking many of the rules of traditional story-telling. For starters, it is hard to pin down the precise genre of his daring and fascinating first book, Mr. Lincoln's Wars.” —Dan Guillory, for Illinois Heritage (23) His fiction and an interview appear in Q 1.2; the author was also featured on Quiddity's public-radio program.
Dan Guillory, a PhD in American literature from Tulane University, was appointed Professor Emeritus of English at Millikin University in 2004. His post-doctoral studies were at Amherst College, City University of New York, University of Chicago, Sheffield University (England), University of Minnesota. Awards and fellowships include a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; the National Endowment for the Humanities, a National Humanities Institute Fellowship, and a Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award (Gabon, Africa). A native of New Orleans, Guillory is an essayist and poet with eight books, including, most recently, The Lincoln Poems (Mayhaven, 2008) and People and Places in the Land of Lincoln (Mayhaven, forthcoming).
John Knoepfle is the author of over a dozen books and the editor of many more. His recent books include prayer against famine and other irish poems (BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2003) and I Look Around for My Life (Burning Daylight, 2008). He is Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of Illinois Springfield campus. His awards include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation an the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Mark Twain Award for Contributions to Midwestern Literature from the Society for the study of Midwestern Literature, Author of the Year from the Illinois Association of Teachers of English, and the Illinois Literary Heritage Award from the Illinois Center for the Book. He lives in Springfield Illinois with his wife Peggy Sower Knoepfle.
Fall 2008
Pushcart-Prize nominee Peter Ramos’s most recent book of poetry is Please Do Not Feed the Ghost. His other collections of poetry include Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems and the award-winning Short Waves. His poetry has also appeared in many journals, including Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. Ramos holds a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Buffalo State in New York, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature within a cross-cultural context. His scholarly work centers on contemporary criticism in early to Modern American writing; scholarly publications include Mandorla, Verse, The Oxford American, Lagniappe, and Rust Talks. “Peter Ramos conducts a kind of brilliant looking-back, at once both fierce and tender. . . . Several of the poems have the charged quality of still-lifes suddenly zapped back to life, to action. . . . Ramos shows intelligent restraint when handling nostalgic material, rendering these poems larger than just his life, which enables them to touch, inform and enter ours. Yet this restraint in way inhibits the passion of this visually and aurally pleasing work . . .” —Kathleen Lynch, author of Hinge (2006), winner of the Black Zinnias Press National Poetry Book Competition. His poetry appears in Q 2.1; the poet was also featured in an interview on Quiddity's public-radio program.
The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta Bureau Chief Douglas A. Blackmon has written extensively about the American quandary of race, exploring the integration of schools during his childhood in a Mississippi Delta farm town, lost episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. Many of his stories in The Wall Street Journal have explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct, and racial segregation. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Slavery by Another Name, an exerpt of which appeared in Q 1.2, reveals for the first time the use of slave labor by dozens of U.S. corporations and commercial interests in coal mines, timber camps, factories and farms in cities and states across the South, beginning after the Civil War and continuing until the beginning of World War II. New York University Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering Lewis says the book reveals “an America holocaust that dare not speak its name, a rivetingly written, terrifying history of six decades of racial degradation in the service of white supremacy” Bill Cosby recently called the book “the most important work of history written in a long time.” Mr. Blackmon’s stories or the work of his bureau have been nominated by the Journal for the Pulitzer Prize three times, including for coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Florida hurricanes in 2004 and for his stories in 2001examining the use of slave labor by U.S. corporations in the early 20th century.
A professor at Washington and Lee University, Roberta Senechal de la Roche received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her book, In Lincoln’s Shadow, is considered a provocative and definitive work on the 1908 race riot in Springfield and has won awards for both superior historical achievement and human-rights scholarship, including the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights and the Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award. Senechal de la Roche has published several theoretical works on lynching, rioting, and terrorism and has presented extensively—from Amsterdam, Budapest, and Paris to Krakow—on the subject of collective violence. Spring 2008
Tyehimba Jess is the author of Leadbelly, winner of the prestigious National Poetry Series in 2004. Leadbelly tells the story—in verse—of blues legend Huddie Ledbetter and has been called “astonishing” by the Library Journal and Ploughshares. According to Publisher’s Weekly, “from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song,...soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one's talent…[Jess’s] poems teach us how to read them, but more so, these poems demand performance, recalling that space beyond the page: the stage…, proving that a good poem—slam or not—neither needs nor abandons its poet once on the page.” Having served as Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana, Jess’s numerous awards include, among others, the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Provincetown Fine Arts Center.
Best known for Lies My Teacher Told Me, winner of the American Book Award, James Loewen was a professor of race relations at the University of Vermont for twenty years after teaching at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He has been called as an expert witness in over fifty court cases involving civil, voting, and employment rights. James Loewen has earned a number of awards, not only for his literary works, but also for his achievements as a sociologist. His most recent book, Sundown Towns, was named a Distinguished Book of 2005 by the Gustavus Myers Foundation. Other awards include the First Annual Spivack Award of the American Sociological Association for "sociological research applied to the field of intergroup relations," and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. He is also Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Additional books include the co-authored Mississippi: Conflict and Change, winner of the Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Nonfiction, and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, Social Science in the Courtroom, and The Truth about Columbus. Loewen lives and writes in Washington, DC. |
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