Conference Faculty and Speakers

Below are listed some of the instructors, panelists, and readers who will lead this summer's Writers' Conference. Please select from this list if registering for an individual manuscript consultation.

Robert Archambeau
Robert Archambeau is a poet and critic and a professor at Lake Forest College. His books include Word Play Place (1998), Home and Variations (2004) and the soon-to-be-released Laureates and Heretics. He has received awards from the Illinois Arts Council and the Academy of American Poets. He writes the Samizdat Blog at www.samizdatblog.blogspot.com.

Daniel Borzutzky
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet, fiction writer, and a translator from Spanish. He is the author of two books: The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox Books, 2007) and Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005); and his creative work and translations have appeared in dozens of print and online journals. Daniel's translation of Port Trakl by Chilean poet Jaime Luis Huenún is forthcoming from Action Books. Daniel teaches in the English Department at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago.

Rosellen Brown
Rosellen Brown's fifth novel, Half a Heart, was published in 2000 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and in paperback by Picador in 2001. She is the author of four other novels (Before and After, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992/Delta, 1998, which has been translated into 23 languages and became a film starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson; Civil Wars, Knopf, 1994/Delta, 1998; Tender Mercies, Knopf, 1978/Delta 1998; The Autobiography of My Mother, Doubleday, 1976/Delta, 1998); three collections of poetry (Some Deaths in the Delta, University of Massachusetts Press, 1970; Cora Fry, Norton, 1977, and a sequel, Cora Fry's Pillow Book, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). She has also published a collection of stories (Street Games, Doubleday/Ballantine, 1974; Norton, 2001), and a miscellany containing essays, stories and poetry, A Rosellen Brown Reader (University Press of New England, 1992), one of a series of books by writers associated with the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has published widely in magazines and her stories have appeared frequently in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes. One is included in the recently published best-seller BEST SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY, edited by John Updike.

She has been the recipient of an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the Howard Foundation, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was selected one of Ms. Magazine's 12 "Women of the Year" in 1984. Civil Wars won the Janet Kafka Prize for the best novel by an American woman in 1984.

She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Carolyn Crimi
Carolyn Crimi received her MFA in Writing for Children from Vermont College in 2000. Her publishing credits include Don't Need Friends, (1999), Tessa's Tip- Tapping Toes (2002), Get Busy, Beaver! (2004), Boris and Bella (2004), Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies (2005), The Loud Family (2006), Where’s My Mummy? (2008), Dear Tabby (2009), and Rock and Roll Mole (2010). Carolyn has taught Writing For Children for the past ten years at Chicago area colleges. When she’s not writing or teaching, Carolyn enjoys giving author talks to elementary schools all over the country.

Kevin Davis
Kevin Davis is the author of Defending the Damned: An Inside Look at a Dark Corner of the Criminal Justice System, which is scheduled for release in 2007. His first non-fiction book The Wrong Man, was published in 1996. He is a freelance writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Chicago Magazine, USA Weekend, Utne Reader, Writer’s Digest, In These Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, Encyclopedia Britannica, American Bar Association Journal, USA Today and the Chicago Tribune. He is a former staff writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and teaches writing in an art therapy program at the Cook County Jail.

Danielle Dutton
Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) and SPRAWL (Clear Cut Press, forthcoming 2008). She earned a PhD at the University of Denver and has taught writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Denver, and Naropa University in Boulder. She currently works at Dalkey Archive Press.

Anne Gendler
Anne Gendler is the managing editor at Northwestern University Press, where she has edited poetry, fiction, and drama as well as a range of nonfiction books. Formerly she was the editorial director at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago.

Susan Harris
Susan Harris is an editor at Words Without Borders (www.wordswithoutborders.org). She is the former director and editor in chief of Northwestern University Press and the founding editor of the Hydra imprint in literature in translation.

Esther Hershenhorn
Chicagoan Esther Hershenhorn spends her days doing what she loves and loving what she does: writing picture books and middle-grade fiction, teaching Writing for Children and coaching writers of all ages to help them tell their stories. Esther’s picture books include Chicken Soup by Heart, winner of the 2003 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Younger Readers and Fancy That, a Junior Library Guild selection. Esther’s middle grade novel, The Confessions and Secrets of Howard J. Fingerhut, is a Crown Award nominee for 2004/2005 and was named to the Children’s Book Committee of Bank Street College’s Best Books of the Year list. A former elementary school teacher, Esther now teaches at the University of Chicago’s Writer’s Studio, Ragdale and Chicago’s Newberry Library. She also works with the children’s book community to advocate books and their creators. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, an international organization numbering 20,000 members, and is the Regional Advisor of the organization’s 900-member Illinois Chapter.

Sheryl Johnston
For the past eleven years, Sheryl Johnston has served as Managing Director and Publicist for the annual Story Week Festival of Writers presented by the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Johnston earned her BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College, and her work has appeared in Emergence, Hair Trigger 16 and 17, Bandit-Lit.com, the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism's Journal of Corporate Public Relations, and others. Before attending Columbia, Johnston was an editorial writer at WLS-TV (where one of her editorials was nominated for an Emmy), a vice-president in public relations at J. Walter Thompson, and president of her own communications agency. She has also been a judge for the WBEZ-FM Stories on Stage contest, and an editor for Hair Trigger and Bandit-Lit.com. With 30 years of experience, Johnston handles publicity and event management for authors, and other clients involved with education, arts, and entertainment.

Michael McColly
Michael McColly has taught yoga for over 12 years, studying in India, Thailand and across America with senior teachers from a wide-range of styles and approaches. He also teaches creative writing at Columbia College and in the graduate program at Northwestern University. He holds degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and Religious Studies from the University of Chicago. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Ascent, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Sun-Times and many other journals. His recent book The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism won the 2006 Lambda Award for Best Spiritual Writing. He is a senior teacher at Yoga Now. In December 2007 he was featured in Yoga Journal for his blending of activism and yoga.

Simone Muench
Simone Muench grew up in Louisiana and Arkansas before moving to Colorado to receive her BA and MA from the University of Colorado. Her first book The Air Lost in Breathing won the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry (Helicon Nine, 2000). Her second Lampblack & Ash received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (Sarabande Books, 2005), and was one of the editor's selections in the New York Times Book Review. Her latest chapbooks are Orange Girl (dancing girl press, 2007) and Sonoluminescence written with Bill Allegrezza (Dusie Press, 2007). She has poems appearing in Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, American Poet, and the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is an assistant professor and director of the Writing Program at Lewis University. Currently, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books, is a contributing editor to Sharkforum where she presents a 'poem of the week' series.

Naeem Murr
Naeem Murr's first novel, The Boy, was a New York Times Notable Book and was translated into six languages. Another novel, The Genius of the Sea was published in 2003. His latest, The Perfect Man, was awarded The Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of Europe/South Asia, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including a Stegner Fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a writer-in-residence at numerous universities, including the Universities of Missouri, Western Michigan University, and Northwestern University. Born and brought up in London, he has lived in America since his early twenties, and currently resides in Chicago.

James O'Laughlin
James O'Laughlin is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Northwestern. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Saint Louis University, and an M.A. in English from Northwestern University, and did additional graduate work in English at Northwestern. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999-2000 from Northwestern's School of Continuing Studies, and in 2005 was named to the Associated Student Government's Faculty Honor Roll. He has written reviews of literary fiction, literary biography, and philosophy, and essays on special topics for Booklist; he also writes short stories, and is currently writing a book on writing. Since 1998 he has been a fiction editor at StoryQuarterly, a literary journal in its 32nd year. He teaches Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction, Reading and Writing Fiction, Modes of Writing, and Literary Editing, among other courses.

Roger Rueff
Roger Rueff's award-winning stage plays Hospitality Suite and So Many Words have been produced in the U.S. and around the world. His works for the screen include The Big Kahuna, starring Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito. Mr. Rueff has also authored a collection of poetic proverbs written for his son, titled, Fifty Things I Want My Son to Know (Andrews-McMeel).

Donna Seaman
Donna Seaman is a critic, reviewer, and associate editor for Booklist. A contributor to the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other venues, Seaman has created the fiction anthology, In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness. Seaman has received The James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, The Writer Magazine Writers Who Make a Difference Award, and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. Seaman hosts the radio show Open Books (www.openbooksradio.org) on WLUW 88.7FM (www.wluw.org) in Chicago, a program supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the Leo S. Guthman Fund. Seaman's author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, which has been hailed by the Chicago Tribune as a "trove of insights into the creative processes and cultural observations" of diverse writers.

Cynthia Sherry
Cynthia Sherry is publisher of Chicago Review Press. She acquires books for CRP and oversees the editorial and book production of 40 new titles a year under four imprints, including A Cappella, Lawrence Hill Books, and Zephyr Press. Her diverse background in book publishing spans accounting, book production, acquisitions, and management. She worked for The University of Chicago Press prior to coming to Chicago Review Press in 1989.

Peggy Shinner
Peggy Shinner's work has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Western Humanities Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Bloom, the Chicago Reader, Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters, and other publications. She has been awarded several Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and residencies at the Ucross and Ragdale Foundations. She teaches in the Masters in Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University.

David Standish
David Standish has been the editorial adviser for 12 Magazine Publishing Project prototypes. He also teaches magazine writing. When not teaching, he works as a freelance writer, primarily for magazines. He was an editor at Playboy for 10 years, and has written many articles for that magazine. He has also written for Esquire, Travel & Leisure, Outside, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Audubon, GEO, Landscape Architecture, House Beautiful, Reader's Digest, Diversion, Chicago, Satisfaction and others. He writes occasional nationally syndicated travel articles for Universal Press Syndicate. He was author in 2000 of "The Art of Money" (Chronicle Books), which was named one of the 10 notable art books of the year by the New York Times. In the mid-80s he was also a co-writer of the film comedy "Club Paradise," which starred Peter O'Toole and Robin Williams. Standish has a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from Miami University. He completed course work on a Ph.D. in American Studies at Indiana University, but took a long detour into journalism and never finished his dissertation. He most recent book, "Hollow Earth: A Cultural History," was published by DaCapo Press in 2006.

Michele Weldon
An award-winning journalist for newspapers, magazines, websites and radio for more than 25 years, Michele Weldon's third nonfiction book, "Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page" was released in January 2008 from the University of Missouri Press. Weldon is an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism teaching more than 200 journalism students each year in the fundamental skills courses on writing and reporting.

Her first book, a creative nonfiction memoir, I Closed My Eyes (Hazelden, 1999), has been translated into seven languages and was featured with her second book on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in June and October, 2002. Weldon's second book, Writing to Save Your Life (Hazelden, 2001), has been translated into four languages and is used by therapists and medical professionals in the field of narrative therapy. She received a trademark for the term "scribotherapy" in 2004 and won the Chicago Women in Publishing 2002 Excellence Award in nonfiction for her second book.

This is the basis of her Writing to Save Your Life Workshops given in Chicago and around the country since 1999 and is considered important to the field of narrative therapy. Weldon was a co-investigator on a study at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University on the role of written narrative in the physical and emotional health of caregivers.

She has written news and features for scores of major daily newspapers, websites and radio such as the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dallas Times Herald, New York Times and Minnesota Public Radio. She has also written for major magazines such as Woman's Day, Parenting, Dial, Seventeen, Writer's Digest and many others. She writes regularly for Writer's Digest and West Suburban Living magazines.

As a popular public speaker, Weldon has delivered more than 150 keynotes across the country and Canada. She has been a guest on hundreds of radio and television shows in the United States, Europe and Canada including "Oprah," "Jenny Jones," "NBC's Later Today," "ABC Sunday Morning," and BBC-TV.

She received the Rainbow House Individual Courage Award in 2000, Women's Peacepower Award in 2001 and the Visionary Award 2003 from Sarah's Inn for advocacy work on behalf of women and children. In 2005, Weldon received the Donna Allen Award from the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication for feminist advocacy. In 2006 she received one of the "20 Heroes, 20 Years" award from Between Friends, Chicago, a domestic violence prevention advocacy program. In 2007, she won first place in the IWPA humor column category for her work at West Suburban Living Magazine.

The mother of three sons, Weldon lives in Chicago. She is a member of Journalism & Women Symposium, an international non-profit organization for women in print, broadcast and online journalism as well as university-level educators in journalism, and has served on their board of directors. Weldon is also a member of Illinois Woman's Press Association, the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communications, Society of Midland Authors, Association of Women Journalists, National Association of Women Writers and Chicago Women in Publishing.

She is completing a fourth book, a creative non-fiction narrative about her sons' involvement in high school wrestling and her own battle with breast cancer.

S.L. Wisenberg
S.L. Wisenberg is the author of an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions (2002), which came out in paperback in December, and a short story collection, The Sweetheart Is In (2001). Her work has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review and Creative Nonfiction as well as anthologies, including Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction and Rules of Thumb: 71 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations. Wisenberg has received a Pushcart Prize and awards and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is the creative nonfiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine, and co-directs Northwestern's Master of Arts in Creative Writing program. She also teaches at the University of Chicago's creative writing certificate program. Her diary on breast cancer has aired as a series on WBEZ-FM, Chicago public radio. It can be found online at http://cancerbitch.blogspot.com.