The faculty listed below have confirmed their intention to teach in the 2010 Prague Summer Program. WMU is not responsible for cancellations by faculty due to unforeseen circumstances.

The faculty listed below have confirmed their intention to teach in the 2010 Prague Summer Program. WMU is not responsible for cancellations by faculty due to unforeseen circumstances.

CLAUDIA BARNETT

Claudia Barnett is an Ingram New Works Playwright- in-Residence at the Tennessee Repertory Theatre and a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she’s received the Bob Womack Distinguished Faculty Award. Her plays have had productions, workshops, or staged readings at East Haddam Stage Company, n.u.f.a.n. ensemble, People’s Branch Theatre, Portland Theatre Works, Venus Theatre, and at the annual Mid-America Theatre Conference Playwriting Symposium. Her one-acts and excerpts are published in anthologies from New Issues, Meriwether, and Applause, and in the journals Aries, Dramatics, Pacific Review, Poems & Plays, and River Styx.

PETR BILEK

Petr Bilek received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1993, and has become one of the bright lights of modern and contemporary Czech literary criticism and theory. The author or editor of five books and scores of articles in English as well as Czech, his inquiries range from issues of narratology to an exploration of the "lyric self" and other concerns related to identity. A professor in Charles University’s Faculty of Arts and Chair of its Department of Czech Literature, Bilek has also taught at Brown University. He chose the poets for, and wrote the introduction to, Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution: Voices from the Czech Republic (a Special Double Issue of New Orleans Review, Spring, 2000).

GAYLORD BREWER

Gaylord Brewer’s most recent books are The Martini Diet, his seventh book of poetry, and the comic novella Octavius the 1st. He has published 750 poems in journals and anthologies, such as Best American Poetry and The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and plays in The Art of the One-Act, Collages & Bricolages, One on One, Shades of December, Stage Whisper, and Verve. His plays have been staged in Chicago, Columbus, Nashville, New York, and Valdez, Alaska. Critical works include David Mamet and Film and, for Macmillan, Charles Bukowski. Brewer founded the literary journal Poems & Plays, which he has edited for 17 years. He has taught in London, Nairobi, and St. Petersburg, and currently teaches at Middle Tennessee State University and in the low- residency MFA at Murray State. Among his recent residencies were the Global Arts Village (India) and Can Serrat (Spain).

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

Christopher Buckley’s 17th book of poetry, Rolling the Bones, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, published by the University of Tampa Press April 2010.  Recent books are Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007, Tupelo Press, 2008, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California, edited with Gary Young, Alcatraz Editions, and Flying Backbone: The Georgia O'Keefe Poems, 2008. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007-2008, and has been awarded the James Dickey Prize for 2008 from Five Points Magazine. He has received a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and is the recipient of NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984.  Over the last 30 years his poetry has appeared in such literary journals as APR, POETRY, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, & New Letters.

MAXINE CHERNOFF

Maxine Chernoff is a professor and chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University.  With Paul Hoover, she edits the long- running literary journal New American Writing, now in its 28th issue. She is the author of six books of fiction and nine books of poetry, most recently The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008) and Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories (Coffee House Press, 2002). Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends… were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.  Her collection of poetry, New Faces of 1952 (Ithaca House), won the 1985 Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry and a PEN Fiction Award. With Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which won the PEN USA 2009 Translation Award.  She has read her and lectured on her work in Belgium, England, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Scotland, China, and Russia.

GERALD COSTANZO

Gerald Costanzo is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon. He has published more than three hundred poems, articles about poetry, and literary essays in addition to three limited edition collections of poems, four full-length collections, and two edited anthologies. He has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Pushcart Prizes, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship, and an Editorial Fellowship from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. In the early 70s, he founded Three Rivers Poetry Journal and Carnegie Mellon University Press. A graduate of Harvard, and of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, his collections of poems include In the Aviary (winner of Dvins Award), and The Laps of the Bridesmaids.

STUART DYBEK

Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction: I Sailed With Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Both I Sailed With Magellan and The Coast of Chicago were New York Times Notable Books, and The Coast of Chicago was a One Book One Chicago selection. Dybek has also published two collections of poetry: Streets in Their Own Ink and Brass Knuckles. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Poetry, Tin House, and many other magazines, and have been widely anthologized, including work in both Best American Fiction and Best American Poetry. Among Dybek's numerous awards are a $500,000 2007 MacArthur Fellowship (read more ), a PEN/Malamud Prize "for distinguished achievement in the short story," a Lannan Award, a Whiting Writers Award, an Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, several O.Henry Prizes, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University and a member of the permanent faculty for Western Michigan University's Prague Summer Program.

ROBERT EVERSZ

Robert Eversz is the author of seven novels, including Gypsy Hearts, an expatriate novel set in Prague and Budapest, and given a starred review by Kirkus. His other novels include Shooting Elvis, named best crime novel of the year in the Oslo's leading daily paper, Aftenposten, and best comic novel in the Manchester Guardian; Killing Paparazzi, which was named among the best books of 2002 by the Washington Post Book World; Digging James Dean, listed as an Editor's Choice in the Boston Globe and Mystery of the Month by BookPage; and Zero to the Bone, given a starred review by Publisher's Weekly and listed by January Magazine as one of the best books of 2006. His novels have been translated into 15 languages, including Czech and Slovak. In 2007, he served as the final judge for the AWP Award Series In the Novel, and is currently Writer In Residence at Western Michigan University. He helped found the Prague Summer Writer's Workshop, now the Prague Summer Program, and has maintained at least part-time residence in Prague since 1992.

LYNN FREED

Lynn Freed’s books include six novels: THE SERVANTS’ QUARTERS, HOUSE OF WOMEN, THE MIRROR, THE BUNGALOW, HOME GROUND, FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY; a collection of stories, THE CURSE OF THE APPROPRIATE MAN and a collection of essays, READING, WRITING & LEAVING HOME.  Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review,  The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, among others.  She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received fellowships, grantsand support from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation.  Born in South Africa, she now lives in northern California.

Ron Grant is a previously board-certified pediatrician, who, twenty years after receiving his medical degree at the University of Wisconsin, earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the creative writing department at the University of Arizona. A member of the Associate Faculty at the University of Arizona’s Medical School, where he currently teaches a course in narrative medicine, he has published essays in Harmony, The Oklahoma Review, and Creative Nonfiction (his essay, “Hypoplastic Heart,” was a finalist in CN’ s $10,000 Best Medical Essay Contest.). In 2004 he was awarded the University of Arizona’s John Weston Fellowship. He also teaches memoir at the Learning Curve, an adult educational program serving the arts interests of Tucson, Ariz. With colleague Sue Ribner, he co-founded in 2005 a unique manuscript review workshop offered to post-MFA grads or the equivalent looking to complete their first nonfiction book.

PATRICIA HAMPL

Patricia Hampl’s most recent book is The Florist’s Daughter, winner of numerous “best” and “year end” awards, including the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year” and the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, published in 2006 and now in paperback, was also one of the Times Notable Books; a portion was chosen for The Best Spiritual Writing 2005. Patricia Hampl first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage, awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. This book and subsequent works have established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years. She is the author as well of two collections of poetry, Woman before an Aquarium, and Resort and Other Poems. And she has published Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak's 1893 summer in Iowa, with engravings by Steven Sorman. Virgin Time, about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life, is available in a recent paperback.

MARK JARMAN

Mark Jarman is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Iris (a book-length poem), Questions for Ecclesiastes, and To the Green Man. His most recent book, Epistles, is a collection of prose poems.  He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa . His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and The Poets’ Prize.  His poems have appeared in journals such as the American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. In addition, he is the author of two collections of essays: The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry.  He is Centennial Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University.  Sarabande Books will publish his new and selected poems next year.

VÁCLAV JIRÁSEK

Václav Jirásek is one of the foremost representatives of the younger generation of Czech photographers. He graduated in 1984 from the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Brno with a degree in applied graphics. He later received a degree in painting from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. His approach to the medium is much more reflective than that of "native" photographers, yet at the same time his almost fetishist attitude towards craft and his thorough knowledge of the medium's traditions differentiate him from the so-called "artists using photography." Jirásek created not only his own specific conception of pictorial form, style, and subject, but also his own conception of photography. One can see this distinctive way of taking photographs at all levels in Jirásek's work. This was evident in his early works made at the end of the 1980s, when he, along with a few other photographers, artists, writers and musicians, founded the controversial group Brotherhood. The anonymously exhibited works of the group were clearly inspired by the agitation art of the Socialist Realism of the 1950s.

Founding director of the Prague Summer Program, Richard Katrovas is the author of six collections of poetry, among them Dithyrambs (Carnegie Mellon, 1998), and Prague Winter (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). He is also the author of a book of short stories, Prague, U.S.A. (Portals, 1997), a memoir, The Republic of Burma Shave (Carnegie Mellon, 2001), and a novel, Mystic Pig (Smallmouth, 2001). His most recent book was the "anecdotal memoir" The Years of Smashing Bricks. His poems, essays and stories have appeared widely, and won numerous grants and awards. He was editor for Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution: Voices from the Czech Republic (New Orleans Review, Special Double Issue, Spring, 2000). Katrovas witnessed the Velvet Revolution on a Fulbright in 1989, and has been a resident of Prague with his three daughters for much of each year since. He taught for the University of New Orleans for twenty years, and joined the faculty of Western Michigan University in the fall of 2002.

IVAN KLIMA

Ivan Klima is the author of Love and Garbage, My Merry Trades, and Judge on Trial, among many other novels and short-story collections. Ivan was one of Czechoslovakia’s most steadfast and courageous dissident voices, and is now one of the Czech Republic’s most beloved authors. A Holocaust survivor, Klima is a world-class author of prose fiction and a Kafka aficionado.

TOMAS KRAUS

Tomas Kraus completed a degree law degree at Charles University in 1979 and worked for several years in Prague’s music industry. In 1985 Kraus served as the project manager for Expo 86 World Exhibition sponsored by Art Centrum, the Czech agency for creative artists and was hired by the agency as assistant to the General Manager. In 1990 the President of the Federation of Jewish Communities asked Kraus to help him revitalize the life of the Czech Jewish community. Kraus has served as the Executive Director of the Federation since 1991. He was in charge of rebuilding the whole communal infrastructure, leading negotiations for the return of Jewish property and for compensation for Holocaust survivors on a national, as well as on an international level. Kraus has been teaching for New York University and the Prague Summer Program since 1999. His parents were Holocaust survivors.

ARNOST LUSTIG

Arnost Lustig is among the most beloved writers in the Czech Republic, and all of Central Europe. After being incarcerated in Terezin, the Nazi's Bohemian "show" camp, and then Auschwitz, he was being transported to yet another death camp when a U.S. warplane mistook the train packed with doomed Jews for a troop transport and bombed the engine. Lustig and a friend escaped; everyone else who tried was gunned down by Nazi troops. Lustig returned to Prague and joined the resistance. He later became a journalist and a member of the Communist Party. He eventually fell out with the authorities over Soviet policy towards Israel and was forced into exile. A professor at American University in Washington, D.C. for over 30 years, Lustig is the author of many critically acclaimed novels and short story collections, all centered on the Holocaust. Notable among his works that have been translated into English are Diamonds of the Night, A Prayer for Katarina Horovitzova, Darkness Casts No Shadow, and most recently Lovely Green Eyes. He was presented the prestigious Karel Capek Award by President Vaclav Havel in 2000, and has received an Emmy for a documentary film based on his life, as well as numerous other honors, including the American Jewish Book Award. In 2002, Arnost Lustig was on the Nobel Prize literature committee's short list.

Jan Pohribny is a graduate of the prestigious Film and Television Faculty of the Czech Academy of Fine Arts. In addition to his fine art projects he also works in the field of design and illustration photography. He co-operates with a number of leading agencies, companies and magazines in the Czech Republic and abroad. Since 1998, he works as a part-time teacher at Silesian University, Institute of Creative Photography and he leads numerous photographic workshop home and abroad. His work has been represented in more than sixty exhibitions in Europe, Japan and America. His photographs are in the permanent collections of such prestigious institutes as La Mission de la Photographie (Paris), Museum of Decorative Arts (Prague), Musée de l‘Elysée, (Lausanne) and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He is a member of the Professional Photographers Association and of the Prague House of Photography. Pohribny is author of Magic Stones (Merrell Publishers, London 1997)- the book of the Year 2008 (Photography Magazine). Pohribny’s Web site: www.volny.cz/pohribny

SUSAN RIBNER

Susan Ribner has taught writing at the City University of New York (CUNY) for 21 years and is currently teaching Creative Nonfiction--Memoir and the Personal Essay--at both Hunter College and a Poets & Writers-funded program in New York City. She and her colleague Ron Grant have created the unique Gribner Seminars (run in Oregon and Michigan in 2005, and Prague in 2006-2009)--a creative-nonfiction manuscript peer review workshop--which will be offered again at the Prague Summer Program in July 2010. Published widely in the nonfiction field, her books include the young adult, The Martial Arts, and under the pseudonym Rebecca Moon, Right On! An Anthology of Black Literature. She is currently completing Sister Stories: A Memoir, excerpts of which have been published in Essay 33: Non-Fiction Reflections Upon the Self and Society, Jewish Women's Literary Annual and the new literary journal, Wordriver (Spring 2009). Two excerpts have also been finalists in the Iowa Review Creative Nonfiction contests of 2005 and 2006. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction in 2004 from the University of New Orleans/Prague Summer Seminars, and also has an M.A. in TESOL (Hunter College) and an M.A. in Comparative Government (Cornell University).

Dave Smith primarily teaches in the area of contemporary poetry in the English language, although he has taught seminars in 19th century American poetry and 20th century American fiction. He is the author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), his 14th collection of poetry, The Wick of Memory, New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), Onliness (novel, Louisiana State University Press, 1981), Southern Delights (stories, Croissant & Co., Ltd., 1984), and two collections of essays: Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1985) and Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). He was the editor of The Southern Review from 1990-2002, at Louisiana State University, where he was also the Boyd Professor of English, and has edited The Essential Poe (Ecco, 1991), The William Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (William Morrow and Co., 1985) and The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright (University of Illinois Press, 1981). Currently, he is the editor of the Southern Messenger Poetry Series at Louisiana State University. Smith has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lyndhurst Fellowship as well as the Virginia Prize in Poetry and an Award in Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He was born March 19, 1954 in Prague.

MIRO SVOLIK
Miro Svolik graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Film and Television Faculty, majoring in Fine Art Photography. During his studies in the mid-80s of the 20th century he already began to create staged photography images, as well as several other classmates from studies in Prague. Back then, they created together a group of photographes who acted under the name New Slovak Wave. He has been teaching photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava since 2009. His photos won several major awards – 1989 KODAK Triennale Prize, 1. Internationale Trienale, Esslingen Young Photographer, 1990 Sixth Annual Infinity Awards, International Center of Photography, New York City. He has organized sixty individual exhibitions around the world and participated in about two hundred group exhibitions. His photos are exhibited in numerous major photographic collections in the world; in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, etc…
Miro Svolik’s Web site: www.mirosvolik.cz

PAVEL SRUT

Pavel Srut is one of Central Europe's leading poets, though not allowed officially to publish anything but children's books for more than twenty years. In the twelve years following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Srut's poetry and song lyrics have appeared and been performed widely. His rich and linguistically complex lyric poems are slowly but steadily being translated into English to great acclaim.

HANA ULMANOVA

Hana Ulmanova is a senior lecturer in American literature at Charles University, Prague. She is a regular contributor to the book section of the most widely read serious Czech newspaper Dnes and the prestigious political and cultural weekly Respekt. She conducted interviews with leading American literary figures (e.g. Arthur Miller, William Styron, Edward Albee or Gore Vidal), and she is a translator, too: her main works include short stories by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty, but she has done also poetry (Emily Dickinson) and drama (David Ives). Next to Czech and English, she speaks Russian, German, French, Spanish, and elementary Yiddish and Hebrew.

EILEEN POLLACK

Eileen Pollack was born and grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist. A graduate of Yale University with a BS in physics, Eileen later earned an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship.She is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic And Other Stories, a novel, Paradise, New York, and a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which won a 2003 WILLA finalist award. Eileen's essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many periodicals; her innovative textbook and anthology, Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings, was published in January 2009 by Wadsworth/Cengage. A new collection of stories and novellas called In the Mouth was published in 2008 by Four Way Books and was named the winner of the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which is presented annually to an American writer whose published creative work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew, in addition to being shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature, being chosen as a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Award, and winning a silver medal in ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Awards.Eileen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, SubTropics, Agni, and New England Review. Her novella "The Bris" was chosen to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology, edited by Stephen King, while her stories have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, the Cohen Award for best fiction of the year from Ploughshares, and similar awards from Literary Review and MQR. She lives in Ann Arbor and is the Zell Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.