The faculty listed below have confirmed their intention to teach in the 2011 Prague Summer Program. WMU is not responsible for cancellations by faculty due to unforeseen circumstances.

PSP Permanent Faculty

 RICHARD KATROVAS

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.

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.

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.

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.

PSP Guest Faculty

CHARLES BAXTER

RICHARD JACKSON

ARNOLD JOHNSTON

THOMAS MALLON

Thomas Mallon’s seven novels include Henry and Clara, Bandbox and Fellow Travelers. He has also written non-fiction books about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One’s Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. He received his Ph. D. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and taught for a number of years at Vassar College. The recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing, he has been literary editor of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently directs the Creative Writing program at The George Washington University in Washington, D. C.

BRYCE MILLIGAN 

DEBORAH PERCY

MELISSA PRITCHARD

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).

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.

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.

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

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.