The faculty listed below have confirmed their intention to teach or be a guest writer in the 2012 Prague Summer Program. WMU is not responsible for cancellations by faculty due to unforeseen circumstances.

PSP Permanent Faculty

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 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 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’s most recent books, The Florist’s Daughter and Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime were on numerous “best” and “year end” lists, including the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year."  She 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. She is also the author of two collections of poetry.  Her other books include Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak's 1893 summer in Iowa, and Virgin Time, about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life.  I Could Tell You Stories was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2000.  Her short fiction, essays, poetry and travel pieces have appeared widely, in such publications as The New Yorker, Paris Review, The American Scholar, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.   She is a recipient of fellowships from the NEA (in poetry and in prose), the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a  MacArthur Fellow.  She is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.

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 the head of the Center of Comparative Literature in 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).

   
Tomas Kraus completed a 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

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.

PSP Guest Faculty & Guests

Christopher Buckley's 18th book of poetry, WHITE SHIRT, was recently
published by the Univ. of Tampa Press, 2011.  ROLLING THE BONES won
the Tampa Review Prize for poetry for 2009 and was published by the
Univ. of Tampa Press in 2010.  Buckley was a Guggenheim Fellow for
2007-08, has received two NEA grants in poetry, a Fulbright Award in
Creative Writing, four Pushcart Prizes and the James Dickey prize
from Five Points Magazine.  Editor of several poetry anthologies, his
most recent are ASPECTS OF ROBINSON: HOMAGE TO WELDON KEES (The Backwaters Press) with Christopher Howell, and BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC: PROSE POEMS & POETICS FROM CALIFORNIA (Alcatraz Editions) with Gary Young.  He teaches in the Creative Writing Dept. at the Univ. of California Riverside.

Michael Byers

Gerald Costanzo

Jaimy Gordon's fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the 2010 National Book Award for fiction. She is the author of the underground fantasy classic Shamp of the City-Solo. Her third novel, Bogeywoman, appeared in 1999 and was on the Los Angeles Times Best Books List for 2000. She has been on the Writing Committee for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown since 1999, and has been a juror for the Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellowship eight times. Her fiction (along with that of three other American writers) was the subject of an international conference, Imagination Alive Imagine, Symposium sur la literature Americaine contemporaine, at L’Institut Charles V, Université Paris 7, in 2001. Her translation of Maria Beig’s Hermine, an Animal Life appeared from New Issues in 2005. Her short fiction, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in the Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry International, and many other places, as well as in Best American Short Stories. She was born in Baltimore, graduated from Antioch College in 1966, received an M.A. in English from Brown University in 1972, and earned Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing in l975, also from Brown. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches in the MFA program of Western Michigan University. Full bio:  http://www.wmich.edu/english/facultyandstaff/profiles/gordon.html

Robin Hemley

Mark Jarman  is the author of 10 books of poetry, including, most recently  Epistles (Sarabande Books, 2007), and Bone Fires:  New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 2011).  He has also published two collections of his prose, The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2000) and Body and Soul:  Essays on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2001).  Jarman is an elector of the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City.  His awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award for his poetry, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in poetry.  His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets’ Prize.  Questions for Ecclesiastes won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Nation Magazine.  He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

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.

Melissa Pritchard is the author of four short story collections, Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for Bliss, Disappearing Ingenue and The Odditorium; three novels, Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits and Late Bloomer, as well as a biography of Arizona philanthropist Virginia Galvin Piper, Devotedly Virginia.

Her short fiction has won the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, a PEN/Nelson Algren Honorary Mention, two O.Henry Prizes and two Pushcart Prizes, the Ortese Prize in North American Literature from the University of Florence and has been cited and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, The Pushcart Prize, The O.Henry Awards, The Prentice Hall Anthology of Women's Literature, American Gothic Tales, The Literary Ghots: Great Contemporary Ghost Stories, and The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death.
She has won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, been chosen for National Public Radio's Annual Summer Reading List, and received fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts; the Hawthornden Foundation, Scotland; the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy; and the Howard Foundation at Brown University.  Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, ECOTONE, Agni, The Southern Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Nation, The Chicago Tribune and many other publications. A number of her works have been translated into Italian and Spanish. Melissa teaches at Arizona State
University and is founder of The Ashton Goodman Fund, the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

David St. John

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 website

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.

Terri Witek  is the author of  Exit Island (2012),  The Shipwreck Dress (2008), Carnal World ( 2006), Fools and Crows (2003), Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Prize),  and  Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self (1993), as well as lyric and literary essays about poetry and art . Her projects with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes include works on paper, video, and site-specific installation and have been featured at Art in Odd Places (Big Bronze Statues was chosen as one of the highlights of the 2009 season by Time Out New York), solo shows, and festivals. The first retrospective of their work to date, but here all dreams equal distance, was shown at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery; a site-specific project in St. Augustine, Florida, A Shelter on King’s Road,  placed the trace of Martin Luther King’s firebombed cottage within the historic Markland House. Currently they are constructing the third round of a poetic game called Uma Coisa N’Outra.  Witek teaches at Stetson University, where she holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing.

V.V. Ganeshananthan's first novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book
World’s Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and The American Prospect, among others. She currently serves on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
She previously taught creative writing at Skidmore College. She now teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing.

Arnold Johnston lives in Kalamazoo, MI.  His plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife, Deborah Ann Percy, have won awards, production, and publication across the country. His poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies.  His books include
What the Earth Taught Us, The Witching Voice: A Play about Robert Burns, Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding, and The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns (Wings Press, 2009).  His translations of Jacques Brel’s songs have appeared in musical revues nationwide (including the acclaimed Jacques Brel: Songs of Love and War and Jacques Brel’s Lonesome Losers of the Night), and are also featured on his CD, Jacques Brel: I’m Here!  He and Debby have just completed Summers on the Seine, a musical focusing on Renoir and his circle with jazz arrangements of songs by Gabriel Fauré and lyrics translated by Arnie.  A CD of his Fauré translations, By the Riverbank, appeared in 2011, featuring performances by some of Chicago’s leading cabaret singers.  His singable English version of Wilhelm Müller’s lyrics for Schubert’s Winterreise had its premiere in October 2010.  Arnie is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the American Literary Translators Association.  He served as chairman of the English Department (1997-2007) and taught for many years at Western Michigan University, where he co-founded the creative writing program and founded the playwriting program.  He is now a full-time writer-performer.    

Deborah Ann Percy earned the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University.  A book of her short fiction, Cool Front: Stories from Lake Michigan appeared late in 2010 from March Street Press.  Her plays, and those written in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Johnston, have won awards, publication, and production nationwide.  Their books include their full-length plays Beyond Sex—also available in a Romanian edition as Dincolo de Sex, translated by Dona Roşu and Luciana Costea—and Rasputin in New York; a collection of their one-acts, Duets: Love Is Strange; and translations (with Dona Roşu) of plays by Romanian playwright Hristache Popescu, Night of the Passions and Sons of Cain and Epilogue. Their edited anthology The Art of the One Act appeared in 2007 from New Issues Press.  Since 2003 they have written more than a dozen half-hour radio dramas for broadcast on Kalamazoo’s NPR-affiliate WMUK-FM as part of All Ears Theatre.  They are currently working on a novel and several new plays and are joint Arts and Entertainment columnists for the national quarterly journal Phi Kappa Phi Forum.  After a distinguished administrative career in the Kalamazoo Public Schools, Debby is now a full-time writer.  Winner of major playwriting grants from the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs and the Gilmore Foundation, she is a member of the Dramatists Guild and American Literary Translators Association.  

Christopher Buckley's 18th book of poetry, WHITE SHIRT, was recently 
published by the Univ. of Tampa Press, 2011.  ROLLING THE BONES won 
the Tampa Review Prize for poetry for 2009 and was published by the 
Univ. of Tampa Press in 2010.  Buckley was a Guggenheim Fellow for 
2007-08, has received two NEA grants in poetry, a Fulbright Award in 
Creative Writing, four Pushcart Prizes and the James Dickey prize 
from Five Points Magazine.  Editor of several poetry anthologies, his 
most recent are ASPECTS OF ROBINSON: HOMAGE TO WELDON KEES (The 
Backwaters Press) with Christopher Howell, and BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC: 
PROSE POEMS & POETICS FROM CALIFORNIA (Alcatraz Editions) with Gary 
Young.  He teaches in the Creative Writing Dept. at the Univ. of 
California Riverside.