THE FACULTY LISTED HAVE CONFIRMED THEIR INTENTION TO ATTEND THE SUMMER 2008 PROGRAM. WMU IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR CANCELLATIONS DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES. A FINAL LIST OF FACULTY/GUESTS, AS WELL AS A FINALIZED SCHEDULE,WILL BE DISTRIBUTED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PROGRAM.

CLAUDIA BARNETT'S Feather recently premiered in Chicago with an 11-night run by the  n.u.f.a.n. ensemble. Her scripts have been performed, workshopped, and given staged readings at Portland Theatre Works (Oregon), the Venus Theatre Play Shack (Maryland), the Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival (New York), Playfest, Kalamazoo! (Michigan), the Play Lab of the Prince William Sound Community College Theatre Conference (Alaska), and the Playwriting Symposium of the Mid-America Theatre Conference (Minnesota, Missouri). Her scholarly criticism of contemporary women playwrights has been published in Modern Drama and TDR, and her plays in The Art of the One-Act (New Issues, 2007) and One on One: the Best Women's Monologues for the Millennium (Applause, 2007). She is a professor of English, the recipient of the Bob Womack Award for Distinguished Faculty, and the coordinator of the Visiting Artist's Seminar for the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.

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 is founding editor of the journal Poems & Plays. The most recent of his seven books of poetry are Let Me Explain (Iris, 2006) and Orphic Prize winner The Martini Diet (Dream Horse, 2008). His plays have been staged in Alaska, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee, and published in The Art of the One-Act, Blackwater Review, Coe Review, Collages & Bricolages, One on One: Best Women's Monologues for the 21st Century, Shades of December, Stage Whisper, and Verve. Additional publications include David Mamet and Film (McFarland, 1993) and Charles Bukowski (Twayne/Macmillan, 1997) and the forthcoming novella Octavius the 1st (Red Hen, 2008). For the Summer Literary Seminars he taught in St. Petersburg and Kenya. His most recent fellowship was at the Global Arts Village in Delhi, India. He's a professor at Middle Tennessee State University.

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER has published ten novels--The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, and Fair Warning--and four volumes of short fiction--Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and his most recent, Severance, from Chronicle Books. Butler has also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway. Among his numerous other awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and two National Magazine Awards in Fiction. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope, and The Paris Review and have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, and numerous college literature textbooks. He is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

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.