THE FACULTY LISTED HAVE CONFIRMED THEIR INTENTION TO ATTEND THE SUMMER 2009 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.

• 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).

• SEAN CLARK

is a playwright, screenwriter and producer with an MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa. His television screenwriting credits include: Early Edition, Northern Exposure, Coach, Sliders, Sirens, Evening Shade, as well as several series pilots. He served as Consulting Producer on the current Albanian feature film, Lenin and Us, doing extensive work on that script. His plays, which have been performed around the United States, include Eleven-Zulu, Dog Explosion and The Angeles Crest. He won the Lorraine Hansberry Award, for "Best Play Portraying the Black Experience in America", for Eleven-Zulu, his comic Viet Nam drama. His Sin City play series has been performed the past two years at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. He is currently the head of Graduate Screenwriting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where his students have gone on to remarkable success in feature films and television.

• BARBARA CULLY

is the author of The New Intimacy (Penguin, 1997), which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition; Shoreline Series (Kore Press, Tucson, 1997); and Desire Reclining (Penguin, 2003). She has co-edited two text books, Writing as Revision and Entry Points (Pearson, 1999 and 2003). She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the University of Iowa. She has been Writer-in-Residence for the YMCA Writer’s Voice and an Arizona Arts Grant recipient. Poems from a new poetry collection appear in CUE and Sonora Review and are forthcoming in Tight and the University of New Orleans' Bayou Magazine. She teaches in the Department of English at the University of Arizona.

• ALISON DEMING

Alison Deming is the author of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. The book was listed among the Washington Post's Favorite Books of 1994 and Bloomsbury Review's Best Poetry books of the past fifteen years. She is the author of two additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), and Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005). Deming has also published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), which was a finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed Editions 2001, Credo Series: Notable American Writers on Nature, Community and the Writer Life). She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1996) and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity and the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002). Her small press works include two limited edition chapbooks, Girls in the Jungle: What Does it Take for A Woman to Survive in the Arts (Kore Press, 1995) and Anatomy of Desire: The Daughter/Mother Sessions (Kore, 2000), a collaboration with her daughter, the artist Lucinda Bliss. Read more here.

• 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.

• STEVE FEFFER

Steve Feffer's plays have been produced or developed by theatres that include the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre (NY), Philadelphia Festival Theatre, Stages Repertory Theatre (Houston), Whole Art Theatre (Kalamazoo), and the National Jewish Theatre (Chicago).  His publications include The Wizards of Quiz (Dramatists Play Service), and “Little Airplanes of the Heart” in Best American Short Plays 1997-1998 (Applause) and Plays from the Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon (Faber and Faber).  Additional short plays and performance pieces are published by New Issues Press and Heinemann Books.  Steve has won a number of national playwriting awards including the New Jewish Theatre Project Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for Ain’t Got No Home and the Southwest Plays National Children’s Play Award for The House I Call Love.  Steve is a professor of playwriting in the Creative Writing Program at Western Michigan University.

• JAIMY GORDON

Jaimy Gordon's third novel, Bogeywoman, was on the Los Angeles Times Best Books List for 2000, as well as on Context's booksellers' list of the Most Important Works of Fiction published that year. Gordon was born and raised in Baltimore, a city which figures prominently in Bogeywoman. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping , was published in 1990 by Algonquin Books. Often described as a woman's road novel, the book was an American Library Association Notable Book for 1990, and in 1991 it won the author an Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Gordon is also the author of a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue (Burning Deck), a narrative poem, The Bend, The Lip, The Kid (Sun), and the underground fantasy classic, Shamp of the City-Solo (McPherson & Company). She also translates the fiction of Maria Beig from the German, most recently Hermine, an Animal Life , a novel (forthcoming in 2005 from New Issues). Gordon has received grants for her fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College. Her short story about horseracing, "A Night's Work," was chosen for Best American Short Stories 1995, and she is completing a fourth novel , Lord of Misrule, about the racetrack.

• RON GRANT

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.

• ROBIN HEMLEY

Robin Hemley is the author of seven books of nonfiction and fiction, and the recipient of a number of awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, and the Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction.  His nonfiction titles include, a memoir, Nola, a Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness (Graywolf),a book of investigative journalism, Invented Eden, the Elusive Disputed History of the Tasaday (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, University of Nebraska), and the craft book, Turning Life into Fiction (Graywolf).  He is currently working on a new work of nonfiction titled, Do Over, forthcoming from Little Brown in February, 2009.  His nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, and many literary journals.   He is the Director of the Nonfiction Writing program at The University of Iowa.

• CYNTHIA HOGUE

Cynthia Hogue is the Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University and she has published five collections of poetry: Where the Parallels Cross (Whiteknights Press 1984), The Woman in Red (Ahsahta Press 1989), The Never Wife (Mammoth Press 1999), Flux (New Issues Press 2002), and The Incognito Body (Red Hen Press 2006).  Her critical work includes Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity (SUNY P, 1995), and the following co-edited editions: We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Feminist Poetics and Performance Art (U of Alabama P, 2001), Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (U of Iowa P, 2006), and the first edition of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (UP of Florida, 2007).   Her books and essays on poetry, ranging from that of Emily Dickinson to Kathleen Fraser and Harryette Mullen, have explored the possibilities for ethical, poetic subjects and the transformation of consciousness.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• BRET LOTT

Brett Lott is the author of twelve books, most recently the novel Ancient Highway, (Random House 2008); other books include the story collection The Difference Between Women and Men, the nonfiction book Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life, and the novel Jewel, an Oprah Book Club pick. His work has appeared in, among other places, The Yale Review, The New York Times, The Georgia Review and in dozens of anthologies. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1984, studying under James Baldwin, and from 1986 to 2004 he was writer-in-residence and professor of English at The College of Charleston, leaving to take the position of editor and director of the journal The Southern Review at Louisiana State University. Three years later, in the fall of 2007, he returned to The College of Charleston and the job he most loves: teaching. His honors include having been named Fulbright Senior American Scholar and writer-in-residence to Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel, and having spoken on Flannery O’Connor at The White House. He is presently nonfiction editor of the journal Crazyhorse, and a member of the National Council on the Arts.

• ARNOST LUSTIG

Arnots 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.

• STANLEY PLUMLY

Stanley Plumly is the author of six books of poetry. His first collection, "In the Outer Dark," received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; his third, "Out-of-the-Body Travel," was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other titles are "Giraffe," "Summer Celestial," and "Boy on the Step." His sixth collection of poems is called "The Marriage In The Trees." He has also been nominationed for the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Academy of Amerian Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has taught at numerous institutions including Louisiana State University, Ohio University, Princeton, Columbia, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Houston, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1978 and 1979. Stanley Plumly's work has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Awards, Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, and an Academy Award in Literature.

• JAN POHRIBNY

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. His work has been represented in more than fifty exhibitions in Europe 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) and Musée de l‘Elysée, (Lausanne). He has participated in the International Photography festival at Arles. He is a member of the Professional Photographers Association and of the Prague House of Photography. Recently his work was featured in Aperture magazine. Pohribny’s website: www.volny.cz/pohribny

• WILLIAM PITT ROOT

William Pitt Root and his wife, poet Pamela Uschuk, live in Southwestern Colorado near the Weminuche Wilderness with a cadre of animal companions including the wolf-dogs Happy and Lulu, plus Sadie (born a kitty, she soon opted to be a wolf too). Summer 2008, they will team-teach a workshop for the Prague Summer Program. When not off giving readings or acting as poetry editor for CutThroat, A Journal of the Arts, Root enjoys hiking, kayaking, canoeing, or just heading off for the backcountry with an old SLR Nikon in his even older Land Cruiser. Poetry, he suggests, is a news and weather report from the soul.

• SUSAN RIBNER

Susan Ribner has taught writing at the City University of New York (CUNY) for eighteen 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 and 2007)-a creative-nonfiction manuscript peer review workshop-which will be offered again at the Prague Summer Program in July 2008. 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, and the Jewish Women's Literary Annual. 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).

• 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.

• PAMELA USCHUK

Pam Uschuk was called by The Bloomsbury Review "one of the most insightful and spirited poets today." She is the author of four books of poems, the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert, One Legged Dancer, Scattered Risks (nominated by Ploughshares for the 2005 Zacharias Poetry Award as well as nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) published by Wings Press and Without the Comfort of Stars: New and Selected Poems (2007 Sampark Press, New Delhi and London). She is also the author of several chapbooks of poems. Future publications include Crazy Love, a collection of poems from Wings Press. Read more here.

• MICHAEL WATERS

Michael Waters' eight books of poetry include Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize), and Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997) from BOA Editions, and Bountiful (1992), The Burden Lifters (1989), and Anniversary of the Air (1985) from Carnegie Mellon UP. His several edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry Review and Rolling Stone. In 2004 he chaired the poetry panel for the National Book Award. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and four Pushcart Prizes, he teaches at Monmouth University in New Jersey and in the Drew University MFA Program.

• DOMINIKA WINTEROVA

Dominka Winternova taught at Charles University before becoming a freelance interpreter and translator. A co-founder of the Prague Summer Program (with Richard Katrovas), she has organized and directed the Czech Literature Lecture Series since its inception, and been the PSP’s in-country coordinator since 1997. She is the author of a scholarly article that was published in the Czech Republic’s leading journal of linguistics, and of numerous translations of Czech poetry and prose which have appeared in Indiana Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review and Poetry East.