2009 UND WRITERS CONFERENCE

“WIT”

Charles Baxter is the author, most recently, of The Soul Thief, and of Saul and Patsy. His third novel, The Feast of Love, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into a film by Robert Benton, starring Morgan Freeman. He has published two other novels, First Light and Shadow Play, four books of stories, most recently Believers, essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House and Beyond Plot , and a book of poems, Imaginary Paintings, was published by Paris Review Editions. He has received the Award of Merit in the Short Story and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix St. Valentine in France, and the Catalan Booksellers’ Association Award for book of the year in Spain. He now lives in Minneapolis and is currently the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.

University of North Dakota alumnus Chuck Klosterman’s most recent book is Downtown Owl: A Novel, although he is perhaps best known for his numerous works of nonfiction, including Fargo Rock City; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto; Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story; and Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. Klosterman was a senior writer at SPIN and writes a monthly column, “Chuck Klosterman’s America,” for Esquire, where he wrote that magazine’s infamous 70th anniversary cover story on Britney Spears. Klosterman has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, ESPN Magazine and The Believer. His work has been anthologized in Dave Egger’s Best American Non-Essential Reading series and is regularly chosen for the prestigious Da Capo Best Music Writing annual.

Poet Jacqueline Osherow is the author of five books, Looking for Angels in New York, Conversations with Survivors, With a Moon in Transit, Dead Men’s Praise, and most recently The Hoopoe’s Crown. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters as well as a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, Twentieth Century American Poetry, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, and Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998). She is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Steve Almond’s nonfiction book Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America was a New York Times Bestseller, and was featured on Food Network. He is the author of two collections of short stories, My Life in Heavy Metal and

The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, the collaborative novel (with Julianna Baggott) Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions, and most recently, another collection of nonfiction, Not that You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions.

Karen Russell is the author of a collection of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and the forthcoming novel Swamplandia!. She has been featured in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue, and New York magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She teaches at Williams College.

Greg Williamson is the author of two poetry collections: The Silent Partner, which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize in 1995, and Errors in the Script. Winner of the 1998 Whiting Award, his work has appeared in such journals as The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and The New Republic. He is a regular member of the faculty of the renowned Sewanee Writers Conference, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.


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