UIUC Creative Writing

Influential author and critic William Gass will read from his work at this special Carr Reading Series headline event of the 2009 AWP Conference. Professor Gordon Hutner will join acclaimed writers Mary Jo Bang, Kathryn Davis, and Rikki Ducornet in a tribute to Gass's contribution to American letters. Steve Davenport, Associate Director of Creative Writing, will introduce the event. (Conference registration is required to attend this event. Visit awpwriter.org for more information.)

David Jauss is the author of two collections of short stories: Black Maps (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), which won the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction, and Crimes of Passion (Story Press, 1984), as well as a collection of essays on the craft of fiction, Alone With All That Could Happen (Writer's Digest Books, 2008). He is also the author of two poetry collections, You Are Not Here (Fleur-de-Lis, 2002) and Improvising Rivers (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995). The recipient of fellowships from the James A. Michener Center for Writers and the National Endowment for the Arts, Jauss has had fiction and poetry anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses, and Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah Poetry. Currently, he teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of six collections of poetry, including most recently The Wave-Maker (W.W. Norton, 2008). She is also the author of six children's books, including the forthcoming William Edmondton and His Stone Carvings. The recipient of numerous awards for poetry, including the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Prize for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Spires currently resides in Baltimore with her husband and daughter and teaches at Goucher College, where she holds a Chair for Distinguished Achievement.

Sherwin Bitsui is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship, and a 2006 Whiting Award. His first book, Shapeshift, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2003. Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, he currently lives in Tucson.

Hannah Tinti's work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2003. Her first novel,The Good Thief, was published in 2008 by The Dial Press (U.S.) and Headline (U.K. and Australia) and received starred reviews from Kirkusand Booklist. Her short-story collection, Animal Crackers (Dial, 2004), has been sold in fifteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is the editor of One Story magazine.

Patrick Rosal is the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books, 2004), finalist for the Asian-American Writers' Workshop Literary Awards and winner of the AAWW Member's Choice Award. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award. His work has appeared in journals such as North American Review, Columbia, Folio, and many anthologies including The NuyorAsian Anthology, Pinoy Poetics, and The Beacon Best. He has been a featured reader at many venues around the country, in Buenos Aires, London, and on the BBC radio program "The World Today". His second full-length collection, My American Kundiman, was published by Persea Books in fall 2006.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Mariko Nagai has lived in Europe and America most of her life, earning a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from New York University, where she was the Erich Maria Remarque Poetry Fellow. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Pushcart Award twice, in both poetry and short story, and has received numerous fellowships and scholarships from art foundations and writers’ conferences. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, among others. She also translates modern and contemporary Japanese poems and fiction into English. Currently, she teaches creative writing and literature at Temple University Japan Campus, where she also directs the Writing Programs.

Mark Costello is the author of The Murphy Stories and of Middle Murphy. His work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories. The Murphy Stories won the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction.

A recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and five grants from the Illinois Arts Council, Mr. Costello has served as visiting writer at many universities and colleges, among them Dartmouth College, Amherst College, The University of New Hampshire, The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, The University of Arizona, and the University of Oregon. He has held the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and was, for a year, writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Mark Costello is a native of Decatur, Illinois. He is presently a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Katherine Min is the author of Secondhand World (Random House, 2006). Katherine Min’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been widely anthologized, most recently in The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize. “Eyelids” was listed as one of 100 distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 1997. “The Brick” was read on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts program in 1999. “Courting a Monk” won a Pushcart Prize.

Roy Kesey is the author of the novella Nothing in the World (Bullfight Press 2006) and the story collection All Over (Dzanc Books, 2007). Roy's work has appeared in over 50 top flight literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and Georgia Review. Several of the stories in All Over first appeared in journals such as Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Other Voices, and The Iowa Review. His story "Wait" was included in Best American Short Stories 2007.

Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a native Chicagoan. Her first book, The Grass Dancer, was published in 1994 and awarded the PEN/Hemingway Prize. Her second book, Roofwalkers, was published in 2001 and awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.