BENNINGTON, Vt., Jan. 4, 2008 - At the height of each new year, the Bennington College campus swells when some of America’s most acclaimed and celebrated writers come together for the Bennington Writing Seminars, one of two 10-day -residencies in its MFA in writing program. Hundreds of budding writers travel cross-country to join a host of award-winning faculty and writers-in-residence that include former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Faculty and associates offer an evening reading series, free and open to the public, in Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery, VAPA. The readings begin Thursday, January 3, 2008, and will conclude Saturday, January 12, 2008. 

Friday, January 4, 2008, 7:00 pm

Rachel Pastan published her first novel, This Side of Married, in 2004, and her new novel, Lady of the Snakes, is currently in press.  Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Salon.com, and other venues.  She was recognized as one of the Barnes and Nobel Discover Great Writers, has won many prizes for her short fiction, and has been a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left, which won the Best Novel of the Year Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Saturday, January 5, 2008, 7:00 pm

Richard McCann’s book of stories, Mother of Sorrows, was published in 2005 and has been translated into French and Italian.  His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, Esquire, Ploughshares, Ms., Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other magazines.  His books of poems are Ghost Letter and Dream of the Traveler.  He received the O. Henry Prize for fiction in 2007.  Mr. McCann has received a Guggenheim fellowship and has also been awarded fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Washington, DC Arts Commission.

George Scialabba’s first book of nonfiction, Divided Mind, was published in 2006.  His second book, What Are Intellectuals Good For?, will appear this winter.  Mr. Scialabba has published hundreds of reviews and essays in magazines such as Dissent, The Nation, The American Prospect, Agni, The Village Voice, The Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Boston Review, and many others.  He received the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, and the literary award from St. Botolph Club.

Sunday, January 6, 2008, 7:00 pm

Tom Bissell's books are Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative; Speak, Commentary, a work of satire he co-wrote with Jeff Alexander; God Lives in St. Petersburg, a story collection; and The Father of All Things, a hybrid work of history and memoir. His nonfiction, fiction, and reviews have been widely published. Bissell is currently working on a travel book about the tombs of the Twelve Apostles. In 2006 he won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work has appeared in six languages.

Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, most recently The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, and seven novels, including Italian Fever, The Great Divorce, Mary Reilly, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story told from the viewpoint of a housemaid, which was filmed with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich, and the 2003 Orange Prize-winning Property. She is also the author of a non-fiction work about St. Francis of Assisi: Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis.

Monday, January 7, 2008, 7:00 pm

Robin Hemley is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction. His awards include The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from the Chicago Tribune, two Pushcart Prizes, The Independent Press Book Award, an Editor's Choice Award from the American Library Association and many others.  His work has been widely anthologized and translated.  He is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Bellingham Review, a former Faculty Chair of Vermont College, and is currently the Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa, as well as founder and organizer of the biennial conference, NonfictioNOW.  His stories and essays have recently appeared in the New York Times, The Southern Review, New York Magazine, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, New Sudden Fiction, Best American Fantasy, The Touchstone Anthology of Creative Nonfiction, 1970- the Present, and others.  His latest book, Do Over, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in Spring, 2009.

Major Jackson’s books of poems are Hoops and Leaving Saturn. Hoops was selected as a finalist for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.   He has published poems in various magazines, and his work has been anthologized widely.  He received a Whiting Fellowship in 2003.  He has also been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008, 7:00 pm

Sven Birkerts’s newest book, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then Again, was recently published by Graywolf Press, which also published Reading Life: Books for the Ages in 2007.   In 2002 Viking published My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time. Other books by Mr. Birkerts include The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth Century Literature, The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry, and American Energies: Essays on Fiction.    Mr. Birkerts has published reviews and essays in On the Poetry of Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Mirabella, Parnassus, The New Republic, WigWag, and many other places.  He edits the journal Agni at Boston University.  He was a 1994 Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship.  In 1985 he was awarded the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. 

Thomas Lynch is a writer and funeral director.  His collections of poems include Skating with Heather Grace, Grimalkin & Other Poems, and Still Life in Milford.   The Undertaking, his first book of nonfiction won The American Book Award, The Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  It is published in eight languages. A book of short stories, Late Fictions, and a new collection of poems, Walking Papers, is forthcoming.  His work has been the subject of two documentary films, each titled “The Undertaking,” both broadcast in 2007, one by PBS/Frontline in the USA and the other in Ireland and the UK by Cathal Black/Little Bird Productions for RTE and the BBC.          

Thursday, January 10, 2008, 7:00 pm

Frank Bidart’s first volume of poetry, Golden State (1973), was selected by poet Richard Howard for the Braziller Poetry series, but it wasn't until the publication of The Sacrifice (1983) that Bidart's poetry began to attract a wider readership. Bidart's early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990).  His recent volumes include Star Dust (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Music Like Dirt (2002), and Desire (1997), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. Mr. Bidart’s honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" in 1981. In 2007, he received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.  Bidart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003.

Askold Melnyczuk’s third novel, will appear in the spring of 2008.  His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead, was a Los Angeles Times Best of the Year for 2002.  His first, What Is Told, was a New York Times Notable Book.  His work has been translated into Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian.  In 1997, Mr. Melnyczuk received a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award in Fiction, and he has also received the McGinnis Prize in Fiction and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Saturday, January 12, 2008, 10:30 am                                                    

Debra Spark is author of the novelsCoconuts for the Saint andThe Ghost of Bridgetown and editor of the anthologyTwenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers.  Her most recent book isCurious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing.  Spark has also written forEsquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times (travel section and book review),Food and Wine,Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post andThe San Francisco Chronicle, among other places.  She has been the recipient of several awards including a NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book.  She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

Note:  This reading will be held in TISHMAN AUDITORIUM.

For more information please visit www.bennington.edu or call 802-440-4743.

Bennington College (www.bennington.edu), a nationally recognized liberal arts college with enrollment of 720 students (570 undergraduate, 150 graduate) is located on 470 acres in the Green Mountains of southwestern Vermont. The College offers a full range of study, with programs in the humanities, natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and visual and performing arts, as well as a five-year Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Teaching. Additional graduate programs include a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, a Master of Fine Arts in Performing Arts, and a Master of Arts in Teaching a Second Language.

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