The MFA Program is thrilled to announce its 2013 visiting writers: in poetry, Linda Gregerson and Alicia Ostriker, and in creative nonfiction, Brian Doyle and Cheryl Strayed. Brian Doyle is an award-winning author, essayist, and editor of Portland Magazine. Linda Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Alicia Ostriker has written fourteen volumes of poetry and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Cheryl Strayed is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Wild, which has been picked up by Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and has been optioned for film. For more about these esteemed writers, read on after the jump.
Brian Doyle is an award-winning author, essayist, and editor of Portland Magazine. Portland is annually ranked among the ten best university magazines in America. Doyle's books include Saints Passionate & Peculiar, Credo, and Two Voices. His most recent book, Mink River, won the Editor’s Choice Prize for fiction. Doyle’s own essays have appeared in many periodicals, including The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Commonweal, Georgia Review, and Harper’s. His essays have also been reprinted in the Best American Essays anthologies and in Best Spiritual Writing.
Linda Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections: Magnetic North (2007), Waterborne (2002), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), and Fire in the Conservatory (1982). She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.
She has served on the faculties of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers Conference, The Prague Seminars, The Bear River Writer's Conference, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Cheryl Strayed is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Wild (Alfred A. Knopf), the advice essay collection Tiny Beautiful Things (Vintage Books), and the novel Torch (Houghton Mifflin). Wild will also be published in Brazil, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Korea, Israel, the United Kingdom commonwealth, Taiwan, Denmark, France and Italy. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. It has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon's production company, Pacific Standard. IndieBound selected Wild as their #1 Indie Next pick for April, Barnes and Noble named it a "Discover Great New Writers" pick on their Summer 2012 list, and Amazon named it a "best of March" pick. Strayed's debut novel, Torch was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers from the Pacific Northwest. Strayed has written the "Dear Sugar" column on TheRumpus.net since March 2010. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Self, The Missouri Review, Brain, Child, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun and elsewhere. The winner of a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, her essays and stories have been published in The Best American Essays, The Best New American Voices, and other anthologies. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She's a founding member of VIDA: Women In Literary Arts, and serves on their board of directors. Raised in Minnesota, Strayed now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, the filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, and their two children.
Brian Doyle is an award-winning author, essayist, and editor of Portland Magazine. Portland is annually ranked among the ten best university magazines in America. Doyle's books include Saints Passionate & Peculiar, Credo, and Two Voices. His most recent book, Mink River, won the Editor’s Choice Prize for fiction. Doyle’s own essays have appeared in many periodicals, including The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Commonweal, Georgia Review, and Harper’s. His essays have also been reprinted in the Best American Essays anthologies and in Best Spiritual Writing.
Linda Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections: Magnetic North (2007), Waterborne (2002), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), and Fire in the Conservatory (1982). She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.
She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, and the Modern Poetry Association, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Magnetic North was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Waterborne won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both The Poet's Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Review (UK), and many other publications.
Gregerson is also the author of two volumes of literary criticism, Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (2001) and The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (1995), and the co-editor, with Susan Juster, of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2011). Her essays on lyric poetry and Renaissance literature appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare's Works, The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry, Milton Studies, Criticism, and ELH (English Literary History).
She has served on the faculties of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers Conference, The Prague Seminars, The Bear River Writer's Conference, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, author of fourteen volumes of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy, which received a 2009 National Jewish Book Council Award, and The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011. She has also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the San Francisco Poetry Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America, among others, and has twice been a National Book Award finalist. As a critic Ostriker has published several books on poetry and on the Bible, including The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, and For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. She teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University.
