33rd Annual Literary Festival
Old Dominion University

October 4-8, 2010

PARTICIPANTS

Blake Bailey - Buzz Bissinger - Bonnie Jo Campbell - Ted Conover - Natalie Diaz - Brenda  A. Flanagan - Jupiter String Quartet - Rodger Kamenetz - Randall Kenan - Dennis Lehane - Sarah Mccoy - Wilbert Rideau - Seni Seneviratne - Rebecca Skloot - Anne Waldman - Writers In Community

Click here for books by festival participants

Blake Bailey

Blake Bailey is the biographer of writers Richard Yates and John Cheever and is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Cheever: A Life was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Bailey is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of Women and Other Animals, Q Road, and American Salvage.  She is the winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction and the Southern Review’s 2008 Eudora Welty Prize.  Her stories have appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Ontario Review.  American Salvage was a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.

Ted Conover

Ted Conover is the critically-acclaimed author of Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes; Whiteout; Coyotes: A Journey Across the Border with America’s Mexican Migrants; and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  His latest work is The Routes of Man, which explores the ways roads are changing the world.

Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mohave Indian Reservation in Needles, California.  After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for four years, she returned to ODU to complete her MFA.  She has been awarded the 2007 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry and the 2007 Tobias Wolff Fiction Prize.  Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. 

Brenda  A. Flanagan

Brenda Flanagan left school in Trinidad at age 14 to help support her family.  In 1967 she came to the USA, where she worked as a domestic servant.  Marriage and motherhood further kept her from an education until 1975, when she began her studies at the University of Michigan.  She is the author of the prize-winning novel You Alone Are Dancing, a collection of stories, In Praise of Island Women and Other Crimes, and the forthcoming Allah in the Islands.

Jupiter String Quartet

The Jupiters have been awarded numerous chamber music honors, including First Prize in the Banff International String Quartet Competition, Grand Prize in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, membership in Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society Two, and Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award, which “promotes a rising young string quartet whose artistry demonstrates that it is in the process of establishing a major career.”  Most recently, they received an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet and author. He wrote the international bestseller The Jew in the Lotus and the National Jewish Book Award-winning Stalking Elijah. His five books of poetry include The Lowercase Jew.  Kamenetz has been called “the most formidable of the Jewish-American poets.”  His latest book, The History of Last Night’s Dream, was featured on Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series.

Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan is the author of novels, stories, and nonfiction, including A Visitation of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and The Fire This Time.  He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane is the author of A Drink Before the War, Darkness, Take My Hand, Sacred, Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain, Mystic River, The Given Day, and Shutter Island. Mystic River was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction.  Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor trailers.  He has written episodes for the acclaimed series The Wire.

Sarah Mccoy

Sarah McCoy graduated from Virginia Tech with a BA in journalism and public relations.  She received her MFA in Fiction from Old Dominion University.  Sarah's debut novel is titled The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico.  She is working on a second novel. 

Wilbert Rideau

Wilbert Rideau was once a death row inmate in Angola Prison in Louisiana.  Since his 2005 trial and release after 44 years, former Angolite editor Rideau has devoted himself to educating people about the realities of the world behind bars.  His autobiography, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, is more than a tale of personal transformation and triumph; it is also the story of how the Louisiana State Penitentiary changed from the bloodiest prison in America to one of the safest.

Seni Seneviratne

Seni Seneviratne is a writer, singer, photographer, and performer.  She was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, to an English mother and a Sri Lankan father.  Her poetry and prose are published in the UK, Denmark, Canada and South Africa.  Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin is her first poetry collection.

Rebecca Skloot is a science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; Columbia Journalism Review; and many other publications.  Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published in 2010 to critical and popular acclaim.  She is a contributing editor at Popular Science, and has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW.

Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman is the author of over 40 books and is an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement.  In 1974, Allen Ginsberg, Waldman and others founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, where she remains a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Director of Naropa’s Summer Writing Program.  Waldman and her son Ambrose Bye perform together and have created a YouTube channel titled Fast Speaking Music, featuring music and poetry videos.

Writers In Community

Writers in Community is a non-profit program dedicated to helping the diverse communities of Hampton Roads by cultivating literacy and creativity.  Under the auspices of the Old Dominion University Creative Writing Program, Writers in Community works with local organizations to reach out to children and adults who can benefit from the opportunity to express themselves artistically.  By introducing people to the pleasures of reading and writing, Writers in Community promotes literacy, self-esteem, and self-expression.