Interviews

MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow George Saunders is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, including Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as a collection of essays and a book for children. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Kim Barnes is the author of In the Kingdom of Men, named a best book of 2012 by San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Oregonian, and long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award in nonfiction for her first memoir, In the Wilderness, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ online, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Oprah, Good Housekeeping, Fourth Genre, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Larry Woiwode’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Harpers, GQ, The New York Times, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and others, along with two dozen stories in The New Yorker. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and is included in four volumes of Best American Short Stories. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Lannan Fellow, a U. S. State Department Traveling Artist, and in 1995 was awarded the Medal of Merit from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for “distinction in the art of the short story.” He is poet laureate of North Dakota.

Laura Kasischke is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2012. She has published eight novels, two of which have been made into feature films—“The Life Before Her Eyes,” and “Suspicious River”—and eight books of poetry. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards. Her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s, and The New Republic. She lives with her family in Chelsea, Michigan and is an Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.

LeAnne Howe is the author of novels, plays, essays, screenplays and poetry. Her latest book, Choctalking on Other Realities, Aunt Lute Books, 2013 is a memoir about her travels abroad. She is co-editor of Seeing Red, Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film, MSUP Press, 2013. An enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, she has won multiple national and international awards including the 2012 USA Artist Ford Fellowship, a $50,000 award from United States Artists. She’s a professor in the MFA program, and American Indian Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Theatre Department at the University of Illinois.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is an internationally recognized public speaker and author of poetry, fiction, and essays. Recent books are Rounding the Human Corners, a Pulitzer nominee, and People of the Whale, also a Pulitzer finalist. Next year her new book, Dark. Sweet. New and Collected Poetry will be published. Her work has received the Colorado Book Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award and a prestigious Lannan Foundation Fellowship, among others. Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Famein 2007 and has recently been the Writer in Residencefor The Chickasaw Nation.

Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has taught in numerous colleges and writing programs including Bowdoin College, Boston University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and is the author of a collection of stories and seven novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The House on Fortune Street and The Flight of Gemma Hardy. She is the fiction editor at Ploughshares magazine and a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston.

Ron Carlson’s newest novel is Return to Oakpine. He is the author of ten books of fiction and his short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies. Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing, is taught widely. He is the author of a book of poems, Room Service. He taught at Arizona State University for twenty years and is now Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine.

William Kittredge grew up on a ranch in the deserts of eastern Oregon. He's a Regents Professor Emeritus at the University of Montana, where he taught Creative Writing for twenty-nine years. His publications include "Owning it All" (essays, out of print), Hole in the Sky (memoir), "The Nature of Generosity" (book length essay), "Southwestern Homelands," "The Best Stories of William Kittredge," "The Next Rodeo" (essays) and The Willow Field (a novel). He's presently finishing Another Summer to Run, a memoir.