A Symposium on the Art of Memoir
“I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead” – Samuel Goldwyn
Author Biographies
A. Manette Ansay
A. Manette Ansay was born in Lapeer, Michigan, in 1964, and grew up in Port Washington, Wisconsin, among 67 cousins and over 200 second cousins. She started writing as a New Year's resolution on January 1st, 1988, after developing a muscle disorder which made it necessary for her to find a career she could manage sitting down.
Her first novel, Vinegar Hill, was published in 1994, followed by a story collection, Read This and Tell Me What it Says in 1995. She has since published three more novels: Sister (1996), River Angel (1998), and Midnight Champagne (1999), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She's been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Friends of American Writers Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards, among others. Vinegar Hill was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her November 1999 Book Club Selection. Ansay's memoir, Limbo, was published in 2001.
Currently she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, where she is Associate Professor of English.
Photo: Preston Merchant
Madeleine Blais
Madeleine Blais is the author of The Heart Is An Instrument, a collection of journalistic pieces; In These Girls, Hope Is A Muscle, a finalist in the category of general nonfiction by the National book Critics' Circle and Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family, selected by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) for its national book award in 2002 and was also chosen as Massachusetts Book of the year. She began her career in journalism and worked at several newspapers, including at Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald where she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Since coming to the University of Massachusetts in 1987, she had taught many courses, including Diaries, Memoirs and Journals, the subject of her new book manuscript. She serves on the editorial board of two leading nonfiction literary journals, River Teeth and Points of Entry, and she is also on the advisory board for the masters program in creative nonfiction at Goucher College.
Denise Brown
Denise Brown's new memoir, The Unspeakable, is the painful and evocative tale of her life in the months after her husband, Connecticut's lottery president, was killed. She lives in Vermont and is working on a novel.
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Dana Brand
Dana Brand is a Professor of English and American Literature at Hofstra University. He is the author of The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 1991) and numerous articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and film. He is currently at work on a collection of personal essays entitled The Middle of My Life and he has completed a volume of essays entitled Mets Fan, soon to be published by McFarland, about his 45 years as a fan of the new york Mets. His website is metsfanbook.com and the associated blog is metsfanbook.com/blog/.
Rand Richards Cooper
Rand Richards Cooper grew up in New London, CT, and graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College. He is the author of a novel, The Last to Go (Harcourt Brace), and a story collection, Big As Life (The Dial Press). His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Esquire, and many other magazines, as well as in the Selected Shorts series on NPR; his short story, “Johnny Hamburger,” is included in Best American Short Stories 2003 (Houghton Mifflin). The Last to Go was produced for television by ABC. Cooper has been Writer in Residence at Amherst and Emerson colleges.
A frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Cooper serves as a film critic for Commonweal and a contributing editor for Bon Appétit, where his features have been included in Best American Food Writing. His 1997 Commonweal essay on assisted suicide won a citation from the Catholic Journalists of America, and his cover story on “The Great Profs of Connecticut” for Northeast Magazine was awarded first prize by the Education Writers Association of America. Cooper is also the recipient of a 2002 Lowell Thomas Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Travel Writers. Recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the Connecticut Commission for the Arts, he lives in Hartford with his wife, Molly, and their newborn daughter, Larkin.
Debra Dickerson
PLEASE NOTE THAT DEBRA DICKERSON HAS HAD TO CANCEL HER APPEARANCE AT THE SYMPOSIUM BECAUSE OF A FAMILY CRISIS. SHE SENDS HER REGRETS.
Deborah Digges
Deborah Digges was born and raised in Missouri. She is the author of three books of poems. Her first book, Vesper Sparrows, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize from New York University. Late in the Millennium was published in 1989, and Rough Music, which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize, was published in 1995. Digges has written two memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001). She has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Digges lives in Massachusetts, where she is a professor of English at Tufts University.
Lucy Ferriss
Lucy Ferriss is the author of eight books, most recently the memoir Unveiling the Prophet: The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante (U. Missouri, 2005) and Nerves of the Heart, a novel (U. Tennessee, 2002). Her collection Leaving the Neighborhood and Other Stories was the 2000 winner of the Mid-List First Series Award. Other short fiction and essays have appeared most recently in Missouri Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Georgia Review, and have received recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Faulkner Society, the Fulbright Commission, and the George Bennett Fund, among others, She received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and currently lives in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College.
Sheila Fisher
Sheila Fisher received her B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Honors in English from Smith College, where she majored in English and Latin, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. She joined the English Department at Trinity in 1984, and she is currently Chair of the Department. As a medievalist who specializes in Chaucer, late fourteenth-century English literature, and medieval women writers, Sheila has published a book on Chaucer and articles on the Gawain-poet and medieval romance, as well as co-editing a volume of feminist contextual essays on medieval and renaissance writings. She is currently at work on a poetic translation of the greatest hits of The Canterbury Tales.
Francine du Plessix Gray (Keynote Speaker)
Francine du Plessix Gray has chronicled the lives of Simone Weil, Marquis de Sade, and several exotic others, but prior to Them, Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, she had never before written extensively about two extraordinary people she knew quite well: her own parents. Her mother, Tatiana du Plessix, was a gorgeous, sophisticated White Russian fashion icon who had been linked romantically to famed poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, Gray's stepfather, was a gifted magazine editor and artist who eventually presided over the entire Condé Nast empire. Both had been married before they began their passionate affair, Tatiana to a prominent French diplomat. After Hitler seized Paris, they fled to America with young Francine. Them presents both Alexander and Tatiana as brilliant and bold but also as neurotic, narcissistic, and ruthlessly ambitious. The author refuses to airbrush her parental portraits, but her insights about them are gently reflective, even forgiving. A much-acclaimed biographer, Gray is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.
Photo: Nancy Crampton
Bret Lott
Bret Lott is the author of the novels The Man Who Owned Vermont, A Stranger's House, Jewel, Reed's Beach, and The Hunt Club; the story collection A Dream of Old Leaves, and the memoir Fathers, Sons and Brothers. Originally from Los Angeles, Lott attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he studied writing under the late James Baldwin, and taught at Ohio State University and the College of Charleston before taking over the editorship of the venerable Southern Review. He is also on the faculty of the MFA Program in Writing at Vermont College.
Karen McElmurray
Karen McElmurray earned her B.A. at Berea College, an M.F.A. at the University of Virginia, and the Ph.D. at the University of Georgia. She has taught at the latter two institutions and several others, including Georgia State University, where she is now Assistant Professor of English. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in The Kenyon Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her books are Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (a novel) and Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey (a memoir of the relinquishment of her son to state-supported adoption in Kentucky in 1973), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction.
Colin McEnroe
Colin McEnroe is a radio talk show host, print journalist, and humble teacher of a Trinity College course on blogs. He is also the author of My Father's Footprints, winner of the Connecticut Book Award in Biography for 2003.
Josip Novakovich
Croatian-born Josip Novakovich moved to the United States at the age of twenty. He has published a novel (April Fool's Day, HarperCollins), three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters), two collections of autobiographical essays (Plum Brandy: Croatian Journeys and Apricots from Chernobyl), and was anthologized in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and O.Henry Prize Stories. His textbook, Fiction Writer’s Workshop, was a Book of the Month Club selection. His work has been published in translation in a dozen countries, including Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, and Italy. He received the Whiting Writer’s Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York City Public Library. His work has appeared in many journals, including Paris Review, Threepenny Review, The New York Times Magazine, and European Magazine. He teaches in the MFA program at Penn State University.
Irene Papoulis
Irene Papoulis is a Senior Lecturer in the A.K. Smith Center for Writing
and Rhetoric at Trinity. She teaches creative nonfiction writing.
Leila Philip
Leila Philip is the author of The Road Through Miyama, (Random House 1989, Vintage 1991, 1992) for which she received the Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction in 1990; Hidden Dialogue; A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States (Japan Society Public Affairs Publishing Program 1993; and her most recent book, the award-winning memoir, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Penguin 2002). Her writing has been recognized by numerous awards including fellowships from The National Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Radcliffe Research and Study Center, The American Association of University Women, the Deming Memorial Fund and the Futhermore Foundation. She has been the James Thurber Writer in Residence at the Ohio State University and a Granville Hicks endowed resident at Yaddo. She just received a Guggenheim fellowship for 2008.
Clare Rossini
Clare Rossini has published three collections of poems: Lingo (University of Akron, 2006); Winter Morning with Crow (University of Akron, 1997), which was selected by Donald Justice for the l996 Akron Poetry Prize, then was a finalist for a Small Press Book Award and for PEN’s 1999 Joyce Osterweil Award; and Selections from the Claudia Poems (Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, 1996). Rossini’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review, and Poetry, as well as in textbooks and anthologies, including Manthology (University of Iowa, 2006); Poets for the New Century (David Godine, 2002) An Introduction to Poetry (ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, Longman, 2002) and Best American Poetry ( Scribners, 1997). She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Bush Foundation. Rossini teaches in the English Department at Trinity College, where she is director of the InterArts Program.
Photo: Pablo Delano
Scott Russell Sanders
Scott Russell Sanders’s nineteen books include novels (Bad Man Ballad, Terrarium, The Engineer of Beasts) and collections of short stories (Wilderness Plots, Fetching the Dead), but his chief work has been in literary nonfiction (The Paradise of Bombs, Secrets of the Universe, Staying Put, Writing from the Center, Hunting for Hope, The Force of the Spirit, The Country of Language). His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Audubon, Orion, Georgia Review, and other magazines, and in numerous anthologies. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lilly Endowment. Sanders' work has also received the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Book Award, and the Ohio Book Award. For his work in nonfiction, Sanders received a Lannan Literary Award in 1995. He has been honored with Indiana University's highest teaching award, as well as the rank of Distinguished Professor.
Sanders has been the subject of two videos from the Lannan Foundation and of interviews or profiles in Fourth Genre, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. For an essay which appeared in Audubon, where he is a contributing editor, he won the John Burroughs Natural History Essay Award for 2000. His essay "The Force of Spirit" appeared in The Best American Essays 2000, the fourth time his work has been selected for this annual collection of outstanding nonfiction. Sanders' most recent book is A Private History of Awe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), a coming-of-age memoir, love story, and spiritual testament.
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
The recovery of repressed memories of the 1953 murder by a serial killer of an 11-year-old friend and neighbor in a blue-collar enclave in Hartford, Conn., triggered Smith's absorbing memoir, Girls of Tender Age. In recalling her childhood, she is compelled to describe her upbringing in a fractured family whose existence centered on placating her psychotic older brother, Tyler, who today would be identified as an autistic savant. The narrative is further enriched by the author's investigations into the life and crimes of the psychopath who preyed on her friend and other little girls, and by her insights about the unequal rights of girls and women before feminism. The making of a writer is the subtext here; forbidden by her strict Catholic upbringing to question her parents, Smith was forced to develop her imagination. She was blessed with a nurturing father, who was the lifesaving antidote to her disillusioned and resentful mother. Smith's ironic narrative voice, familiar to readers of her Poppy Rice mysteries and her sensitive and witty novels, serves her well. Larger than the sum of its parts, this book illuminates a social class as it recounts a tangled story of a family and a crime.
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith is the author of eight novels as well as this memoir. She has lived all her life in Connecticut, except for two years when she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon.
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Beverly Wall
Professor Beverly Wall is the director of the A.K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric at Trinity College.
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“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful” – George Orwell