Conference Faculty and Speakers

Below are listed some of the instructors, panelists, and readers who will lead this summer's Writers' Conference. Please select from this list if registering for an individual manuscript consultation.

Veronica Arreola
Veronica I. Arreola is a professional feminist, writer and a mom. She directs the Center for Research on Women and Gender's award winning Women in Science and Engineering program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Veronica has been writing and organizing online since 1996. Her writing has been featured in print by Bitch, Ms., and in the recently released book, PunditMom's Mothers of Intention: How Women & Social Media Are Revolutionizing Politics in America. You can find her online at VivalaFeminista.com, her blog since 2007 where she explores the intersection of motherhood and feminism. Arreola earned both her bachelor's degree in biological sciences and master's degree in public administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Jim Aylesworth
Jim Aylesworth tells his stories with generous doses of loud sounds, rhythms and rhymes. His teaching career taught him that these are the elements children like in a story - especially when it is being read aloud.

Aylesworth's experiences as a teacher gave him a great appreciation for children's books. And while he agrees teaching requires much patience, Aylesworth says that books really help. He is amazed how a good book will make a room full of children sit and pay attention. Having read hundreds of books to his students over the years, Aylesworth found himself wanting to be a bigger part of this world of children's stories. And so he decided to write his own books, and has stuck with this goal ever since his first work, Hush Up!, was published in 1980.

All of Aylesworth's stories, whether filled with sounds of a country night or catchy rhymes, find their way back to his inspiration - his students and what he found that they liked. So, in Hanna's Hog, Aylesworth includes a loud hog call. In The Completed Hickory Dickory Dock, he offers numerous bouncy nonsensical rhymes. In Country Crossing, the sounds of the still countryside and a train passing fill the night. And in Old Black Fly, a repetitious, rhythmic chant follows a pesky fly in its journey through a house.

M. Molly Backes
M. Molly Backes is the Assistant Director of StoryStudio Chicago, where she teaches creative writing classes for adults and teens, and the author of the young adult novel The Princesses of Iowa (Candlewick, 2012). Molly pens the "Writing Tips" column for The Prairie Wind, has been a guest blogger at Puffery, Brood, and This Wasn't in the Plan, and is a frequent contributor to StoryStudio's blog Cooler by the Lake. Occasionally, she even updates her own blog mollybackes.blogspot.com. She lives in Chicago with her family.

Eula Biss
Eula Biss is the author of The Balloonists and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, which won the 2009 National Books Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She has received a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, an Illinois Arts Council grant and a Pushcart Prize. Biss is co-founder and co-editor of Essay Press, a small press dedicated to publishing innovative essays in book form. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, Norton's The Best Creative Nonfiction 2007, and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, the North American Review, the Iowa Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper's. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Scott Blackwood
Scott Blackwood’s novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here won the AWP Prize for the Novel, the Texas Institute of Letters for best fiction, and was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Award for fiction. His award-winning collection of stories In the Shadow of Our House was published in 2001. His stories and essays have appeared most recently in the Gettysburg Review, Boston Review, American Short Fiction, Southwest Review, Austin American Statesman, AustinChronicle, American Primitive Volume II, and Bookslut.com. Blackwood teaches in and directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

John Bresland
John Bresland works in video, radio, and print. His audio essays have aired on National Public Radio’s Weekend America, and his video essays have been published online by various literary journals, including Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Requited,and Wag’s Review. Bresland has also curated video essay sections for Blackbird and Triquarterly. His print essays can be read at Brevity, North American Review, Minnesota Monthly,and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and digital media at Northwestern University.

Henry Carrigan
Henry Carrigan is Assistant Director and Senior Editor at Northwestern University Press. Before coming to NUP, he was publisher at Continuum International. He writes about books for Publishers Weekly, BookPage, Library Journal, and ForeWord, and he has written for numerous newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Orlando Sentinel, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post Book World.  He taught Humanities at lake Forest College, Russian Literature at Northwestern University, Humanities at Otterbein College in Ohio, and Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and worked for ten years as a reference librarian at the Westerville Public Library in Westerville, OH. He has led numerous workshops on collection development at the local, regional, and national levels, and he speaks widely on topics ranging from writing and book reviewing to book publishing. Over the past four years, he has been a regular contributor to a number of reference books published by Salem Press, including Magill’s Literary Survey. In the early years, Henry was a columnist for Library Journal for three years as well as Forecasts editor at Publishers Weekly for five years.

Suzanne Clores
Suzanne Clores is a writer, editor, consultant, and teacher. She is the author of Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider (Conari 2000) among other books, essays and stories. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. Currently she lives and teaches in Chicago.

Garnett Kilberg Cohen
Garnett Kilberg Cohen's most recent awards include the 2004 Crazyhorse National Fiction Prize for her short story, "Second Sight"; the 2003 Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review for "Bad News"; a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize; and four awards from the Illinois Council of the Arts, two literary awards for stories, a 2006 finalist fellowship, and a 2001 IlCA Artist's Fellowship for prose of $7,000. Her short stories have appeared in many publications, including American Fiction, Ontario Review, Descant, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and The Nebraska Review. Her first collection of short stories, Lost Women, Banished Souls was published by the University of Missouri Press. She was recently named Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where she is a professor.

Kevin Davis
Kevin Davis is the author of two nonfiction books: Defending the Damned: An Inside Look at a Dark Corner of the Criminal Justice System (Atria, 2007) and The Wrong Man (Avon, 1996). He is a freelance writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Chicago Magazine, USA Weekend, Utne Reader, Writer’s Digest, In These Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, Encyclopedia Britannica, American Bar Association Journal, USA Today the Chicago Tribune and The Rumpus. He is a former staff writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and teaches journalism part time at Loyola University Chicago. He is currently pursuing an MFA at Northwestern.

Beth Finke
NPR commentator Beth Finke writes for the Chicago Tribune, Woman's Day, Dog Fancy and The Bark. Her radio pieces air during the Morning Edition show on National Public Radio, and her work on WBEZ-FM was awarded a Lisagor Award for radio sports reporting and took top prize in Journalism Excellence from the Illinois Associated Press Broadcasters Association. Beth's memoir, Long Time No See, was published by University of Illinois Press in 2003 and released in paperback in 2004. The book is featured on the Book Sense Top Ten list of University Press books and was named one of the Chicago Tribune's favorite non-fiction books of the year. Her children's book about Seeing Eye dogs was published by Blue Marlin Publications and won a Henry Bergh Children's Book Award from the ASPCA. "Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound" is  also featured on the Martha Speaks Book Club list on PBS. Beth teaches a memoir-writing course for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center, sponsored by Mayor Daley's Commission on Aging. She lives in Chicago's Printers Row neighborhood with her husband Michael  Knezovich and her Seeing Eye dog Harper. You can follow her adventures on her "Safe & Sound" blog: http://www.bethfinke.wordpress.com

Reginald Gibbons
Reginald Gibbons is a poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, artist and professor of English at Northwestern University. He earned his M.A. in English and Creative Writing, and a PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford. Reginald is the co-founder and an editor of TriQuarterly Books. His book Creatures of a  Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry. Winner of the Folger Shakespeare Library's 2004 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize and other awards. He is the author of seven volumes of poems including The Ruined Motel (1981), which was the winner of the New Poetry Series publication competition; Saints (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series publication competition; Maybe It Was So (1991), winner of the Carl Sandburg Award; Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997) winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; It's Time (2002), winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of Poetry Prize; and a chapbook, In the Warhouse (2004). Reginald is the author of a book of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches (1991) and a novel, Sweetbitter (1994), which won the 1995 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the 1995 Jesse Jones fiction award. In addition to the Hardison Prize, Reginald's honors include poetry fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council, and other prizes.

Alice George
Alice George's first collection of poetry, This Must Be The Place, was published by Mayapple Press in 2008.  A visual artist, she received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches text/image classes to all ages. A visiting poet in K-12 classrooms, she teaches poetry through the University of Chicago’s Graham School Certificate in Creative Writing program.  She was an editor of RHINO magazine for ten years and now sits on their advisory board.

Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey is the author of Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America (Random House), which received a 2008 Editors’ Choice award from Booklist and a best-books citation from The Chicago Tribune. His previous book, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (Random House), a national and international bestseller, was selected by USA Today as one of the top ten books of 2000. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University.

Kate Harding
Kate Harding edited novels and short story collections for a small press before receiving her MFA in fiction from Vermont College in 2005. As a nonfiction writer, she's co-authored a book, Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere, and blogged for numerous outlets, including Salon, Jezebel, and the L.A. Times. She's currently at work on a collection of essays about classic literature, feminism, and ADHD. Plus some other stuff.

M.M.M. Hayes
M.M.M.Hayes has published nine books as editor & publisher of StoryQuarterly and Hayes fiction has been anthologized in four “Best of …” anthologies: Best American Mystery Stories of 2009, New Stories from the South, Best of the West, and 2Plus2, an International Anthology.” Her fictions have received awards, including a Katherine Anne Porter prize from Nimrod Magazine, a Redbook prize, fantasy awards and conference and screen writing scholarships. They have also appeared in literary and commercial magazines here and abroad, most recently Kenyon Review, Stand Magazine (UK), and War, Literature and the Arts. Hayes recently assisted judging for the Flannery O’Connor Awards out of the University of Georgia, has taught literature at Columbia College of Missouri and given workshops and lectures at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, and regional workshops, while continuing to serve as Senior Contributing Editor for StoryQuarterly.

S. Whitney Holmes
S. Whitney Holmes is the current Managing Editor of Switchback Books and has previously worked as Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and others.

Laurie Lawlor
Since 1986, Laurie Lawlor has written more than 37 award-winning books of fiction and nonfiction for children and young adults. She is the 2010 recipient of the Prairie State Award for Excellence in Writing for Children presented by the Illinois Reading Council.

Shadow Catcher: the Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis won the Carl Sandburg Award and the Golden Kite Honor Book Award. This Tender Place: the Story of a Wetland Year, a natural history/memoir, was selected for Outstanding Achievement by the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards Committee.  Young adult historical novels published recently include The Two Loves of Will Shakespeare, He Will Go Fearless, and Dead Reckoning.

Her newest book, Muddy as a Duck Puddle: Real American Smiles was published in 2010 by Holiday House.  Rachel Carson and her Book that Changed the World will be published in spring 2012.  This biography celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Carson's
pathbreaking Silent Spring.

For the past 20 years, Lawlor has presented informative sessions on writer’s craft and creative process to students of all ages as well as parents, teachers, and librarians. A resident of Evanston with a Masters of Arts in Teaching from National-Louis University, she was trained as a journalist at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  She teaches part-time at National-Louis University in the Writing Program and at Columbia College of Chicago in the Fiction Writing Department, where she has led introductory and advanced classes in writing Young Adult Fiction for undergraduate and graduate students. Visit her website: www.laurielawlor.com.

Simone Meunch
Simone Muench is the author of four poetry books: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Helicon Nine, 2000); Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Sarabande, 2005); Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010); and Disappearing Address co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010). She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and now directs the Writing Program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. She serves on the advisory board of Switchback Books and is an editor for Sharkforum.

James O’Laughlin
James O’Laughlin is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer at Northwestern University. He’s taught writing in the School of Continuing Studies at NU since 1990, and has served in the university’s WCAS Writing Program since 2000, received the Distinguished Teaching Award from Northwestern's School of Continuing Studies in 1999-2000, and in 2005, he was named to the ASG Faculty Honor Roll at Northwestern. He has taught a wide range of courses, including Reading and Writing Fiction, Literary Editing, Irish Literature, Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction, and American Indian Literature.  He was a fiction editor at StoryQuarterly from 1998 until 2007 (and Co-Editor in 2004), and has written reviews of fiction, biography, and philosophy for Booklist. He is at work on a book on writing.

Audrey Petty
Audrey Petty's stories have appeared in such journals as Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, African American Review, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod International Journal and The Massachusetts Review; her poetry has been published in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review. A long-time nonfiction editor for Ninth Letter magazine, Petty's creative nonfiction has appeared in Saveur, Best Food Writing 2006, Cornbread Nation 4, The Southern Review and Oxford American. She's currently at work on an oral history of high-rise public housing communities in Chicago (to be published in 2012 by Voice of Witness series). 

Petty has been awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Colony, the Richard Soref Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she’s also been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Hewlett Foundation. She teaches creative writing at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Elaine Romero
Elaine’s work has been developed, produced, and commissioned(*) by Goodman Theatre, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts*, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alley Theatre*, Magic Theatre*, Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, InterAct Theatre Company*, Curious Theatre Company*, Kitchen Dog Theater*, Urban Stages, Women’s Project and Productions, Working Theater, Short+Sweet Festival, (Australia), InspiraTo Festival (Toronto). Sample publishers: Simon and Schuster, Samuel French, Vintage Books. Romero’s PONZI won a 2010 Edgerton Fund for New American Play Award with Kitchen Dog Theatre for their May 2011 World Premiere. It appeared at Florida Studio Theatre. REVOLUTIONS premiered in Spanish translation at the Panama National Theatre and BARIRIO HOLLYWOOD premiered at Aurora Theatre, also in Spanish translation. REVOLUTIONS will be produced in English in Sydney, Australia. Elaine serves on the board of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She has participated in network programs at CBS and NBC. Elaine attended LA Film School and holds an MFA in Playwriting from UC Davis. She teaches screenwriting, television writing and playwriting at Northwestern University. Elaine is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Kathleen Rooney
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, and the author of the critical study Reading with Oprah: the Book Club that Changed America, the memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object, the essay collection For You For You I Am Trilling These Songs, and the poetry collections Oneiromance (an epithalamion) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (with Elisa Gabbert). Currently at work on her first novel, she lives in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago with her husband, the writer Martin Seay. She blogs sporadically at: www.kathleenrooney.com. 

Roger Rueff
Roger Rueff's award-winning stage plays Hospitality Suite and So Many Words have been produced in the U.S. and around the world. His works for the screen include The Big Kahuna, starring Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito. Mr. Rueff has also authored a collection of poetic proverbs written for his son, titled, Fifty Things I Want My Son to Know (Andrews-McMeel).

Alex Schwartz
J. Alex Schwartz is the Director of Northern Illinois University Press. Prior to becoming Director, Alex was an executive editor at McGraw-Hill and a senior editor at the University of Chicago Press. He did his undergraduate work at Tufts University and his graduate work at Western Connecticut State University and Harvard University. He also lectures on developmental editing for the University of Chicago's editing certificate program. Alex Schwartz is also the Director of Switchgrass Books, the fiction imprint of Northern Illinois University Press. Switchgrass is publishing their first books in the fall of 2009.

Fred Shafer
To Fred Shafer, writing is not just the process of bettering one's story or book, but also the process of bettering oneself. It's a subject he speaks of easily after a career in editing and publishing - several years with TriQuarterly, Northwestern's literary journal - and nearly two decades as an instructor at SCS. Fred also serves as a consultant to novelists and storywriters and a leader of workshops. His own essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in several journals.

Virginia Smith
Virginia Smith is a spring 2011 graduate of Northwestern’s MFA program, with a concentration in poetry. Her work has been twice-nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Award; she currently has four poems forthcoming in moria.

For the last seven years she has worked as a middle school art teacher, with a focus on integrating language-based imagery into the visual arts curriculum. In spring 2011, her eighth-grade students staged several readings from “A Slim Pillar of Song,” a collection of image-based centos they composed.

Christine Sneed
Christine Sneed's story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, won AWP's 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short fiction and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in first fiction category. Portraits has also been long-listed for the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; the winner will be announced in September. Her short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, Southern Review, New England Review, Glimmer Train, The Literary Review, and many other journals. She teaches creative writing for DePaul University, Roosevelt University and will teach for Northwestern University in the spring of 2012.

Cornelia Maude Spelman
Cornelia Maude Spelman (www.corneliaspelman.com) is the author of a memoir, MISSING, and ten picture books for young children.  Her works have been translated into eight languages.  A former therapist, Cornelia writes about the importance of emotions and healthy relationships in the lives of children and families. She has won Illinois Arts Council awards for her nonfiction, and has been awarded a Fellowship at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.  She is also a diarist, currently writing volume #145 of her diaries, which are being archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Unversity.  She is at work on a nonfiction book linked to her memoir, MISSING, and  based on her diaries.

David Standish
David Standish has been the editorial adviser for 12 Magazine Publishing Project prototypes. He also teaches magazine writing. When not teaching, he works as a freelance writer, primarily for magazines. He was an editor at Playboy for 10 years, and has written many articles for that magazine. He has also written for Esquire, Travel & Leisure, Outside, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Audubon, GEO, Landscape Architecture, House Beautiful, Reader's Digest, Diversion, Chicago, Satisfaction and others. He writes occasional nationally syndicated travel articles for Universal Press Syndicate. He was author in 2000 of "The Art of Money" (Chronicle Books), which was named one of the 10 notable art books of the year by the New York Times. In the mid-80s he was also a co-writer of the film comedy "Club Paradise," which starred Peter O'Toole and Robin Williams. Standish has a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from Miami University. He completed course work on a Ph.D. in American Studies at Indiana University, but took a long detour into journalism and never finished his dissertation. He most recent book, "Hollow Earth: A Cultural History," was published by DaCapo Press in 2006.

Michele Weldon
An award-winning journalist for newspapers, magazines, websites and radio for more than 30 years, Michele is an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School.

Her first book, I Closed My Eyes (Hazelden, 1999), has been translated into seven languages and was featured with her second book Writing to Save Your Life (Hazelden, 2001), on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in June and October, 2002. She has written news, opinion and features for scores of major daily newspapers, websites and radio such as the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dallas Times Herald, Huffington Post, New York Times and Minnesota Public Radio. She has been writing a column for West Suburban Living magazine for more than 12 years. She recently completed a fourth nonfiction book, “Escape Points,” about raising her three sons alone, recovering from cancer, and balancing a hectic professional life.

The essay she read on NPR for “This I Believe” is featured in the recent, “This I Believe on Fatherhood,” (Wiley, 2011). She is a frequent guest on radio and television and is a popular keynote speaker around the country on issues related to media, women and writing.

The mother of three sons, Weldon is a member of Journalism & Women Symposium, an international non-profit organization for women in print, broadcast and online journalism as well as university-level educators in journalism, and has served on their board of directors. Weldon is also a member of Association of Women Journalists and Women of the World.

S.L. Wisenberg
S.L. Wisenberg has taught in the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program since it began in the fall of 2003. She became co-director a year later. She's the author of two collections, The Sweetheart Is In, and Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions, and the recently published The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, based on her blog. She has an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a B.S. in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism. She was a reporter for the Miami Herald and has published prose and poetry in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tikkun, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and many other places. She's received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was the graduate faculty recipient of the 2006-2007 Distinguished Teaching Award, presented by Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies. Her latest book, according to the online review Bookslut, "is funny, damned funny." The reviewer also noted that the book is "far more selfless than most illness memoirs. Its eyes rove outward more than almost anything else I've read in the genre." Library Journal noted: "Wisenberg brings her serious writing chops to bear in unflinching observations on breast cancer, cancer research, and teaching."