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.

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.

Susan Bradanini Betz
Susan Bradanini Betz is a senior editor at Chicago Review Press, where she acquires political nonfiction for the Lawrence Hill Books imprint and general nonfiction for the Chicago Review Press imprint. She has also held positions as editor in chief at Northwestern University Press, a children's trade editor, and a textbook editor. For thirteen years she was a full-time freelancer for various commercial publishers, and she continues to act as a freelance manuscript editor for Knopf and other Random House imprints.

Janet Burroway
Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and eight novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk (runner-up for the National Book Award), Opening Nights, Cutting Stone, and the 2009 Bridge of Sand. Her Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and Imaginative Writing is in preparation for its third edition. Her children's book The Giant Jam Sandwich has been translated into twenty languages and scored for orchestra. Recent works include the plays Sweepstakes, Medea With Child, and Parts of Speech, which have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres; and a collection of essays, Embalming Mom. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.

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.

Rives Collins
Rives Collins is the Chair of the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University. Recent directorial efforts include: How Can You Run With A Shell On Your Back? The Orphan Train, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, Children of Eden, To Kill A Mockingbird, And Then They Came For Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank, Once Upon A Mattress, The Secret Garden, Into the Woods, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and Salt and Pepper.

In addition, he serves on the board of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. He was the co-chair of the national conference held in Chicago in 2005, has the president-elect. He will assume the presidency of the AATE in the summer of 2009, working to advance the role of drama and theatre in the lives of young people.

A lover of stories since he could talk, he is featured regularly as a professional storyteller and keynote speaker at festivals, schools, libraries, businesses, and museums, proclaiming that, "Storytelling is at the heart of everything I do."

Carolyn Crimi
Carolyn Crimi received her MFA in Writing for Children from Vermont College in 2000. Her publishing credits include Don't Need Friends, (1999), Tessa's Tip- Tapping Toes (2002), Get Busy, Beaver! (2004), Boris and Bella (2004), Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies (2005), The Loud Family (2006), Where’s My Mummy? (2008), Dear Tabby (2009), and Rock and Roll Mole (2010). Carolyn has taught Writing For Children for the past ten years at Chicago area colleges. When she’s not writing or teaching, Carolyn enjoys giving author talks to elementary schools all over the country.

Kevin Davis
Kevin Davis is the author of Defending the Damned: An Inside Look at a Dark Corner of the Criminal Justice System, which is scheduled for release in 2007. His first non-fiction book The Wrong Man, was published in 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 and the Chicago Tribune. He is a former staff writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and teaches writing in an art therapy program at the Cook County Jail.

Anne Gendler
Anne Gendler is the managing editor at Northwestern University Press, where she has edited poetry, fiction, and drama as well as a range of nonfiction books. Formerly she was the editorial director at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago.

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. 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.

Judith Goldman
Judith Goldman received her PhD from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature (2007). She is currently revising for publication her doctoral dissertation, "Visible Hand: 'System,' Method, and Suasion in the Human Natural Science of Adam Smith," an interdisciplinary project that theorizes the textual form of Smith's paradigmatic Enlightenment system-building enterprise as his scientific method. Judith's general scholarly interests include the intersection of law (criminal and intellectual property law, and critical race studies) with literature, material cultures of textual production and consumption (especially matters of authority and authorship), and the relationship of affective subjectivity to media; she also concentrates on gender and sexuality studies and contemporary American avant-garde poetry. Her new research directions include investigations of the relation of violence to representation in contemporary experimental poetry and of the relationship of various modes of late-eighteenth-century valorization and authentication to literary form in Britain, focusing especially on the works of Ann Radcliffe. Judith is also the author of two books of poetry, Vocoder (Roof 2001) and DeathStar/Rico-chet (O 2006), and the co-editor, with Leslie Scalapino, of War and Peace, an annual anthology of experimental writing against the war.

Kate Harding
Kate Harding is the founder of "Shapely Prose" (kateharding.net), the most popular body acceptance blog on the web, a regular contributor to Salon.com, and co-author of the new book Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body. She also contributed essays to the recent anthologies Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti) and Feed Me: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image (edited by Harriet Brown). A graduate of University of Toronto and the MFA program in writing at Vermont College, Kate lives in Chicago with her husband and two very old dogs.

Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey, author of The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (2001), is working on a creative nonfiction project about Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European artist in North America, to be published Random House. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, The Sun, The Sonora Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and other journals. The recipient of a 2004-2005 Illinois Arts Council Award for prose, Mr. Harvey has written for the United Press International, In These Times, and Outside magazine. He teaches creative nonfiction in Northwestern's Master of Arts in Creative Writing program.

M.M.M. Hayes
M. M. M. Hayes is editor of StoryQuarterly Inc., which has recently merged its print operation with the large online operation of Narrative Magazine. Her fiction appears currently in War, Literature and the Arts, is upcoming in Kenyon Review, and has appeared in many commercial and literary publications including Best of the South and 2Plus2: An Anthology of International Fiction. She has received the Katherine Anne Porter Prize as well as screen fellowships and awards from Science Writers of the Future and Writer's Digest. Hayes lives in Chicago but has lived in and writes about the Middle East and the American West.

Angela Jackson
Angela Jackson is a poet, dramatist, and fiction writer. She has written on various aspects of the African American experience: northern and southern black life, African heritage, cultural connectivity and integration, and the wide-ranging experience of love. Her collections of poetry include Voodoo/Love Magic (1974), The Greenville Club (1977), and Solo in the Boxcar (1985). Jackson has also published works of fiction, including the short stories "Dreamer" (1977) and "Witch Doctor" (1977) and a piece from a novel in progress, Treemont Stone (1984). Her most recent publications are Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (1993), a full-length collection of poems that focus on the spider as a symbol of African American womanhood, And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (1998), and a forthcoming novel, Where I Must Go. She is currently working on a collection poems entitled The Elegance of Memory, and the 2nd book of Treemont Stone.

Laurie Lawlor
LAURIE LAWLOR has written more than 35 award-winning works of fiction and nonfiction for children and young adults, among them SHADOW CATCHER: THE LIFE AND WORK OF EDWARD S. CURTIS, which won the Carl Sandburg Award and the Golden Kite Honor Book Award, and THIS TENDER PLACE: THE STORY OF A WETLAND YEAR, a natural history/memoir recently selected for Outstanding Achievement by the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards Committee. Recent young Adult historical novels include DEAD RECKONING: A PIRATE VOYAGE WITH CAPTAIN DRAKE, HE WILL GO FEARLESS, and THE TWO LOVES OF WILL SHAKESPEARE. Trained as a journalist at Northwestern University, she facilitates workshops and presentations in schools throughout the country and teaches in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College of Chicago. Visit her website: www.laurielawlor.com.

Heather Momyer
Heather Momyer, nonfiction editor of the new online magazine, Requitedjournal.com, holds an MFA in fiction and a PhD in English literature. Her own scholarly and critical work uses autobiographical literary criticism while focusing on the blurs between art and reality, between fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Moria, Robot Melon, PANK, Exquisite Corpse, A cappella Zoo, wordriver, Infinity's Kitchen, and other journals. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

Michele Morano
Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Her essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals such as Best American Essays, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, and Sonora Review. She has received honors and awards for her writing from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the American Association of University Women, and the Magazine Association of the Southeast, among others. She is associate professor of English at DePaul University.

James O'Laughlin
James O'Laughlin is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Northwestern. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Saint Louis University, and an M.A. in English from Northwestern University, and did additional graduate work in English at Northwestern. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999-2000 from Northwestern's School of Continuing Studies, and in 2005 was named to the Associated Student Government's Faculty Honor Roll. He has written reviews of literary fiction, literary biography, and philosophy, and essays on special topics for Booklist; he also writes short stories, and is currently writing a book on writing. Since 1998 he has been a fiction editor at StoryQuarterly, a literary journal in its 32nd year. He teaches Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction, Reading and Writing Fiction, Modes of Writing, and Literary Editing, among other courses.

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).

Fred Sasaki
Fred Sasaki is a writer and editor living in Chicago. He publishes in or works with Poetry magazine, Stop Smiling, MAKE and other places. He is also the founding organizer of the Printers' Ball, an annual celebration of literary culture.

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.

Peggy Shinner
Peggy Shinner's stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Daedalus, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Bloom, River Styx, and others. One of her stories, "Jack's Things," was selected as one of the 100 Distinguished Stories in the Best American Short Stories 2007. She's been awarded two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and residencies at the Ucross and Ragdale Foundations. She teaches at Roosevelt University. Peggy Shinner's work has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Western Humanities Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Bloom, the Chicago Reader, Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters, and other publications. She has been awarded several Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and residencies at the Ucross and Ragdale Foundations. She teaches in the Masters in Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University.

Patrick Somerville (Keynote Speaker)
Patrick Somerville grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later earned his MFA from Cornell University. He has taught creative writing and English at Cornell, Northwestern University, Auburn State Correctional Facility, and The Graham School in Chicago. His first book of stories, Trouble, was published in September of 2006 (Vintage) and named 2006's Best Book by a Chicago Author by Time Out Chicago, and his first novel, The Cradle, was published by Little, Brown in March of 2009. His writing has appeared in One Story, Epoch, GQ, Esquire, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Patrick was recently selected as the winner of the 2009 21st Century Award, given annually by the Chicago Public Library.

Cornelia Spelman
Cornelia Maude Spelman is currently writing volume 129 of her diary, which is being archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard (www.radcliffe.edu/schles), and is at work on a book titled Excerpts From a Life which evolved from her diaries. She has recently finished a memoir, Missing, an excerpt of which was a 2004 finalist for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award at the Center for Women Writers at Salem College. Another excerpt, published in Chicago magazine in November, 2008, can be read online at www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2008/Love-Bill/ A former clinical social worker, Spelman is the author of ten picture books for young children which help them recognize and manage their emotions and cope with difficult situations. Her website is www.corneliaspelman.com.

Ellen Placey Wadey
Ellen Placey Wadey is the executive director of the Guild Complex, a community-based literary organization that presents and supports diverse, divergent and emerging voices. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College (cum laude), a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She was awarded the Scott Turow Fiction Prize in 2001, received two Ragdale Foundation residencies, attended the Centrum Writers Conference by invitation of the writer Michelle Cliff, and studied with acclaimed writers Antonya Nelson and Michael Martone at the Postgraduate Writers Conference. She is co-host of Prosody, a weekly radio show featuring the work of poets and writers, broadcast on WYEP FM, a national public radio affiliate in Pittsburgh, and has served on numerous panels including judging competitions for Chicago Public Radio's Stories on Stage, the Third Coast Festival's new artists submissions, and the Ragdale Foundation artist residency program's fiction and creative nonfiction submissions. She also served as consultant to the Ragdale Foundation to help them reach out to more Chicago artists and artists of color. She has taught composition, fiction writing, literature and reviewing the arts courses.

Michele Weldon
An award-winning journalist for newspapers, magazines, websites and radio for more than 25 years, Michele Weldon's third nonfiction book, Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page, was released in January 2008 from the University of Missouri Press. Weldon is an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

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 and features for scores of major daily newspapers, websites and radio such as the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dallas Times Herald, New York Times and Minnesota Public Radio. She has received numerous awards including the Rainbow House Individual Courage Award in 2000, Women's Peacepower Award in 2001, the Visionary Award 2003, the Donna Allen Award 2005, the "20 Heroes, 20 Years" award 2006 from Between Friends and in 2007, she won first place in the IWPA humor column category for her work at West Suburban Living Magazine.

The mother of three sons, Weldon lives in Chicago. She 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 Illinois Woman's Press Association, the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communications, Society of Midland Authors, Association of Women Journalists, National Association of Women Writers and Chicago Women in Publishing.

She is completing a fourth book, a creative non-fiction narrative about her sons' involvement in high school wrestling and her own battle with breast cancer.

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."

Claire Zulkey
Claire Zulkey has run the blog, Zulkey.com, since 2002. It has been mentioned in a number of publications, such as USA Today, the New Yorker and on CNN's AC360. She can also be found publishing pop culture writing and criticism online for the LA Times and AV Club. Her first novel, AN OFF YEAR, will be published in September. Zulkey, a Chicago native, is a graduate of the Northwestern MCW program.