Barry Lopez

March 5, 2009

Barry Lopez is best known as the author of Arctic Dreams , for which he received the National Book Award. Among his other nonfiction books are About This Life , and Of Wolves and Men , which was a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of several award-winning works of fiction, including Field Notes, Winter Count , and a novella-length fable, Crow and Weasel . His recent work includes Light Action in the Caribbean , a collection of stories, and Resistance (2004), a book of interrelated stories-Lopez's eloquent response to the recent ideological changes in American society. He selected and introduced a collection of essays, The Future of Nature , and he is the co-editor with Debra Gwartney of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape , a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Horizon .

Barry Lopez has received numerous awards and prizes, among them the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal, Guggenheim, National Science Foundation, and Lannan Fellowships, and the John Hay Medal, as well as Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non fiction. He is a regular contributor to Granta , The Paris Review , Orion , Manoa , Outside , The Georgia Review , Harper's , and other periodicals; he has also just been named as one of four "contributing writers" to National Geographic magazine.

Susan Werner

February 5, 2009

Susan Werner made her first public performance at age five, playing guitar and singing at church. She began playing piano when she was 11, and after earning a degree in voice from the University of Iowa, she completed her graduate studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she performed in recitals and operas.

Werner launched her recording career with the self-released Midwestern Saturday Night in 1992, which was followed by Live At Tin Angel in 1993. The second album impressed executives at Private Music/BMG, which released her major label debut Last Of The Good Straight Girls in 1995. She also received critical accolades for her subsequent recordings Time Between Trains (VelVel, 1998) and New Non-Fiction (Indie, 2001). She has toured the nation with acts such as Richard Thomson, Keb Mo and Joan Armatrading, and was featured in a 1998 Peter, Paul and Mary PBS television special as one of the best of the next generation of folk songwriters.

From her folk/pop beginnings, to the songbook flavored I Can't Be New and now The Gospel Truth , Werner relishes the challenges of being a creative free spirit and says she's in an exciting new phase of doing themed projects.

Kelly Cherry

October 27, 2008

Kelly Cherry is the author of seventeen books and eight chapbooks of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (memoir, essays, and criticism). Her most recent titles are Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems (2007), History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope: Prose about Poetry (2005), Welsh Table Talk, a poetic sequence (2004), In the Wink of an Eye, a novel (rpt. 2004), We Can Still Be Friends, a novel (2003, paper 2004). Rising Venus: Poems (2002), My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (rpt. 2002), The Society of Friends: Stories (1999), and Death and Transfiguration: Poems (1997). She has also published translations of Sophocles’s Antigone and Seneca’s Octavia. Forthcoming are a book of essays in (probably) 2008 and another book of poems in 2009. Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she now lives on a small farm in southside Virginia, with her husband, Burke Davis, a fiction writer. She is currently working on another collection of short stories.

"The appearance ofKelly Cherry is made possible through a partnership with Rollins College and is sponsored by Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, as part of its Master Artists-in-Residence Outreach Program. For more information, please visit www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org.

David Whyte

October 23, 2008

Poet David Whyte grew up among the hills and valleys of Yorkshire, England. An Associate Fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many American and international companies. The author of five books of poetry, he holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including working as a naturalist guide and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions. He brings this wealth of experiences to his poetry, lectures and workshops.

In addition to his five volumes of poetry, David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America , published by Doubleday/Currency, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, published by Riverhead Books, an audio lecture series and an album of poetry and music.