Interview: Kenneth McClane

Kenneth McClane is the author of eight books of poetry, including a volume of collected poems entitled Take Five; he has also written two collections of essays, the second of which, Color, came out earlier this year from University of Notre Dame Press. The recipient of numerous awards for teaching and writing, McClane received his B.A., M.A. and M.F.A. from Cornell, and has taught there since 1976. He earned a Clark Teaching Award in 1983 and become a full professor in 1989. He now lives in Ithaca, NY, and plans to start a non-fiction publishing series, focusing on the works of the disenfranchised.

McClane read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

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Interview: Robert Morgan

Poet, novelist, short story writer, and historian Robert Morgan was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He is the author of many books; highlights include the novels Gap Creek, Brave Enemies and This Rock, the poetry collections The Strange Attractor and October Crossing, and the nonfiction book Boone: A Biography. Morgan has taught at Cornell since 1971, and presently lives in Ithaca, NY.

Morgan read from his work on November 12, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)

Interview: Manuel Muñoz

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is a recipient of a 2008 Whiting Writers' Award and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award for his story "Tell Him About Brother John."

Muñoz is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review, and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts. A native of Dinuba, California, he graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell. He has joined the faculty of the University of Arizona's creative writing program as an assistant professor, and currently lives in Tucson.

Muñoz read from his work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (21MB MP3)

Interview: Lydia Peelle

Lydia Peelle is the author of a collection of short stories, Reasons For And Advantages Of Breathing. Peelle was born in Boston; her fiction has appeared in Granta, One Story, Orion, Epoch, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and two Pushcart Prizes, and her stories have twice appeared in Best New American Voices. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a graduate of Cornell University and the MFA program at the University of Virginia, she now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Peelle read from her work on October 15, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (17MB MP3)

Interview: Sharon Bryan

Sharon Bryan is a nationally recognized award-winning poet and editor. Her newest collection, Sharp Stars (BOA, 2009), was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009. She is also the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Prize awarded by The Nation, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as other literary prizes. She has published three previous poetry collections, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, both with Wesleyan University Press, and Flying Blind with Sarabande Books. She is the co-editor of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande), and the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton). Additionally, she has held positions as poet-in-residence and visiting professor at more than 20 colleges and universities, and is currently the Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, in Storrs, Connecticut.

Bryan read from her work on September 24, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (16MB MP3)

Interview: Gina Franco

Gina Franco received a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. in poetry writing, and an M.A. in English from Cornell University. Her collection of poems, The Keepsake Storm, was published by the University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol Latina/o Literary Series in 2004. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. She received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Chasen Poetry Prize, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry. She divides her time between Galesburg, Illinois, where she teaches English and creative writing at Knox College; the Arizona desert where she grew up; and the Texas border, her mother's home.

Franco read from their work on September 24, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (19MB MP3)

Interview: Susan Choi, David Friedman, Charity Ketz

Susan Choi is the author of the celebrated novel A Person of Interest. Her previous novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She is also the author of The Foreign Student, winner of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and is co-editor with David Remnick of the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she was born in 1969 and lives in Brooklyn.

David Friedman was born and raised in Washington, D.C, and educated at Cornell (B.A., English) and Columbia (M.A., English Literature) Universities. Friedman won the 2004 National Poetry Series open competition, selected by Pulitzer Prizewinner Stephen Dunn; his book of prose poems, The Welcome, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He presently lives and teaches in New York.

Charity Ketz was born in Roanoke, Virginia and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from Penn State University, an M.F.A. from Cornell University, and has held lectureships at both universities. Her first book of poems, The Narcoleptic Yard, was published this year by Black Lawrence press; she has also published a chapbook, Locust in Bloom. A former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ketz is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

The three read from their work on September 10, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)
Note: our apologies, the sound quality of this week's podcast isn't very good. The usual fidelity should be restored next time around.