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Visiting Writers |
The Lurie Author-in-Residence Program was established through the generosity of Connie and Robert Lurie in order to attract nationally and internationally known authors to a position officially called "Visiting Artist/Scholar" for a period of one or two semesters (depending upon funds and the availability of the author). It is a teaching professorship entailing close contact with students and public appearances. The fund is a permanent endowment. Candidates are nominated and selected by a review committee appointed by the English Department Chair with the approval of the Dean. Ursula K. le Guin occupied the first Lurie chair in 2000, followed by Carolyn Kizer (2001), Al Young (2002), Molly Giles (2003). Simon Winchester (2004), Ishmael Reed (2005), James D. Houston (2006), James Kelman (2007), and ZZ Packer (2008). The 2009 Lurie Professor will be Sandra M. Gilbert. |
2009 Lurie Professor - Sandra M. Gilbert |
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Sandra M. Gilbert will be the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor during the 2008-2009 school year. A former president of the Modern Language Association and Professor Emerita at University of California, Davis, she is best known for her poetry and literary criticism in the fields of feminist theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Her most famous works are collaborations with Susan Gubar, which includes the 1979 text The Madwoman in the Attic. The work was a major part of the second-wave feminist wave in the United States. Some other notable achievements:
She holds degrees from Cornell University, New York University,
and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English Literature. She
has taught at numerous universities, including John Hopkins and
Stanford. She now spends her time between Paris, France, and Berkeley,
California. She is a grandmother of four. |
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Past Lurie Professors |
ZZ Packer |
ZZ Packer was the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor during the 2007-2008 school year. With an early talent for writing, she was first published at only the age of nineteen for Seventeen Magazine. Her short story fiction piece Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was featured in The New Yorker’s 2000 Debut Fiction issue. In 2003, that story became part of a collection published under the same name, to much critical acclaim. Her collection was selected by writer John Updike for the Today Show Book Club, amongst many other honors. Some of her other distinguished achievements include:
She has earned degrees from Yale University, John Hopkins University,
and the University of Iowa. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, in
1973. Her childhood experiences were spent in Atlanta, Georgia and
Louisville, Kentucky. She currently resides near San Francisco and
San Jose, in California. |
James Kelman |
James Kelman was the Lurie Distinguished Professor for the 2006-2007 school year. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1946. After he dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, he became a writer at twenty-one. He is known for his political essays, short stories, theater & radio plays, and novels. His most famous short story is 1994 Booker Prize winner How late it was, how late, about a man made blind due to police encounter. Many of his works focus on the socio-cultural aspects of society, and is an outspoken supporter of libertarian socialist anarchy.
He has lived in England, the Channel Islands, United States, and
Australia. He currently resides in Glasgow with his family. |
James D. Houston |
James D. Houston is the author of seven novels, including the trilogy, CONTINENTAL DRIFT, LOVE LIFE, and THE LAST PARADISE, which received a l999 American Book Award. His recent SNOW MOUNTAIN PASSAGE, described in The Washington Post as "a dignified, powerful narrative of our shared American destiny," was cited by The Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Los Angeles Times as one of the Year's Best Books. Among his several nonfiction works is FAREWELL TO MANZANAR, co-authored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. A true account of her family's experience during and after the World War Two internment, it is in a 65th printing from Bantam Books and a standard work in schools and colleges across the country. A frequent visitor to Hawai'i, he has traveled widely in the Pacific Basin, thanks in part to grants in the l980s from the U.S.I.S. Arts America program, which took him to South Korea, Japan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. In 1993 he was invited to Okinawa to lecture at the University of the Ryukyus. In 1998 he served as a Smithsonian Lecturer for the Cunard Lines' South Pacific Cruise to the Marquesas, Fakarava, Tahiti, Tonga and Fiji. His often anthologized stories and essays have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ, Ploughshares, The Utne Reader, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Honolulu, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and Zyzzyva (The Last Word: west coast writers and artists). |
Ishmael Reed |
Ishmael Reed was SJSU's Lurie Professor for the year 2004-2005. A prolific novelist, poet and critic, Reed has been a major literary figure on the American landscape for many years. Musician Max Roach is said to have called Reed "the Charlie Parker of American fiction," while Fredric Jameson has judged him to be one of the principal postmodernists. Nick Aaron Ford, in Studies in the Novel (vol. 3, 1971), referred to him as the "most revolutionary" African American novelist to have appeared thus far, and Addison Gayle, Jr., in The Way of the New World (1975), called Reed the best satirist in the black tradition since George S. Schuyler. His recent works include Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race Wars (2003), Blues City: A Walk in Oakland (2003), two collections of essays. He is the author of five collections of poetry, nine novels, including Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and six essay collections; he also had authored four plays, three television productions, and two librettos, and edited four anthologies. |
Simon Winchester |
Our 2004 Lurie Professor was Simon Winchester, whose most recent book is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for The Professor and the Madman (1998), he's also the author of The Fracture Zone (2002), The Map That Changed the World (2001), The River at the Center of the World (1997), The Sun Never Sets (1986), as well as articles in Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Salon.com. Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland. |
Molly Giles |
Molly Giles was the winner of the following literary awards:
Her publications include Iron Shoes (2001), Creek Walk and Other Stories (1997), and Rough Translations (1993). |
Al Young
2002 |
Al Young has taught poetry and fiction writing at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Davis, Foothill College, the Colorado College, Rice University, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, and San José State University. In the spring of 2003 he taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee Professor in Writing. In the fall of 2003, he was the Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. His honors include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations.Young's many books include novels, collections of poetry, essays, memoirs and anthologies. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Letters, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He has written film scripts for Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State. On May 13, 2005, State Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger named Al Young to be California's Poet Laureate. |
Carolyn Kizer
2001 |
Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1925. She is the author of eight books of poetry: Cool Calm & Collected (Copper Canyon Press, 2000); Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (1996); The Nearness of You: Poems for Men (1986); Yin (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984); Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971); Knock Upon Silence (1965); and The Ungrateful Garden (1961). She has also written Picking and Choosing: Prose on Prose (1995), Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1994), and Carrying Over: Translations from Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Hebrew and French-African (1986), and edited 100 Great Poems by Women (1995) and The Essential Clare (1992). In 1959, she founded Poetry Northwest and served as its editor until 1965. From 1966 to 1970, she served as the first Director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, the John Masefield Memorial Award, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. She is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and lives in Sonoma, California, and Paris. |
Ursula K. Le Guin
2000 |
Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for performance or recording. She has published six books of poetry, twenty novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, eleven books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms. Several of Le Guin’s major titles have remained continuously in print for over thirty years. Her best known fantasy works, the first four Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise. |
Other Center for the Literary Arts (CLA) Visiting Writers |
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On the web: |
Neil Gaiman was on campus on October 16, 2003, for two events, a reading and discussion. Over twenty years as a professional writer, Neil Gaiman has been one of the top writers in modern comics, and is now a best-selling novelist, whose most recent novel for adults, American Gods, was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX and Locus awards, while his children's novel Coraline, has been, like American Gods, an international bestseller and an enormous critical success. 2003 sees the publication of several works by Gaiman: a new children's picture book, The Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by his longtime collaborator Dave McKean; a serialised story for Marvel called 1602; and the first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, Endless Nights. |
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