Participants

Jack Coughlin

Jack Coughlin is an artist of Irish-American heritage who is best known for his portraits of literary figures and musicians. As a figurative artist and member of the National Academy of Design, Coughlin's work is in many prominent collections including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington D.C., the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences in Virginia, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, the University of Colorado, the Philadelphia Free Public Library, Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, Germany, and the New University of Ulster, Coleraine, Ireland. Born February 19, 1932 in Greenwich Connecticut he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students League, New York. Although Coughlin's education coincided with the heyday of Abstract Impressionism, he has always been drawn to figurative traditions in European and American Art.

Coughlin is perhaps best known for his portraits of literary figures and musicians that are regularly commissioned for the New Republic magazine and that have been published in several volumes of poetry in Ireland and the United States. However, in prints and drawings from the 1960s to the present, he has also pursued a vein of imagery that is much less naturalistic and that explores a wide range of sources, from the anatomical drawings of George Stubbs to the grotesque hybrids of European masters like Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. In many metapmorphic, dream-like images, absurd and mysterious juxtapositions of the human and animal join in an irrational evolutionary journey. Here his automatic drawing pratice is akin to that of the Surrealists and is wed to his interest in the existential wordplay of Samuel Beckett.

Celebrated for his combinations of innovative and traditional techniques during the resurgence of intaglio, lithograph, and woodcut printmaking in the 1960s and 70s, Coughlin taught printmaking at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from the foundation of its art department until his retirement over 35 years later. In 2005 Coughlin received the Gladys E. Cook prize at the 2005 annual exhibition at the National Academy, and in 2007 he was awarded the Dessie Greer prize for drawing at the 182nd exhibition at the National Gallery.

Coughlin is the UMass Amherst Emeritus Professor of Art.



Christin Couture



John Crowley is the author of nine novels and two collections of short fiction. His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer appeared in 1977 and was nominated for The American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s authoritative 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. In 1980 came Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and which Ursula LeGuin described as a book which “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious multi-volume novel called Aegypt, of which three volumes have been published – Aegypt, Love & Sleep, and Daemonomania; the final volume is in preparation. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. (He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant.) His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet.

Crowley’s short fiction is collected in three volumes: Novelty (containing the World Fantasy Award-winning novella Great Work of Time), Antiquities, and Novelties & Souvenirs, an omnibus volume containing almost all his short fiction (a new novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, will appear in 2005). A volume of essays and criticism will appear in 2006.

For much of his working life, Crowley has also worked in films and television, writing scripts for short films and documentaries, many historical documentaries for Public Television; his work has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His scripts include The World of Tomorrow (the 1939 World’s Fair), No Place to Hide (the bomb shelter obsession), The Hindenburg, and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (American fitness practices and beliefs over the decades; with Laurie Block).



Martin Espada

Called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published sixteen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including two collections of poems last year: Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008), released in England, and La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig (Terranova, 2008), a bilingual edition published in Puerto Rico. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include Alabanza: New and Selected Poems  (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premio Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry.  He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.



R. Patrick Gates
R. Patrick Gates is the author of Deathwalker, Tunnelvision, Grimm Memorials, and Fear. His short fiction has appearead in several anthologies, including Masques III, Hotter Blood, and Shock Rock. He lives in Fitchburg, Massachussetts.



Craig Shaw Gardner

Craig Shaw Gardner was born and raised in Rochester, New York, home of the Eastman Kodak Company, the Rochester Red Wings, red hots and white hots, and a whole bunch of snow (see Entry on Ancient Greece). He came to Boston to attend Boston University in 1967, and he's been here ever since. Eventually, he graduated from B.U. with a B.S. degree (appropriately enough) in Broadcasting and Film. On the strength of this degree and the recession of 1971, he immediately got a job as a shipper/receiver for a men's suit manufacturer. Other jobs Craig has held include working in hospital public relations, running a stat camera, and managing a pair of bookstores in Harvard Square: The Million Year Picnic and the late, lamented Science Fantasy Bookstore.

Craig sold his first short story in 1977, and began writing full time in 1987. While most of his early novels are humorous fantasy, the majority of his short stories have been sold to original horror anthologies such as SHADOWS, MIDNIGHT, DOOM CITY and other cheerful names. His novelization of BATMAN spent something like 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, changing his name on book covers to "New York Times Best-selling Author Craig Shaw Gardner" forevermore. His last few books have wandered over into the "epic fantasy" realm; the last three have been written under the pseudonym "Peter Garrison," which will show up right next to Craig Shaw Gardner on those bookshelves.

Among his many other activities, Craig was both president and trustee of the Horror Writers Association; is the continuing co-host of the Kirk Polland Memorial Bad Prose Competition, held more or less annually at Readercon; and is one of the Secret Masters of Camp Necon, which is not so much a convention as a way of life.



Linda Graves



Elizabeth Hand

In her own words: "Born March 29, 1957, the oldest of five children in a large, mostly Irish Catholic clan. Grew up in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, NY, before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1975 to study playwriting and cultural anthropology at Catholic University. Worked for a number of years at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum. In 1988 I moved to a small town on the Maine coast with my former partner, novelist Richard Grant, father of my two teenage children. I continue to live in Maine with my longtime partner, the UK critic John Clute.

I describe myself as a visionary writer, with a longstanding interest in outsider artists, the subjects of much of my short fiction as well as my most recent novels, the forthcoming psychological thriller GENERATION LOSS, about an emotionally damaged proto-punk photographer, and 2004’s MORTAL LOVE, inspired by the life and work of the schizophrenic Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd. I had my own encounter with the numinous in November 1974, when I had an epiphanic vision of a Dionsyian figure I named “the boy in the tree.” Several years later, on St. Patrick’s Day 1978, I was abducted and raped while visiting my boyfriend in Washington, D.C. These two experiences, one of inexplicable transcendence, the other of random human violence, have shaped nearly all of my fiction.

My novels and short stories are highly autobiographical and draw deeply on the places I’ve lived and loved most. These include Yonkers (yes, Yonkers!) in particular my grandparents’ sprawling home overlooking the Hudson River (<< see left), the model for Fairview in my recent short novel ILLYRIA, and Lazyland in GLIMMERING (1997); Pound Ridge (where my father has been the town justice since 1972) and the neighboring small town of Katonah, which became Kamensic Village, a place that is back-or foregrounded in much of my work; Washington, D.C., where I lived for many years, and where the fictional Univertsiy of the Archangels and St. John the Divine (inspired by my alma mater) is located; North London, especially the area surrounding Camden Town; and the rural coast of Maine, where I’ve lived for the last 19 years (see right) and which has been the setting for my most recent work, including GENERATION LOSS and the novellas “Winter’s Wife” and “The Least Trumps.””



Jack Haringa

Jack M. Haringa is a part-time writer and freelance editor and a full-time teacher of English. He has published non-fiction with Hippocampus Press and Jobs In Hell. His fiction has appeared in anthologies from Bedlam/Necro Press and Prime Books. His most recent short story, "A Perfect and Unmappable Grace," was selected for inclusion in the 21st Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Gavin Grant & Kelly Link, which is currently available. His essay, "The Agnatology of Horror: Or, Lies the Internet Told You", appears in Writers Workshop of Horror, published by Woodland Press.

He currently co-edits, with S.T. Joshi, Dead Reckonings, a review journal of horror, suspense, and dark fantasy published by Hippocampus Press.



Paul Lewis

A faculty member of the English Department of Boston College, Paul Lewis recently curated the Boston Public Library's exhibition, The Raven in the Frog Pond, an engaging look at the legends surrounding Poe's feud with the city of his birth.

Paul Lewis is a member of the editorial board of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, a freelance writer, the organizer of the Poe Bicentennial Program in Boston, and the neologist who coined the word Frankenfood.



Barry Moser

The books Moser has illustrated and/or designed forms a list of over three hundred titles. That list includes the Arion Press Moby-Dick and the University of California Press The Divine Comedy of Dante. Moser's edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, won the National Book Award for design and illustration in 1983 and prompted the poet John Ashbery writing in NEWSWEEK (March 1, 1982), to call Moser's work “never less than dazzling.” Mr. Moser was honored as a “New England Living Treasure” in 1983 by the New England Artist Festival. His Jump, Again! The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, was named by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Illustrated Children's Books” of 1987 as well as one of Redbook's Best Books for Children for that same year. His collaboration with Cynthia Rylant, Appalachia, the Voices of Sleeping Birds, won the prestigious Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in 1991, and his collaboration with Ken Kesey, Big Double the Bear Meets Little Tricker the Squirrel, was named one of the best books of 1990–1991 by the International Board of Books for Young People of Zurich, Switzerland. His collaboration with his granddaughter, Isabelle Harper, My Dog Rosie was named a Best of the Year by Parents Magazine in 1994. Whistling Dixie, his collaboration with Marcia Vaughn was a 1995 ALA Notable Book, as was his collaboration with Virginia Hamilton, When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing, in 1997. He has won numerous citations and awards of merit from Communication Arts Magazine, Bookbuilders West, The American Association of University Presses, and The American Institute of Graphic Arts. His monumental work on the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible (1999) has been the subject of scores of articles in print, television, and radio as well as the subject of a documentary film called A Thief among the Angels. It was also featured in the only one-man exhibit ever to be mounted at the Library of National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. by a living artist. It was exhibited in the summer and autumn of 2000 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as part of an exhibit called "The Bible in the Landscape."

 In addition to being an illustrator he is also a printer, painter, printmaker, designer, author, essayist, and teacher. Mr. Moser frequently lectures and acts as visiting artist and artist in residence at universities and institutions across the country. He is on the faculty of the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, was the 1995 Whitney J. Oates Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University, was artist and writer in residence in the Children’s Literature department at Vassar College in 1998, and is currently on the faculty of Smith College where he is Professor in Residence in the Department of Art and serves as Printer to the College. In the fall of 1999 he was artist in residence at Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa. He was the Elliott lecturer in the book arts at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in the fall of 2000, and in the fall of 2001 was the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville. Mr. Moser lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, two English mastiffs and four cats. He has three grown daughters and nine grandchildren.



Sabina Murray

Sabina Murray was born in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines.  She is the author of the novels Forgery (Grove, 2007), A Carnivore’s Inquiry (Grove, 2004), and Slow Burn (Ballantine, 1990). Her short story collection The Caprices (Houghton Mifflin, 2002, Grove 2007) was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award.  Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction.  She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She completed her Master of Arts as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a recipient of a major grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover.  She recently received the Brown Literary Award from the University of Pittsburgh.  Murray is Professor of English, Creative Writing, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. 
 


Stephen C. Tracy

Steven C. Tracy is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Langston Hughes and the Blues, Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City, and A Brush with the Blues (with Jack Coughlin); editor of A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes, A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, and Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader;  co-editor of After Winter: Essays on the Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown; and general co-editor of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (16 vols.). Tracy provided introductions for Howard W. Odum's Rainbow Round My Shoulder  and Wings On My Feet and John Henry: Roark Bradford's Novel and Play, and is currently at work on Chicago Bound: Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance for the University of Illinois Press and a volume dealing with the blues and American literature for Oxford University Press. A Blues singer and harmonica player, Tracy has appeared on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show and played with and/or opened for B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Albert King, James Cotton, Bo Diddley, Robert Lockwood, and many others. He has produced an LP by Pigmeat Jarrett and a CD by his band Steve Tracy and the Crawling Kingsnakes, and has written over 50 sets of liner notes. He currently performs with the King Bees.



Stanley Wiater

Wiater has been acclaimed as "the world's leading authority on horror filmmakers and authors" (Radio/TV Interview Report), "the master journalist of the dark genres" (World of Fandom), and "the top horror journalist in North America for the past twenty-five years" (Rue Morgue). His award-winning books--and more than 700 interviews, articles, short stories, profiles, comic book scripts, reviews, and essays--have been translated into ten languages.




"Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears."