Featured Readers

Etgar Keret is hailed as the voice of young Israel and is one of its most radical and extraordinary writers. His books are bestsellers in Israel, and they have been translated into twenty-two languages. The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (2006), is a story collection that captures what he perceives as the craziness of life in Israel today. With his tragicomic sensibility and casual, comic-strip violence, Keret offers a window on a surreal world that is at once funny and sad. The Girl from the Fridge (2008) contains the best of Keret's first collections, the one that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of the last decade. Others include The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (2004), Missing Kissinger (2007), and Gaza Blues (2004). In France, Kneller's Happy Campers is listed as one of retailer Fnac's two hundred books of the decade, and The Nimrod Flipout was published in Francis Ford Coppola's magazine, Zoetrope (2004). Keret has received the Book Publishers Association's Platinum Prize several times, has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize, and the Ministry of Culture's Cinema Prize. More than forty short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize (1998). As a filmmaker, Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep (1996), which won first prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wristcutters: A Love Story, featuring Tom Waits, was released in August 2007. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Keret is, at present, a lecturer in the film department at Tel Aviv University. Photo: Moshe Shai


Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, most recently How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint, January 2008). Her fifth, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, was shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Prize, and an earlier novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Also an essayist and critic, Millet lives with her husband and two young children in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, where she works as a writer and editor at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. Photo: Kieran Suckling



Nami Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. She has worked as a door-to-door Avon Lady, a dance hostess, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal investigator. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she garnered a Hopwood Award for fiction and the Farrar Prize. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, the Iowa Review, Tin House, Evergreen Review, Witness, and other journals. Miles from Nowhere, her first novel, was published in December 2008. In January 2009, Mun joined the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago as a full-time professor. Photo: Brigitte Sire


Richard Price is the author of the highly-acclaimed Lush Life, and six previous novels, including the national best sellers Freedomland and Clockers, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999 he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction, articles, and essays have appeared in Best American Essays 2002, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, Esquire, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He has also written numerous screenplays, including Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money and shared a 2007 Edgar Award as a cowriter of HBO's miniseries The Wire. He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Judith Hudson, and his two daughters. Photo: Ralph Gibson


Francine Prose grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and earned her BA at Radcliffe College. She briefly attended grad school at Harvard before moving to India to write her first novel, Judah the Pious. When she returned home, a former English teacher submitted her book to Atheneum and it was published when she was 26. Prose has written thirteen novels, among them, Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, Household Saints, Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Goldengrove. Her short-story collections are Women and Children First and The Peaceable Kingdom; she has published three books of translation and a collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Her book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them was a New York Times Best Seller. Prose was the recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edith Wharton Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, and a PEN Translation Prize. She is currently a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College, and has also taught at Harvard, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Arizona, and University of Utah. She lives in New York City with her husband Howard Michels, a painter and illustrator. Photo: Stephanie Berger



MORE FEATURED READERS:

Mort Castle is editor of On Writing Horror from Writer's Digest Books. He has written novels, short stories, poems, articles, and comic books, with credits numbering well over 600. His forthcoming books are New Moon on the Water (fiction collection) and The Spectre of Death (novella-a collaboration with the late J. N. Williamson), both published by Full Moon Press, and, as editor/co-packager, the graphic album J.N. Williamson's Masques: An Anthology of Elegant Evil (Checker Book Publishing). Castle was cited as one of "21 Leaders in the Arts for the 21st Century in Chicago's Southland" by the Star / Hollinger Newspaper Group and, in 2008, as editor, won the Readers' Choice Black Quill Award for Best Nonfiction Work for On Writing Horror, and in 2009 as editor of Doorways, the Best Dark Fiction Magazine. Newsweek Magazine (Polish edition) cited the translations of his novel The Strangers and short story collection Moon on the Water as "two of the best books published in Poland in 2008." Photo: Jane Castle


Don De Grazia is a full-time fiction writing professor at Columbia College, where he also earned his BA and MFA. After completing his master's thesis, American Skin, De Grazia decided to send it off to London's prestigious publisher, Jonathan Cape, who had worked with Irvine Welsh and the Scottish Beats he so admired. Cape offered him a contract, and in January 1998, American Skin was published in the U.K. Hailed as an American classic, the book was so highly acclaimed by critics that it caught the attention of publishers around the world, and in April 2000, American Skin was released in the U.S. by Scribner. A flood of positive reviews appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the San Francisco Examiner. It is now in its fourth printing and was recently anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Fiction. A member of the Screenwriters Guild of America, De Grazia is currently adapting the script for American Skin. He has written for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, and other publications. He resides in Chicago where he is at work on his second novel, Reel Shadows, a chapter of which appears in the March 2009 issue of TriQuarterly. Photo: Kate Paris


Drew Ferguson received his MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago. He is author of the acclaimed first novel The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second (Kensington Publishing, September 2008). His work has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly, the James White Review, Hair Trigger, the Great Lawn, and other publications. His short stories have been nominated for the AWP Intro Award, Scribner's Best of the Writing Workshops, and the Best Gay Fiction series. He lives in Chicago. Readers can visit him at www.drewferguson.com. Photo: Scott Ferguson


Ann Hemenway earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Writing from Start to Finish, Emergence, Private Arts, Sport Literate, The Thing About Hope Is..., f5, and other magazines. Hemenway is an AWP Intro award winner, and the recipient of a Ragdale residency. Her artwork has been shown at the ARC  and Gahlberg galleries. She is a Certified Story Workshop Master Teacher and full-time professor in the graduate and undergraduate programs of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.  Photo: Jessica Tierney


Rick Kogan was born in Chicago and raised in the city's Old Town neighborhood. At age 16, Kogan launched his newspaper career by writing a story about the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Kogan has written for the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Tribune, where he is now a senior writer and columnist for the Sunday magazine. Kogan has been named Chicago's Best Reporter, Chicago's Greatest Living Journalist, and in 2003, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame. He is the author of ten books, including Yesterday's Chicago (in collaboration with his father, Herman); Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder, and the Price of Truth (in collaboration with Maurice Possley); America's Mom: The Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers; and A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, a Curse, and the American Dream, the history of the Billy Goat. He is also the creator and host of WGN radio's Sunday Papers with Rick Kogan.


Alex Kotlowitz is the author of Never a City So Real, The Other Side of the River, and There Are No Children Here. The New York Public Library selected There Are No Children Here as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. The Other Side of the River was awarded The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. A regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and public radio's This American Life, his work has also appeared in the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, as well as on PBS and NPR. He teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern University. Mr. Kotlowitz's  journalism honors include the George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award. He is also the recipient of six honorary degrees and the John LaFarge Memorial Award for Interracial Justice given by New York's Catholic Interracial Council. Photo: Kathy Richland


Stephanie Kuehnert says she got her start writing bad poetry about unrequited love and razor blades in eighth grade. In high school, she discovered punk rock and produced several DIY feminist zines. Stephanie received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and was recently named to NewCity's Lit 50. Her debut novel, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, a raw, edgy emotional tale about growing up punk and living to tell, is titled after a Sleater-Kinney song and was published by MTV Books in July 2008. She has published short stories, interviews, and essays in Hair Trigger and No Touching, and on the websites inkstains.org, freshyarn.com, and vqronline.org (Virginia Quarterly Review). Stephanie's second novel, Ballads of Suburbia, will be published by MTV Books in summer 2009. Photo: Jessica Tierney


Billy Lombardo is the founder and Executive Director of Polyphony H.S., a student-run national literary magazine for high school writers. He teaches at the Latin School of Chicago and also runs workshops for the River Oak Art Association, the University of Chicago, and the Barrington Arts Association. His work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Cicada, and the Bryant Literary Review, and has been featured on ABC World News Sunday, National Public Radio, and WGN radio. His fiction work The Pilgrim Virgin received a Pushcart Prize Nomination and was an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award Winner in 2002. His collection of short fiction, The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, was a winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction in 2004 and a Chicago Tribune Best Fiction of 2005 selection. He is the author of the upcoming How to Hold a Woman (spring 2009) and The Man With Two Arms (spring 2010).  Photo: Stacy Anderson


Jonathan Messinger is the author of the short-story collection Hiding Out, which was named one of the best books of 2007 by the Omaha World-Herald. He's also the Books Editor of Time Out Chicago and founder/cohost of The Dollar Store Show, a literary and comedy series featuring performances inspired by junk purchased from a dollar store. He copublishes Featherproof Books, a small press publishing novels and downloadable minibooks. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Photo: Nathan Keay


J. Adams Oaks has an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. He curates the 2nd Story reading series at Webster's Wine Bar and is a member of Serendipity Theatre's story development team. He has been published in Hair Trigger, River Oak Review, 2D, No Touching and the Madison Review. His work won Chicago Public Radio's Stories On Stage competition, and his first novel, Why I Fight (April 2009, Simon and Schuster), won both the National Society of Arts and Letters regional competition and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award. Photo: Danielle Paz


Bayo Ojikutu is a Chicago-based author. His critically acclaimed first novel, 47th Street Black (2003), received both the Washington Prize for Fiction and the Great American Book Award. His second novel, Free Burning (RH/Crown, 2006), has been called "the most foreboding love letter the city has ever received" (Tim Lowery, TimeOut Chicago), and "a searing portrayal of one of the shameful realities within an oft unjust society" (Denolyn Carrol, Black Issues Book Review). Ojikutu's fiction has appeared in the 2005 anthology Chicago Noir, among other collections. He has taught creative writing with DePaul University, the University of Chicago, and with the Graham School of General Studies at the University of Chicago. Photo: Mylowe Wooley


Chris Maul Rice's fiction and essays have appeared in Bandit-Lit.com, Pigeon, the Beacon, Emergence II, and Hair Trigger. Her most recent audio essays can be heard on WBEZ-FM's Eight Forty-Eight and feature stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Gravity Magazine, and the Detroit Metro Times and Metro Parent newspapers. Rice is an adjunct professor in the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department. She is the chair and director of the department's Young Authors Writing Competition, has been the faculty advisor for the student Hair Trigger anthologies 23-32, and has judged for and presented at the 2006-2009 Columbia University Scholastic Press Association convention and judged the fiction category for the 2007 Southwest Prairie Conference. Photo: David Rice


Augustus Rose earned his MA in creative writing at University of California, Davis, and has published fiction and nonfiction in f7, the Berkeley Fiction Review, Readymade Magazine, Whole Earth Review, and Publishers Weekly, among others. He won F Magazine's first novels-in-progress contest for an excerpt from his novel Revolutionaries. Rose has received fellowships to the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference and the Eastern Frontier Society's Norton Island Residency. A native of California, Rose is currently a part-time faculty member in the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department. Photo: Nami Mun


Marcus Sakey is the author of the award-winning novels The Blade Itself, At the City's Edge, and Good People. His work has been named an Editor's Pick by the New York Times and among the Year's 5 Best Reads by Esquire. Film rights have been sold to Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire. To research his novels, he has ridden with gang cops, shadowed Special Forces soldiers, toured the morgue, and learned to pick a deadbolt. Sakey began writing his first novel, The Blade Itself, while he was enrolled in the Fiction Writing graduate program at Columbia College Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife. Find excerpts, appearances, and contests at www.MarcusSakey.com. Photo credit: Frank Pinc


Betty Shiflett is professor emerita of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department and a winner of the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award. She was the founding director of the Fiction Writing Department's Story Workshop Tutoring and Tutor Training program, Founder and Artistic Director of the Visiting Writers program, and a founding director of the department's in-service teacher training program. She is also a distinguished writer, playwright, and writing consultant. Shiflett is author of the play We Dream of Tours and the musical drama Phantom Rider. Her stories, articles, and novel and play excerpts have appeared in Life Magazine, Evergreen Review, Fiction and Poetry by Texas Women, Emergence: Writings by Women, Private Arts, F Magazine, The Story Workshop Reader, College English, Writing from Start to Finish, and many others. Her award-winning story "The Country Barber" was published in American Fiction and translated into Mandarin by the novelist Geling Yan for Sichuan Literature Monthly. She is coproducer and interviewer for the Story Workshop video The Living Voice Moves, featuring Randy Albers and his Prose Forms class, and she and her Story Workshop Advanced Fiction class are featured in the video Story from First Impulse to Final Draft, coproduced by John Schultz and Randy Albers. Shiflett has been a featured writer three times in the Southwest Writers Conference at Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas. Along with John Schultz, she taught master's creative writing at Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC, fall 2007, helping Fudan set up its first masters in creative writing program in China. She is Principal Story Workshop Master Teacher, now at work on a memoir as novel, Grassfires.  Photo: Tony Ortega