Napa Valley Writers Conference Features Acclaimed Author

Applications accepted starting March 1 for July conference, whose faculty roster includes internationally-renowned poets and fiction writers.

Rolling admissions open March 1 for writers to work side-by-side with a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, a fellow of the Academy of American Poets and other renowned authors at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, slated for July 28 – August 2, 2013. The conference is hosted and sponsored by Napa Valley College.

The faculty for this year’s conference features fiction writer Yiyun Li, a 2010 MacArthur fellow, and Jane Hirshfield, who was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets in 2004.

During the conference week, faculty members will lead intimate workshops with conference attendees, discuss the craft of fiction and poetry in daytime lectures and read from their works in a series of evening events. Lectures and evening readings will be open to the public.

The conference fee – including workshops, lectures, evening events and meals – is $900. One in five conference attendees receive financial assistance, which is awarded according to merit and need. Rolling admissions open March 1, and applications for financial assistance are due March 15. For application materials and guidelines, visit napawritersconference.org.

Serving on the poetry faculty:

• Linda Gregerson, whose books of poetry include The Selvage; Waterborne, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award. Her awards and honors include the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Gregerson teaches literature and directs the creative writing program at the University of Michigan.
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• Hirshfield, the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Come, Thief. Her other collections include After, which was shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize, and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Poetry Medal.
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• Major Jackson, author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops and Leaving Saturn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Holding Company and Hoops were finalists for NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literature: Poetry. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

• David St. John, author of 10 books of poetry, most recently The Auroras. Other collections include The Face: A Novella in Verse and Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award. He co-edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rome Fellowship in Literature and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is teaches at the University of Southern California.

On the fiction faculty:

• Lan Samantha Chang, whose second novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, was published in 2010. Chang is also the author of Inheritance and Hunger: A Novella and Stories. Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

• Peter Ho Davies, author of the novel The Welsh Girl and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its 20 “Best of Young British Novelists.” Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The Welsh Girl was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. Davies is on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

• Li, author of the collections Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, among other honors. Her novel, The Vagrants (2010), won the gold medal of the California Book Award for fiction. She has received fellowships and awards from both the Lannan Foundation and the Whiting Foundation, and was named one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 by Granta, and one of the top 20 writers under 40 by The New Yorker. She teaches at University of California, Davis.

• Christopher Tilghman, whose most recent novel, The Right-Hand Shore, was named a Notable Book of 2012 by The New York Times, which hailed it as “the dark, magisterial creation of a writer with an uncanny feel for the intersections of place and character in American history.” He is also the author of Roads of the Heart and Mason’s Retreat and two story collections: The Way People Run and In A Father’s Place. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, and other magazines. He teaches at the University of Virginia.

About the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference:

For 33 years, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference has given emerging and established writers the opportunity to convene for fellowship and serious work with a focus on craft. The conference is hosted and sponsored by Napa Valley College. Faculty members have included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners and U.S. Poets Laureate. Rolling admissions for the conference begin March 1, with applications for financial assistance due March 15. For application guidelines and materials, further faculty information and a schedule of readings and events, visit napawritersconference.org and follow the conference on Facebook and Twitter @napawriters.

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