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Elizabeth Fenton and Isaac Cates teach in the English department. Elizabeth specializes in early American literature. Isaac teaches poetry and creative writing.

Professor Antonello Borra

Why does the Yeti avoid us?

Because “humans are beasts!” says Antonello Bora, our guest of April 20.

In his first visit to Writers@WRUV, Professor Borra reads his original work in Italian and English, and he even offers up some work yet to be published this fall by Burlington-based publisher Fomite, a new press started by local fiction writer Marc Estrin.

“I think that poetry is always an activity that has moral responsibilities, and I think that as a writer you do have to try and make your audience aware of issues that are common to each one of us and not just to the individual poet,” Borra says.

Listen to the interview and reading here.

Antonella Borra was born in Italy. He graduated from the University of Turin, Italy, in 1988. He earned his MA (1993) and PhD (1998) from  Brown University.
From 1998 to 2001, he was an assistant professor of Italian at Ithaca College in New York.

In 2001 he joined the faculty of the department of romance languages at the University of Vermont as an aassociate professor of Italian.

He is a poet, a translator and a scholar. He is the author of multiple volumes of poetry as well as books of criticism and language pedagogy, including Italian Through Film: A Text for Italian Courses and Italian Through Film: The Classics.

Honors College Associate Dean Lisa Schnell

Nearly a decade ago, Lisa Schnell suffered a parent’s most difficult trial: the loss of her child. Her daughter, Claire, was born with a debilitating, and ultimately fatal, brain condition. Through years of writing, Schnell has maintained her connection to Claire. In many ways, she says, it is through the act of writing that she remains Claire’s mother.

Listen to the interview and reading here.

Schnell is associate dean of the UVM Honors College and an associate professor of English. She has been at UVM in the English Department since 1992. Her scholarly work focuses on the literary and cultural lives and ambitions of women in 16th- and 17th-century England, though her most recent projects combine some of her early modern interests with contemporary theories of narrative, cognitive neuroscience and the work of mourning.

Schnell has taught courses in the English department on Shakespeare, Milton, Renaissance literature, the Bible as literature, and literary theory and criticism. For several years, she taught a sophomore seminar in the honors college called “Telling Stories: Truth and Narrative” in which students read work in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and narrative theory together with several novels that engaged and complicated the sense of “self” that the nonfiction reading presented.  Several of those issues have found their way into the first-year honors college course, “The Pursuit of Knowledge,” a class Professor Schnell said she has greatly enjoyed teaching since its inauguration in the Fall of 2008.

Before becoming the associate dean of the honors college, Schnell served for several years as the director of undergraduate studies in the department of English; she also served a one-year term as acting director of the John Dewey Honors Program in the college of arts and sciences.

Washington Post and every medium in between—Jon Clinch

spent a lifetime as an ad writer. In his visit to Writers@WRUV on Dec. 2, 2010, he tells how his ad life led into his novelist life, and so much more. And—oh, yes—he reads some good work: from his novel Kings of the Earth.

Listen to this extended interview here.

Read an excerpt from his personal draft of Kings of the Earth here.

The Bio!

Born and raised in the remote heart of upstate New York,  Clinch been an English teacher, a metalworker, a folksinger, an illustrator, a typeface designer, a housepainter, a copywriter and an advertising executive. Teaching and advertising took

Author Jon Clinch

him south to the suburbs of Philadelphia for many years, and only with the publication of Finn, his first novel, was he able to return to the kind of rural surroundings he’d loved from the start: This time, in the Green Mountains of Vermont. He is married to the novelist Wendy Clinch, and they have one daughter.

Finn (read The Washington Post review here) tells the secret history of Huckleberry Finn’s father. The book was named an American Library Association Notable Book and was chosen as one of the year’s ten best books by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor. It also won the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Sargent First Novel Prize.

His second novel, Kings of the Earth, led the 2010 Summer Reading List at O, The Oprah Magazine. Set in upstate New York, Kings of the Earth is a powerful story of life, death, and family in rural America.

He invites you to visit his website, his blog and his Facebook page. Oh, and you should follow him on Twitter, too!

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DAN CHIASSON was educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in English. He is the author of three collections of poetry: The Afterlife of Objects; Natural History; and Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, recently published by Knopf this Fall.  Former poetry editor of The Paris Review, Chiasson serves as a poetry critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of a critical study, One Kind of Everything:Poem and Person in Contemporary America. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, he is a Professor of English at Wellesley College. He lives in Sherborn, Massachusetts.

LEA BANKS is the author of the chapbook All of Me, (Booksmyth Press, 2008). She was a finalist for The Pavel Srut Fellowship in Prague and two poems were 2009 Pushcart Prize nominations. Banks is the founder of the nationally-known Collected Poets Series in Shelburne Falls, MA and editor of Oscillation: Poetry in Motion. She was the former poetry editor of The Equinox and editorial assistant for the Marlboro Review. She attended New England College’s MFA program, facilitated stroke survivors’ writing workshops, and is a full-time poet, community organizer, freelance editor and writer. Banks has published in several journals including Poetry Northwest, Slipstream, Diner, Sweet, and American Poetry Journal. See more at www.leabanks.com.

Though we don’t give listening tips very often, here’s one for today: Bianca’s work is a multimedia event—at left, notice a screenshot of one poetry comic—so please click here for Bianca’s Poetry Comics to get the visual portion that radio simply can’t bring you.

Click HERE for the full show.

Bianca Stone

OUR AUTHORS

BIANCA STONE received her MFA from NYU’s creative writing program in poetry in 2009. She is the creator and co-curator of the Ladder Poetry Reading Series in New York City and is a regular contributor to TheThe Poetry Blog. Her most recent poetry publications include The Patterson Literary Review, Fou, Agriculture Reader, and Conduit. She was also a recent finalist for the 2010 Crazyhorse prize in poetry. Her new chapbook of poetry is called Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Argos Books, Fall 2010). Besides writing, Bianca is also a freelance illustrator, often combining poetry and illustration. She is currently working on a manuscript exploring the mixed genre of poetry and image. Her blog is called Poetry Comics. She hails from Middlebury, Vermont: daughter of writer Abigail Stone, and grand-daughter of poet Ruth Stone. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Thomas Heise

THOMAS HEISE is an assistant professor of English at McGill University and the author of Horror Vacui: Poems as well as the critical study, Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. His poetry and essays have appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Modern Fiction Studies, and in the BioCritique series. He has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the University of California, New York University, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

For her appearance on this show, she brought her story “Pluvianus Aegyptius” and told of her plans to help reshape Vermont’s literary landscape with her new magazine.
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Read her story.

Check out the latest buzz about Demonyms.

We were joined in the studio Oct. 7 by Laughing Couple Interactive Storytelling, featuring storyteller Carolyn Hunt and visual artist Rick Hunt.Together, they share tales in the Native Northeast Woodland Tradition with Rick creating spontaneous, improvisational murals as Carolyn shares the stories from memory, often improvising along the way.

For this visit, Carolyn brought an original story, told in in the style of Native American storytelling, that she says came to her in a dream in its finished form. As she read the story on WRUV, Rick pulled out a pen and began sketching away, producing the sketches you see below. It was a fun and dynamic visit.

Listen to the show here.

Rick sketches while Carolyn reads her original story

From their website:

Major Jackson selects the poets, frequently from New England and occasionally from beyond. For the opening session of this year’s series, presented Sept. 29 in the museum’s front hall, he invited Taije Silverman from Philadelphia and Aracelis Girmay from Brooklyn.

Listen to the show here.

For information on future readings, please visit the Fleming Museum site.

About the readers:

Taije Silverman’s debut book of poems, Houses Are Fields, was published in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. The recipient of the 2005–2007 Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, the 2010-11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she lives and teaches in Philadelphia. In 2010-11, she will be working and teaching at the University of Bologna on a Fulbright fellowship.

The inheritor of Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African-American traditions, Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, essays, and fiction. She is the author of Teeth, a collection of poems published by Curbstone Press in 2007, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was nominated for a Connecticut Book Award. Her collage-based picture book, Changing, Changing: Story and Collages, was published by George Braziller in 2005.

A recipient of fellowships from the Watson and Jerome Foundations, Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow and serves on the board of the Acentos Foundation.

Originally from southern California, Girmay lives in Brooklyn and teaches community writing workshops there and in the Bronx. She also teaches in Drew University’s low residency MFA Program and at Queens College.

In September 2010, Aracelis Girmay assumed her duties as a full-time professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College.

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Ben is a Burlington artist who grew up in the small Vermont hamlet of Wallingford. His poetry has recently appeared in Seven Days. Ben has traveled and photographed in 15 countries around the world, and exhibited throughout Vermont. Also an actor and musician, Ben has performed with the Bread & Puppet Theatre in Glover, VT, at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennesee with Burlington’s Unbearable Light Cabaret, and toured in central America with the Mexican Circus, Cabaret Capricho.