Listen to the show here.

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!

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.
Listen to the show.

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:

Click here to listen to the show.

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.

For our first live show of the year, we welcomed back our first guest ever, novelist Philip Baruth. In the midst of the political season, Philip took us back 1993′s The X President, a book-length satire that follows the desperate attempts of Bill Clinton, age 109, to re-write his historical legacy. The New York Times selected The X President as a Notable Book of 2003; the Washington Post described Philip and a small handful of others as “the newer new generation” of up-and-coming writers.

Philip’s most recent novel is The Brothers Boswell, a literary thriller that traces the famous friendship between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, author of the first modern dictionary. The Washington Post selected Brothers Boswell as one of the Best Books of 2009.

Click here to listen to the show.

Our new year starts Thursday, Sept. 16, when we’ll be joined again by our very first guest, Philip Baruth.

Listen to the show.

Visit the author’s website.

Bohjalian’s other novels include the New York Times bestsellers, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars and Midwives.

Chris won the New England Book Award in 2002, and his novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah’s Book Club, a Publishers Weekly “Best Book,” and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. His work has been translated into over 25 languages and twice become movies (“Midwives” and “Past the Bleachers”).

He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and theBoston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett’s Burlington Free Presssince 1992. Chris graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.