Arkansas Spring Writers Festival

 

Stay Tuned for News about the 2014 Arkansas Writers Festival, April 2-3!

 

Featured Writers from Previous Years:

SINAN ANTOON is a poet, novelist and translator.  He was born in Baghdad and studied English literature at Baghdad University. He left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War and studied Arabic literature at Harvard where he earned his doctorate. He has published two collections of poetry and three novels in Arabic. His novel I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody was published in English in 2006. A translation of his latest novel, The Pomegranate Alone (2010), is currently being completed.  He has also translated the works of Mahmud Darwish, which won the 2004 PEN prize for translation. Antoon currently teaches Arabic Literature at New York University.

RANDA JARRAR is the author of the critically acclaimed novel A Map of Home (2008), which won a Hopwood Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Oxford American, The New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, and Salon.com. She was chosen to take part in Beirut39, which celebrates the 39 most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40. Jarrar teaches literature at Cal State-Fresno and is currently completing a collection of stories and a new novel.

SHAHRNUSH PARSIPUR was born in Tehran and has been one of the most widely read Iranian writers of her generation. She authored thirteen books, including Touba and the Meaning of Night (1989) and Women Without Men (1990), which are available in English.  Her first book The Dog and the Long Winter (1974) was the second great novel to be published by an Iranian woman. Women Without Men was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie (2009) by Shirin Nashat, a well-known visual artist. Parsipur currently lives in California as a political refugee after multiple imprisonments. Her books are banned in Iran.

ANDRE DUBUS III is the author of Bluesman, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, and House of Sand and Fog (National Book Award Finalist and Oprah Book Club Selection). His newest novel, The Garden of Last Days, is inspired by the rumored visit of 9/11 hijackers to a strip club shortly before their attacks. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his family north of Boston.

MICHAEL WALSH is the author of The Dirt Riddles, the first winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, as well as a chapbook, Adam Walking the Garden. He is the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and a residency at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. A graduate of Knox College and the University of Minnesota (MFA), he works as a course coordinator in the English Department at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis. 

W. S. MERWIN has published over twenty books of poetry. His recent collections include The Shadow of Sirius (2008), which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize; Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005), which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Among his many honors, he has won fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 2010, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He currently lives and works in Hawaii.

PETER ORNER is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006) which won the Bard Fiction Prize, and Love and Shame and Love (2011). His first collection, Esther Stories (2001) was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Esther Stories was a 2001 New York Times Notable Book. His latest collection, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, will be published in August 2014. Orner is a professor at San Francisco State.