Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Chuck Mee has written Big Love, True Love, First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0, Trojan Women: A Love Story, Summertime, and Wintertime, among other plays—all of them available on the Internet at www.charlesmee.org. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the gold medal for lifetime achievement in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of the Richard B. Fisher Award. Mee is also the author of a number of books of history and is the former editor-in-chief of Horizon, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. His work is made possible by the support of Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher.

Kyoung H. Park is a Korean-Chilean playwright, author of Sex and Hunger, disOriented, Heartbreak/India, and many short plays, including Mina. His plays have been produced Off and Off-Off Broadway and Kyoung has worked internationally in Chile, Brazil, England, South Korea, and India. A former visiting professor at Kyung Hee University’s School of English Language and Culture, Kyoung is currently a Dean’s Fellow at Columbia University’s MFA program in playwriting and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, Ma-Yi Theater’s Writer’s Lab, and the Soho Theatre Writer’s Hub in London.

Nandita Shenoy’s one-act plays Marrying Nandini and By Popular Demand received full productions from Green Light Productions and New Perspectives Theater respectively. She is a member of the Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab, where she developed Lyme Park: An Austonian Romance of an Indian Nature and How to Get Rid of the Wife: A Romance. Shenoy has a BA from Yale University.

Tiphanie Yanique is from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University. Her writing has won a Pushcart Prize and a Boston Review Fiction Prize, and has been published in Callaloo, American Short Fiction, the London Magazine, and other publications. She lives between Brooklyn and St. Thomas. www.tiphanieyanqiue.com

Praise for How to Escape from a Leper Colony

”In this widest of Sargasso Seas, Tiphanie Yanique gives us the pan-Caribbean, from the old lepers’ colony on Chacachacare, off the coast of Trinidad, to St. John, Accra, and London. It’s an astonishing debut collection—as brutal, sexual, magical, and seductively disturbing as if Jean Rhys had written it today.”—Robert Antoni

Nicole Sealey is a writer, editor, and Cave Canem fellow, originally from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Her interviews with writers Sapphire, DJ Spooky, and Nikki Giovanni can be found in Artists and Influence: Volume XXV, Studio, and Mosaic literary magazine, respectively. Her poems can be found—or are forthcoming in— print and online journals, including Callaloo and Torch. Nicole holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida. She is the Readings/Workshops and Writers Exchange Program Manager at Poets & Writers, Inc.

Lily Lopate is 15 and a sophomore at The Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn. She has written for her school newspaper, the Blotter, and for its literary magazine, Reflections, where she is the assistant editor. Last summer she attended Skidmore College’s Young Writers program, and she has since applied to both the Bread Loaf Conference and the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for young writers. She loves writing because “It allows you to express the messy parts of life in an effort to make sense of them. It gives you certain liberties and excuses to elaborate and embellish on the truth, to make it fit a closer version of an alternate world, where fantasy and reality collide more often than not.”

The author of a dozen books, including Being with Children (drawn from his years of work with Teachers & Writers Collaborative); Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan; the essay collections Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body; and three books of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, Two Marriages), Phillip Lopate will be reading from his latest publication, At the End of the Day: Selected Poems, and discussing with his daughter Lily their different writing processes.

Thomas Lux is Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and his most recent book is The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of The Endarkenment, Alibi School, The Forgiveness Parade, and The Splinter Factory. A recipient of an NEA fellowship, McDaniel’s poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry 1944, Ploughshares, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and The Best American Erotic Poems. McDaniel teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and recently moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley, where he lives with his wife, graphic artist Christine Caballero, and their daughter, Camilla Wren.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Moraine (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and Pageant (Alice James Books, 2009). She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and in schools and libraries through Poets House and Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

David Shapiro taught for many years at Columbia University, Bard, Princeton, William Paterson University, and The Cooper Union. He was one of the pioneers of teaching poetry to children and has written more than 20 books of poetry, criticism, and translation.