Teachers & Writers Collaborative

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.tiphanieyanique.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., as well as a future writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook.

”Without a doubt, when we discuss the future of American poetry, we must include Nicole Sealey and her brilliant and intrepid work.”—Sapphire

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.

Praise for At the End of the Day:

”Phillip Lopate is a guerilla fighter: his poems take on the Sisyphean task of trying to convince humanity to forgive itself for being flawed. He knows that this is the work to be done because he finds so much resistance to the idea in himself. The result is often startingly wise, terrifically winning, a precious book.”—Frank Bidart

”These are extraordinary, idiosyncratic poems. As a young poet, Phillip Lopate was already writing of the personal in a way that we came to admire in his later essays, combining a merciless intelligence and open heart in a voice at once humorous, lacerating, and almost reluctantly profound.”—April Bernard

”Phillip Lopate may be an American ambassador of nonfiction, but he is also a youthful, taciturn, love-seeking New York poet, whose poems—plainspoken, personal, darkly humorous—quietly gather strength while confronting the beautiful and ugly in city life. I admire their vitality and honesty.”—Henri Cole

”Phillip Lopate goes on his nerve in these jaunty, energetic, intimate, daily, and urgent New York anti-poems that come bursting out of the past with a bright immediacy.”—Edward Hirsch

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.

Current T&W Fellow Charles Conley was a 2008–2009 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and his stories have appeared in the Harvard Review and the Southern Review, among other publications. He is a 2010 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant.

Steven Polansky grew up in New York City. He was educated at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA in creative writing), and Princeton University (PhD in English literature). He has taught at the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, Macalester College, University of Connecticut, and SUNY Buffalo. His short fiction has appeared in, among other places, the New Yorker, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Glimmer Train, New England Review, and Minnesota Monthly. His first book, the story collection Dating Miss Universe, won the Sandstone Prize for Fiction and the Minnesota Book Award. Polansky lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife and daughter.