Albert Goldbarth is the only living two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for his books Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology and Saving Lives. He is the author of some thirty volumes of poetry and prose. Critic Judith Kitchen has said that “Albert Goldbarth just may be the American poet of his generation for the ages. Often humorous but always serious, Goldbarth combines erudite research, pop-culture fanaticism, and personal anecdote in ways that make his writings among the most stylistically recognizable in the literary world.” Graywolf Press published Goldbarth’s newest book, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007. Goldbarth has been Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Department of English at Wichita State University since 1985.

Sharon May co-edited the anthology In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). She worked in Cambodian refugee camps, researching the Khmer Rouge for the Columbia University Center for the Study of Human Rights, and has lived in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and Australia. Her fiction is forthcoming in Best New American Voices 2008 and has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Manoa, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2005 Robie Macauley Award for Fiction and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, where she is completing a collection of linked stories about Cambodia.

The Sara Lura Mathews Self Writer-in-Residence
In addition to the permanent creative writing faculty, the Converse College program features the Sara Lura Mathews Self Writer-in-Residence, a visiting writer who serves on the faculty for one semester (January Term) each year. The writer’s primary responsibility is to teach the Advanced Tutorial in Creative Writing, a course that combines weekly one-to-one tutorials with a series of masterclass workshops.

The Sara Lura Mathews Self Writer-in-Residence reading will feature R.T. Smith, the author of 12 volumes of poetry, including Messenger, Trespasser and Brightwood, and a highly praised, recent collection of short stories entitled Uke Rivers Delivers (LSU Press). His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, Best American Mystery Stories, as well as Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Zoetrope and Quarterly West. As novelist Lee Smith says of this latest work, these brilliant stories astonish with their extravagant language, piercing insights and deep compassion.” Since 1995 Smith has served as editor of Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he also teaches creative writing and literature courses. As part of his month-long residency, Smith will teach the Advanced Tutorial course in poetry.

Writer and painter Gladys Swan has published five collections of short fiction and two novels, Carnival for the Gods (Vintage Contemporaries Series) and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the Pen/Faulkner Award. Her most recent book, a novella and stories under the title News from the Volcano, was also nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award. Her short fiction has appeared in such literary magazines as the Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner, where she was awarded the Lawrence Foundation Prize for Fiction. In 2001, she received the Tate Prize from the Sewanee Review. She was awarded one of the first Open Fellowships from the Lilly Endowment for a study in Inuit art and mythology and she has held residencies in writing and painting at Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. A former professor of creative writing at the University of Missouri, Gladys Swan currently writes and paints full time.

David Huddle's poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including The Story of a Million Years (Houghton Mifflin), La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (Houghton Mifflin), Summer Lake: New & Selected Poems (LSU), and Grayscale (LSU). LSU will publish his sixth book of poems, Glory River, in spring, 2008. About Huddle’s most recent works, the Washington Post remarked that La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl is a “masterful novel…A truly remarkable piece of fiction.” Huddle is professor of English at the University of Vermont. After serving in the U.S. Army in Germany and Vietnam, he completed degrees from UVA, Hollins and Columbia University. He is a frequent faculty member at the Breadloaf Writers Conference.