April 16 – Get Lit!
Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian Sport Monthly, Real Simple, and Playboy. Smiley's latest book is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a history and anatomy of the novel as a literary form (Knopf). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Date and Time TBA
Susan Musgrave has been labelled everything from eco-feminist to anti-feminist, from stand-up comedian to poet of doom and gloom, from social and political commentator to wild sea-witch of Canada's northwest coast. She has published over twenty books of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and for children. Cargo of Orchids was a national bestseller (Knopf Canada, 2000) and Things That Keep and Do Not Change (McClelland & Stewart, 1999) was included on The Globe and Mail's Best 100 Books of the Year List, 1999, and was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 2000.

VISITING WRITERS 2008-2009

October 2
Melissa Kwasny is the author of two books of poetry, Thistle (Lost Horse Press, 2006) and The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press, 2000). She is the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800 - 1950 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). She has also published two novels, most recently Trees Call for What They Need. Ms. Kwasny lives in Jefferson City, Montana.

October 17
Lee Gutkind is the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and prize-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, the most recent of which, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As founder of the creative nonfiction movement, according to Harper's Magazine, and the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" (Vanity Fair), Gutkind travels widely throughout the world giving workshops and readings, explaining the craft and the mission of the genre.

February 27
Born in Boston in 1968, Lydia Millet moved to Toronto, Canada with her Egyptologist father and teacher/librarian mother two years later. She received a Master's in Environmental Policy at Duke University and moved to New York in 1996, where she worked as a fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 1999 she went freelance and moved to Tucson, where she now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert. Her most recent work includes How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint, 2008) and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Harvest Books, 2005). She is also the author of Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996), George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Scribner, 2000), My Happy Life (Henry Holt, 2002), a winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, and Everyone's Pretty (Soft Skull Press, February 2005).