Next fall the advanced fiction and poetry writing courses will be taught by two visiting writers. Sigrid Nunez, the Elizabeth Drew Professor, will teach fiction writing; Henri Cole, the Grace Hazard Conkling writer-in-residence, will teach the poetry course. As in the past, admission will be by permission of the instructor; work should be submitted to Ms. Kozash in Wright Hall 101 by the end of the pre-registration period. Both courses will be taught primarily as workshops. Both Nunez and Cole are well-known, extremely accomplished writers and experienced teachers; we are very happy, and fortunate, to have them at Smith next year.

Here is a little more information about them:

Sigrid Nunez is the author of three highly regarded novels, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), Naked Sleeper (1996), and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998). Her short fiction and nonfiction have been published in excellent journals and featured on National Public Radio. Her work has been anthologized in several Pushcart Prize volumes and in two well-known collections of work by Asian American writers. Her work has won her many awards and fellowships, the most recent of which was a fiction prize for distinguished achievement from the American Academy. She is an experienced teacher, with stints at Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Amherst College.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He earned his BA at the College of William and Mary, and his MFA at Columbia University in 1982, and served as executive director of the Academy of American Poets from 1982 until 1988. Since then, he taught at several universities in the United States including Yale College, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Reed College, and as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He is currently the Fannie Hurst Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. In addition to the Berlin Prize Fellowship, Cole's awards and honors have included fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, as well as the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Cole's poetry has been published in numerous journals and periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and The Threepenny Review. He has also published four books:

The Visible Man (Knopf, 1998)
The Look of Things (Knopf, 1995)
The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (Knopf, 1989)
The Marble Queen (Atheneum, 1986)