Participants

Judith Hall's four books include To Put The Mouth To, selected for the National Poetry Series, and Three Trios, translations of the poet J II. She has received awards from the NEA, the Guggenheim and is poetry editor of The Antioch Review.

Kendra Hamilton's new poetry collection is The Goddess of Gumbo. She has an MFA from Louisiana State University. She currently serves as Vice Mayor of the Charlottesville City Council.

Hilary Holladay is the author of the poetry collection The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson and the critical analysis Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton. She is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Massachuesetts Lowell.

Ann Hudson’s first book, The Armillary Sphere, was chosen as the winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. She grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended UVa and the University of Utah. She lives in Chicago.

Maud Kelly will receive her M.F.A. in Poetry Writing from the University of Missouri this spring. Her most recent publication is in Best New Poets 2006. A St. Louis resident, she is currently finishing her first book of poems, The Consort.

Sharon Leiter's most recent book is A Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson. She is the author of Akhmatova's Petersburg and a poetry collection, the Lady and the Bailiff of Time. She teaches in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program at UVa.

Charlotte Matthews has a poetry collection, Green Stars, and chapbooks, A Kind of Devotion and Biding Time. She received the 2007 New Writers Award from the Fellowship for Southern Writers. She teaches in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program at UVa.

Michael McFee, author of Shinemaster, his seventh poetry collection, and The Napkin Manuscripts, a collection of literary essays, teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Emory & Henry College celebrated a Michael McFee Literary Festival in October 2002.

Eric McHenry's first book of poems is Potscrubber Lullabies. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Harvard Review, Agni and Orion. He writes about poetry for The New York Times Book Review and Slate.

Elizabeth Seydel Morgan's Without a Philosophy won the 2007 L.E. Philabaum award from Louisiana State University Press. Recipient of a Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, she is writer-in-residence at Hollins University. She was also a finalist in the Library of Virginia's Second Annual Literary Awards.

Canceled

Odetta, iconic folk singer, who began performing in the 1950s, has won the first Duke Ellington Fellowship Award from Yale University, and the international Folk Alliance and World Folk Music Association's Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Gregory Orr, an essayist to NPR's This I Believe, has eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. A UVa creative writing professor, he is a Virginia Literary Award finalist and winner of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Bino A. Realuyo's novel, The Umbrella Country, was included in Booklist's Top Ten First Novels of 1999. His first poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, won the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry.

David Roderick's first book, Blue Colonial, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize. He is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

David Lee Rubin, a professor emeritus of French, has taught Great Books courses to undergraduates, as well as senior citizens in the Jefferson Institute for Lifelong Learning, at UVa. He will be leading a workshop on the "Great Books Approach."