Frank Bidart
*Please note, this event has been CANCELLED - we apologize for any inconvenience*
Frank Bidart is the author of numerous books of poetry, including most recently Music Like Dirt, and is co-editor, with David Gewanter, of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. He has received the Academy’s Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for The War of Vaslav Nijinsky in 1981. He was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2003. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Wellesley College.

Award-Winning Student Poets
Readings by award-winning UCLA student poets. The recipients of honors from the Academy of American Poets and the May Merill Miller Poetry Awards in 2008 are: Robbie Adler, Nahrain Al-Mousawi, Laura Copelin, Peter Eirich, James Franco, Natasha Hakimi, and Marianna Tekosky. The UCLA Ina Coolbrith nominees this year were Tory Adkisson, Peter Eirich, and Ruoxi Hu, the second place winner in that state-wide contest.

Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje is the author of four novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. won the Booker Prize; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Medicis. His most recent novel is Divisidero. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.

Janet Sarbanes & Marisa Silver
Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collection Army of One. She is currently completing a novel entitled This Land: The Adventures of the President's Daughter, and teaches creative writing and cultural studies at CalArts. Marisa Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker when she appeared in the inaugural “Debut Fiction” issue. Her collection of stories, Babe in Paradise, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of the novel No Direction Home.

Jim Crace
Jim Crace is the author of several novels, which have been translated into fourteen languages. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and the GAP International Prize for Literature. He lives in Birmingham, England.

Sarah Hall & Jacob Polley
Sarah Hall was born in 1974, in Cumbria, England. Shecompleted a BA joint-honours at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a Masters in Creative Writing at St. Andrews University in Scotland. As well as being commissioned by the BBC and various national publications, she has written three novels—the second of which, The Electric Michelangelo, was a Man Booker finalist—and she is now working on a fourth novel and a collection of short stories. Jacob Polley is one of the ‘Next Generation’ of British poets. Born in 1975, near the Lake District in Cumbria, his first book of poems, The Brink, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His second collection, Little Gods, published in 2006, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His first novel, Talk of the Town, is due out in 2009.

Rachel Kushner & Salvador Plascencia
Rachel Kushner was an editor at Grand Street and Bomb and now coedits the literary and art journal Soft Targets. A frequent contributor to Artforum, she has a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA from Columbia University. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, will be published this July. Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper, has been translated into over half a dozen languages, and his short stories and reviews have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. He was previously an assistant lecturer at The University of Southern
California where he taught The Sheridan Baker Thesis Machine.

Janet Kaufmann & Thomas Lawson
Janet Kauffman is the author of several books of fiction, including Places in the World a Woman Could Walk. Her new book, Trespassing, is composed of short fiction and essays that illustrate the impact of modern factory farms on a rural Michigan community. It considers the consequences of violating nature’s limits, giving readers a vivid impression of the irreversible damage that violation causes to our habitat. Thomas Lawson is an artist with a diverse, project-driven output. He has shown paintings in private galleries and public museums and has created temporary public works. He has written a book of selected writings, Mining for Gold, as well as three short chapbooks: The Pest of Scotland, Paranoia on the High Seas,, and An Escape Towards Liberty. He has been Dean of the Art School at CalArts since 1991 and co-editor of Afterall since 2002.

Meghan Daum & Nina Revoyr
Meghan Daum is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times and has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Vogue, and The New York Times, among others. She is the author of the bestselling essay collection My Misspent Youth,, the critically acclaimed novel The Quality of Life Report, and is currently working on a book about real estate and identity entitled Give Me Shelter, due out in 2010. Nina Revoyr is the author of three novels: The Necessary Hunger, Southland, and The Age of Dreaming. Library Journal has called her new novel, The Age of Dreaming, “fast-moving, riveting, unpredictable, and profound” and Los Angeles Magazine writes that Revoyr is “fast becoming one of the city’s finest chroniclers and myth-makers.”