UIUC Creative Writing

This event has been canceled.

Patrick Rosal is the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books, 2004), finalist for the Asian-American Writers' Workshop Literary Awards and winner of the AAWW Member's Choice Award. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award. His work has appeared in journals such as North American Review, Columbia, Folio, and many anthologies including The NuyorAsian Anthology, Pinoy Poetics, and The Beacon Best. He has been a featured reader at many venues around the country, in Buenos Aires, London, and on the BBC radio program "The World Today". His second full-length collection, My American Kundiman, was published by Persea Books in fall 2006.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Mariko Nagai has lived in Europe and America most of her life, earning a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from New York University, where she was the Erich Maria Remarque Poetry Fellow. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Pushcart Award twice, in both poetry and short story, and has received numerous fellowships and scholarships from art foundations and writers’ conferences. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, among others. She also translates modern and contemporary Japanese poems and fiction into English. Currently, she teaches creative writing and literature at Temple University Japan Campus, where she also directs the Writing Programs.

Mark Costello is the author of The Murphy Stories and of Middle Murphy. His work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories. The Murphy Stories won the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction.

A recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and five grants from the Illinois Arts Council, Mr. Costello has served as visiting writer at many universities and colleges, among them Dartmouth College, Amherst College, The University of New Hampshire, The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, The University of Arizona, and the University of Oregon. He has held the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and was, for a year, writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Mark Costello is a native of Decatur, Illinois. He is presently a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Katherine Min is the author of Secondhand World (Random House, 2006). Katherine Min’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been widely anthologized, most recently in The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize. “Eyelids” was listed as one of 100 distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 1997. “The Brick” was read on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts program in 1999. “Courting a Monk” won a Pushcart Prize.

Roy Kesey is the author of the novella Nothing in the World (Bullfight Press 2006) and the story collection All Over (Dzanc Books, 2007). Roy's work has appeared in over 50 top flight literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and Georgia Review. Several of the stories in All Over first appeared in journals such as Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Other Voices, and The Iowa Review. His story "Wait" was included in Best American Short Stories 2007.

Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a native Chicagoan. Her first book, The Grass Dancer, was published in 1994 and awarded the PEN/Hemingway Prize. Her second book, Roofwalkers, was published in 2001 and awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.

Natasha Trethewey most recent collection of poetry is Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. . Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 and 2000, and in journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review among others. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Emily Raboteau is the author of The Professor's Daughter (Henry Holt, 2005). An assistant professor of English at the City College of New York, she has an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she was a New York Times Fellow. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo, the Missouri Review, the Gettysburg Review, Tin House, Best American Short Stories 2003 and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Chicago Tribunes Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.