On Writing and the Writing Life

Kim Addonizio is an award-winning author of fiction, essays, and poetry. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and she has won Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and prose. She is also the author of two popular writing guides for poets, The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius, and teaches and performs internationally. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as “Charles Bukowski in a sundress.” (“Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu?” she muses.) Now, in Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin), an utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age.  Passionate and irreverent Addonizio’s poetry collection, Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.

Benjamin Percy is an award-winning novelist, comics writer and screenwriter. He has written three novels, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, as well as two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. Percy writes the Green Arrow series for DC Comics. His honors include an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics. Now, in his first book of nonfiction, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press), Percy challenges the notion that literary and genre fiction are somehow mutually exclusive. The title essay is an ode to the kinds of books that make many readers fall in love with fiction. In fifteen essays, Percy looks to disparate sources such as Jaws, Blood Meridian, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to discover how contemporary writers engage issues of plot, suspense, momentum, and the speculative, as well as character, setting, and dialogue. Thrill Me brims with Percy's distinctive blend of anecdotes, advice, and close reading, all in the service of one dictum: Thrill the reader.

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on “This American Life”. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, and Wesleyan University; she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. In Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life (Grove Press) Shapiro offers a blend of deeply personal stories about what formed her as a writer, tales from other authors, and a searching look at her own creative process. She also offers her gift to writers everywhere: an elegant guide of hard-won wisdom and advice for staying the course.