Writing on the Green:
The Hamline Summer Writing Workshop
Write. Learn. Experiment. Restore. Engage. Experience all of this and more at Hamline's intensive residential retreat set on the campus of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. At the annual Summer Writing Workshop, you will experience a deep immersion in the process and craft of writing with nationally known authors in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Students can choose to commute to class each day or can stay on St. Olaf's picturesque campus. Those who stay on campus can use the free time to write, read, reflect, hike, or socialize.
Students will spend their afternoons in focused study of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. Mornings are open to write, relax, or take advantage of the rich prairie, wetlands, and woodlands surrounding St. Olaf, or the lively charm of historic downtown Northfield.
The Summer 2012 Visiting Faculty:
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July 2012 Faculty
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations, most recently, Rough Likeness (essays, Sarabande Books, January 2012). Her awards include a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for the essay collection On Looking), NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, four Pushcart prizes, work in Best American Essays, 2011, the AWP Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley award in Poetry. Recent work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is Writer in Residence at Loyola University, Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.
(Image via liapurpura.com)
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FICTION
Nami Mun received
significant critical praise for her first novel, Miles from Nowhere, winner of a Whiting Award and selected as a
finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers and an Asian American Literary
Award. Miles from Nowhere was also
selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction
of 2009 by Amazon; and an Indie Next pick. Her short stories have been published in Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The
Pushcart Prize Anthology, and
elsewhere. Other awards include fellowships from Yaddo,
MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Tin House.
In 2011 she was named a U. S. delegate for a China/America Writers
Exchange in Beijing and Chicago. Nami
Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. She received her MFA from the
University of Michigan. She is
currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago.
Peter Ho Davies, author of The
Welsh Girl, called Miles from Nowhere
a “starkly beautiful book, shot through with grace and lit by an off-hand
street poetry. Nami Mun takes a cast of junkies and runaways and brings them
fiercely and frankly to life.” The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer described Mun’s
novel as “a remarkable debut . . . . an intense look at life on the streets,
one that gives genuine voice and heart to struggling people on society’s
margins . . . [with] brilliant
description, achingly real narration and an affecting central character.”
(Image by Brigitte Sire)
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POETRY
Bob Hicok is the author of six award-winning collections
of poetry, including his most recent, Words
for Empty and Words for Full (2010).
This Clumsy Living (2007)
received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress; Animal Soul (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award; and The Legend of Light
(1995) received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Bob Hicok is the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes, a
Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships.
In addition, he has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review and the Anne
Halley Prize from The Massachusetts
Review. His short stories have
been published in such magazines as Poetry,
The New Yorker, and Ploughshares and were selected for
inclusion in six volumes of Best American
Poetry. After having worked
for many years as an automotive die designer and business owner, Bob Hicok is
currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Boston Review described Words for Empty and Words for Full as “poetry memorable for its
structure, its image and sound, but also for demanding that we readers enter
into some serious thinking about our place and time.” Of This Clumsy Living,
Library Journal wrote: “This collection works because it dwells on human
experience and because at its best the language is charged with unforgettably
lyrical wisdom.”
(Image by Robert Turney)
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St. Olaf College
St. Olaf College rests on a beautiful 345-acre campus. Adjacent to the main campus are 700 acres of land, including woodlands, prairies, wetlands, and farmlands. A walk around campus could take you from Norway Valley through dense woods, across open prairie to the shore of a small wetland. It is a setting conducive to reflection, writing, and simple appreciation of the campus’ natural beauty. Northfield is less than an hour’s drive from the Twin Cities, so that students wishing to commute may do so. Dining in St. Olaf’s impressive student center is provided by Bon Appetit. www.stolaf.edu
Explore St. Olaf's prairies, woodlands, wetlands, and trails.
Photo via www.stolaf.edu
Visiting Northfield: http://www.visitingnorthfield.com
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