Featured Artists
 John
Amen
John Amen is the author of three collections of poetry: Christening
the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003), More of Me Disappears
(Cross-Cultural Communications 2005), and At the
Threshold of Alchemy (Presa 2009), and he has released
two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need
and Ridiculous Empire (Cool Midget 2004, 2008). He
founded and continues to edit the award-winning literary bimonthly,
The Pedestal Magazine. (http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com).
Dennis Covington
Dennis Covington is the author of five books, including the
novel Lizard and the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain,
which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. His
work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times
Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, Georgia Review, Oxford
American, and many other periodicals. It has been widely
anthologized in this country and translated into eight languages
abroad. His most recent book is Redneck Riviera: Armadillos,
Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream. A native
of Birmingham, Alabama, he currently makes his home on the
high plains of West Texas, where he teaches in the creative
writing program at Texas Tech University.
Susan Davis
Susan Davis was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and
 graduated
from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and The Creative Writing
Program at The University of Houston in Texas. Her poetry
has been featured in several literary journals including The
Paris Review, The Antioch Review, and The Boston
Review and on National Public Radio. She is the author
of the poetry collection, Gathering Sound (Fairweather
Books/2006.) She is the co-editor with Gina Hyams of the anthology,
Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Writers on the Intense
Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies in America (Hudson
Street Press 2006), and a contributor to the anthology My
Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents,
Stepchildren, and Everyone in Between (Norton, 2006),
and About Face: Women Write about What They See When They
Look in the Mirror (Seal Press, 2008.) She has had a
long career in public radio, working for Marketplace and NPR.
Currently, she is the senior producer of The State of
Things on North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. She lives
in Chapel Hill with her husband and two children.
Chitra Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s work has been published
in over 50 magazines, including The Atlantic  Monthly
and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over
50 anthologies including Best American Short Stories,
The O’Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart
Prize anthology. Her works have been translated into
17 languages. Divakaruni's recent books include Palace
of Illusions, a retelling of the ancient Indian epic
The Mahabharat; Queen of Dreams; The Conch Bearer,
a children’s novel; Neela: Victory Song, which
follows the story of a twelve-year-old girl caught up in the
Independence movement in 1939 India; Vine of Desire,
a sequel to Sister of My Heart (made into a movie
in India); and her latest collection of short stories, The
Unknown Errors of Our Lives. She has also written several
books of poetry. Her first book of short stories, Arranged
Marriage, won critical acclaim and the 1996 American Book
Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers and PEN Oakland Josephine
Miles awards for fiction. Her many awards include four PEN
Syndicated Fiction awards, an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award,
and two Pushcart prizes. She serves on the advisory board
of an organization that fosters literacy and two that help
women in domestic violence situations. She lives in Houston
with her husband Murthy, her two children Anand and Abhay,
and their dog Juno.
Listen to interview with Chitra on SAJA Forum.
Silas House
Silas House is the author of three novels: Clay’s
Quilt (2001), A Parchment  of
Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), a play,
The Hurting Part (2005), and Something’s
Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social
protest co-authored with Jason Howard. His fourth novel, Eli
the Good, will be published in Fall 2009 by Candlewick
Books. A new play, Long Time Traveling, premiered
in April 2009. House serves as Writer-in-Residence at Lincoln
Memorial University, where he also directs the Mountain Heritage
Literary Festival. He is a contributing editor for No Depression
magazine, where he has done long features on such artists
as Lucinda Williams, Nickel Creek, Buddy Miller, Kelly Willis,
Darrell Scott, Delbert McClinton, and many others. He is also
one of Nashville’s most in-demand press kit writers,
having written the press kit bios for such artists as Kris
Kristofferson, Kathy Mattea, Leann Womack, and many others.
House is a two-time finalist for the Southern Book Critics
Circle Prize, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the
Year, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Prize
for Literature, the Award for Special Achievement from the
Fellowship of Southern Writers, and many other honors.
See video of Silas house from his web site.
Cleopatra Mathis
Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana,
of Greek and Cherokee descent. Her first five books of poems
were published by Sheep Meadow Press. A sixth collection,
White Sea, finalist for the  Texas
Institute of Letters Award, was published by Sarabande Books
in 2005. Cleopatra Mathis’ work has appeared widely
in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals, including
The Best American Poetry, 2009, The New Yorker, Poetry,
American Poetry Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review,
The Georgia Review, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary
Southern Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American
Women, and The Practice of Poetry. Various prizes
for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants,
in 1984 and 2003; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book
of Poems in 2001; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets
from the Academy of American Poets; two Pushcart Prizes: 1980
and 2006; The Robert Frost Resident Poet Award; a 1981-82
Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,
Massachusetts; The May Sarton Award; and four Individual Artist
Fellowships in Poetry from the New Hampshire State Council
on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. Cleopatra
Mathis is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor
of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where she has
taught since 1982.
Jill McCorkle
Jill McCorkle is a professor in the MFA in Creative Writing
 program
at NC State. She was one of the original core faculty members
of the Bennington College MFA program and is a frequent instructor
at the Sewanee Summer Writers Program. A member of the Fellowship
of Southern Writers, McCorkle has the distinction of having
published her first two novels on the same day in 1984. Since
then, she has published three other novels and three collections
of short stories. Five of her eight books, which include The
Cheer Leader, July 7th, Tending to Virginia, Ferris Beach,
Carolina Moon, Going Away Shoes, Crash Diet, and
Final Vinyl Days, have been named New York Times notable
books. Her award-winning fictions has appeared in The
Atlantic, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Southern Review and
Bomb Magazine, among others. Her story, "Intervention,"
is in the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology
of Short Fiction. McCorkle has received the New England
Book Award, The John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature
and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Aside from published
fiction, her essays and reviews have appeared in The New
York Times Books Review, The Washington Post, The News &
Observer, Southern Living, Real Simple and the American
Scholar.
Nahid Rachlin
Of Nahid Rachlin’s recent memoir, Persian Girls
(Penguin), Matt Beynon Rees, contributing editor t o
Time, praises, “Through the touching story of two sisters,
Persian Girls unfolds the entire drama of modern Iran. …
If you want to understand Iran, read Nahid Rachlin.”
Rachlin has also written four novels, Jumping over Fire
(City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), The Heart's
Desire (City Lights), and Married to a Stranger
(E.P.Dutton), which, says the New York Times Review of Books,
“shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with
sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked
bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious
factions contending for primacy in the streets outside.”
She has published a collection of short stories, Veils
(City Lights). Her individual stories have appeared in more
than 50 magazines. She had written reviews for The New
York Times, Washington Post and Newsday. While
a student she held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace
Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). Her many grants and awards
include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project
Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She teaches
at the New School University and a variety of summer writers
conferences, abroad and in the United States.
Hear Rachlin speaking about women in Iran on NPR.
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith, lauded by critics as “a testament to
the power of words to change lives,” is the author of
?ve acclaimed poetry volumes, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist
for the 2008 National Book Award, which chronicles the devastation
wreaked by Hurricane Katrina; Teahouse of the Almighty, a
 National
Poetry Series selection and winner of the ?rst-ever Hurston/Wright
Award in Poetry; Close to Death; Life According to Motown;
and Big Towns, Big Talk. She is the winner of the Chatauqua
Literary Journal Award in poetry and a Pushcart Prize for
the poem “The Way Pilots Walk.” The American book
Review called the poems of Blood Dazzler “blessings
that will move like white light through your veins.”
A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam
—the most successful slammer in the competition’s
history--Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s
Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman plays, one
produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott.In addition to
her poetic works, Smith is also the author of Africans in
America, a companion volume to the groundbreaking PBS documentary,
and the children’s book Janna and the Kings, which won
Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Award.She has served
as a Cave Canem faculty member, a Bruce McEver Visiting Chair
in Writing at Georgia Tech University, and writer-in-residence
at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. During a ceremony
at Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center,
Smith was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame
for Writers of African Descent. In 2008 she was awarded a
Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas.
Carole Boston Weatherford
New York Times best-selling author Carole Boston Weatherford
has 35 books of poetry, nonfiction  and
children's literature, including Moses: When Harriet Tubman
Led Her People to Freedom, winner of an NAACP Image Award,
Caldecott Honor Medal and Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration.
Becoming Billie Holiday and Before John Was a Jazz Giant both
won Coretta Scott King Honors; Birmingham, 1963 won the Lee
Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Jefferson Cup; The Sound
that Jazz Makes won the Carter G. Woodson Award from National
Council for the Social Studies; and Remember the Bridge: Poems
of a People and Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins
both won North Carolina Juvenile Literature Awards. Carole
received Golden Kite Honors from the Society of Children’s
Book Writers and Illustrators for Dear Mr. Rosenwald and Before
John Was a Jazz Giant. Her books have been short-listed by
the International Reading Association, National Council for
the Social Studies, and Bank Street College of Education and
have been named best books of the year by the American Library
Association, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and New
York Public Library. Winner of the Ragan-Rubin Award from
the North Carolina English Teachers Association and a two-time
North Carolina Arts Council Writers Fellow, Carole teaches
at Fayetteville State University and resides in High Point,
N.C., with her family
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