Visiting Writers

Biographical Information

J. Allyn Rosser

Ms. Rosser’s new collection of poetry, Foiled Again, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and will be published in October 2007 by Ivan R. Dee. Her first collection, Bright Moves, was selected by United States Poet Laureate Charles Simic for the Morse Poetry Prize, and her second book, Misery Prefigured, won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. Ms. Rosser has received numerous awards for her work including the Peter I.B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, and the Frederick Bock Prize, the latter two from Poetry magazine. In addition, she has had fellowships from the National endowment for the Arts, the YADDO Foundation, the Ohio State Arts Council, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Ms. Rosser has taught at the University of Houston, the University of Michigan, and Vermont College, and currently teaches in the creative writing program at Ohio University.

Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon’s most recent book is the highly acclaimed novel You Remind me Of Me, published by Ballantine in 2004, and subsequently listed as one of the best books of 2004 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly. In 2001 his book of short stories, Among The Missing, was a finalist fort the National Book Award. Mr. Chaon’s stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and have been included in Best American Short Stories of 1996, 2003, the O’Henry Prize Stories, 2001, The Pushcart Prize 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2007, the Best Fantasy and Horror, 2004, and The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2005. His work has been translated into ten languages and he is, most recently, the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Chaon lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife and two sons and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.