June 24 - 29, 2012

Faculty and Presenters 2012

Faculty

Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of two novels – All Is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost and Inheritance, as well as a story collection, Hunger. Hunger was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Inheritance won the PEN/Beyond Margins Prize for the Novel. Samantha is the recipient of writing fellowships from Princeton University, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundations, and has been a frequent Writer-in-Residence at the Napa Valley, Bread Loaf, and Sarah Lawrence Writing Workshops. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and Best American Short Stories. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Kate McMullan

Kate McMullan has written more than 100 children’s books, including SCHOOL: Adventures at Harvey N. Trouble Elementary, Myth-o-Mania, the Greek Myths as told by Hades, the Dragon Slayers’ Academy series, and the Pearl & Wagner books for new readers. She and her illustrator husband, Jim McMullan, have collaborated on many best-selling picture books, among them I STINK!, named one of the Ten Best Picture Books of the Year by The New York Times, I’M DIRTY!, I’M BAD! and most recently, I’M FAST! Kate has taught at NYU, the New School’s MFA Writing Program, and the Southampton Writers Conference. She lives in Sag Harbor, New York, with her husband and two inspirational French bulldogs.

http://www.katemcmullan.com

Mimi Schwartz

Mimi Schwartz is the author of five books, most recently, Good Neighbors, Bad Times - Echoes of My Father’s German Village, a winner of the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Outstanding Book of the Year Award in Memoir and the New Hampshire Writers Outstanding Literary Nonfiction Award. Other books include Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (2000) and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (2006), forthcoming in its second edition. Her short work has appeared in Agni, Tikkun, The Missouri Review, Arts & Letters, The Los Angeles Times, and The Writer, among others, and seven essays have been Notables in Best American Essays. She is Professor Emerita in Writing at Richard Stockton College and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. She is currently working on When History Gets Personal, personal essays that explore the intersection of memoir, history, and politics.

Kathleen Spivack

Kathleen Spivack is the author of six books of prose and poetry. Her new memoir With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Kunitz etc (1959–1979) is due to be released in early fall, 2012.

Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Agni, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and the Harvard Review. Nominated for Pulitzer and Pushcart Prizes, she has also won best essay and short story awards, most recently a first prize, Carpe Articulum, for a novella; New Guard, first prize, for poetry; the Sows Ear International Poetry Chapbook Prize (2010), the Los Angeles and New England Book Festival prizes, and the London Book Festival First Prize for Poetry. She is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg, Erika Mumford and Pautunok awards for recent work, as well as a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and several other arts foundations.

Named by the National Writers’ Union as Best Writing Coach, she teaches in Boston and Paris and has been a faculty member at workshops in Aspen, Sante Fe, Taos, Burgundy, Radcliffe, Berkeley, Skidmore/IWWG, Yarmouth, Truro, Castle Hill, and other summer writing conferences.

http://www.kathleenspivack.com/

Christopher Tilghman

Christopher Tilghman is the author of the novels, Mason’s Retreat and Roads of the Heart. His new novel, The Right-Hand Shore, is due to be released in May 2012. His two short story collections, In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run, were critically acclaimed—especially praised for characters of “depth and grace” and language that is “poetic, spare, and memorable.” His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and in literary quarterlies, and has been selected three times for the Best American Short Stories, as well as other anthologies. His work has been translated into eight foreign languages. Chris has received the Whiting Writer’s Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Since 2001 he has been a Professor of English at the University of Virginia and is currently the Director of the Creative Writing Programs. We are honored to have Chris, lauded by Publishers’ Weekly as “one of America’s most accomplished writers,” join PWW.

Presenters

Jami Bernard

Internationally known author and film critic Jami Bernard helps writers find their voice and finish their books through her company, Barncat Publishing. Eight of her books have been published by major houses, including Penguin, Warner Books, HarperCollins, and Perseus. Jami and her work have been featured on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including Oprah and the BBC. Her books include The Incredible Shrinking Critic, Breast Cancer: There & Back, and Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies. Among the pieces of which she is most proud is a Lois Lane comic, published by DC Comics, in which Lois is based on Jami’s early career as a reporter, editor, and headline writer for The New York Post.

Stephen Clarke

Stephen Clarke grew up in Bournemouth, England playing bass in some of the worst rock bands in musical history. After Oxford, he got a series of high-powered jobs in the wine industry (grape picking), tertiary sector (washing up in a German hotel), and international diplomacy (teaching English to bored French businessmen). All the while, he was writing novels, all of which remained unpublished due to a vast – and never before revealed – conspiracy in the global publishing industry. He self-published two of his books Beam Me Up, Who Killed Beano and A Year in the Merde, and, well, the rest is history. He sold Year to a major publisher (thanks to his agent Susanna Lea). He has now written sequel after sequel, including Merde Actually, Merde Happens, and Dial M for Merde, as well as Talk to the Snail, 1000 Years of Annoying the French, and Paris Revealed.

Sion Dayson

Sion Dayson is an American writer living in Paris, France. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Numero Cinq, Smokelong Quarterly, Stone Highway Review and the anthologies Sounds of this House and Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light, among other venues. In 2007 she won a Barbara Deming Award for Fiction and her novel manuscript recently placed as a semifinalist in the William Faulkner Wisdom Competition. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sion was designated an "Ultimate Paris Travel Blogger" by easyJet Holidays for her blog, paris (im)perfect, which features author interviews and Sion’s quirky adventures in the City of Light. Sion tweets as @parisimperfect, as well.

Mary Duncan

Mary Duncan, a native Californian, has lived in Paris since 2000. She is the author of the memoir Henry Miller is Under My Bed and the Founder and Director of the Paris Writers Group, a collective of Paris-based writers that meets monthly to discuss nuts and bolts issues such as literary agents, editors, writer’s block, private publishing, marketing, websites, blogs, and the publishing industry. Mary founded Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Moscow and is now a sponsor of the Paris Shakespeare and Company Literary Festival. She is currently working on her second book.

Gretel Furner

Gretel Furner studied French and German literature at Oxford and wrote her Ph. D. on the modern novel. She has lived and worked in England, Germany, North and South America and is now settled in Paris where she has been teaching for WICE since 2004. She taught at the George Washington University and the John Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington D.C. She currently runs seminars and writing groups for the international community in Paris.

Terrance Gelenter

Terrance Gelenter has earned the nickname, "Mr. Paris," with his inside knowledge of the city and his Paris Through Expatriate Eyes website, blog, and newsletter. He is the author of From Bagels to Brioches: Paris Par Hasard and uses the internet and social media to promote his book as well as his special cultural events and literary events with noted Paris-based authors.

He is a syndicated film critic, a consultant for writers who want to self-publish (with his company Published in Paris), and, most recently, a singer at local clubs in town such as the Swan Bar.

Adrian Leeds

Adrian Leeds is founder and director of the Adrian Leeds Group, LLC, a team of North Americans who provide complete property consultation services, public relations consultation,Web-based relationship marketing, and event coordination targeted to "francophiles" living in North America and France. She is the author and editor of the Parler Paris Nouvellettre®, editor of French Property Insider, and the author of the first online restaurant guide to Paris published in print and online for iPhone and iPad under the name of Adrian Leeds’ Top 100 Cheap Insider Paris Restaurants. In addition, she co-hosts her own brainchild, the popular Parler Parlor French/English Conversation Group in Paris where members from 50 different countries meet to practice speaking French and English.

Alexander Lobrano

Alexander Lobrano has written about food and travel for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Departures, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, including the anthology A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Adventures Around the World (Lonely Planet). He was European Editor for Gourmet magazine from 1999 until it closed in 2009. He is the author of Hungry for Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City’s 102 Best Restaurants (Random House), which came out in an updated edition in 2010. He is currently working on another epicurean volume and is a regular contributor to the New York Times T Style. He has won several James Beard awards, and in 2011, he was awarded the IACP’s Bert Greene award for culinary writing for his article "Spirit of the Bistro" in Saveur magazine.

Paul Schmidtberger

Paul Schmidtberger is the author of the novel Design Flaws of the Human Condition (Doubleday / Broadway Publishing Group, 2007). Paul's debut novel explores anger, betrayal, loyalty and friendship with compassion and a wickedly irreverent sense of humor. A Yale College and Stanford Law School Graduate and member of the California State Bar, Paul practiced law for ten years and lived in Japan and San Francisco before moving to Paris to write. Movie rights for Design Flaws of the Human Condition were recently optioned. Paul's articles have appeared in numerous law journals as well as the New York Times.

Thirza Vallois

Thirza Vallois is an expert on all things Parisian. She has lived in Paris most of her life and holds several degrees from the Sorbonne, among them the prestigious French Agrégation. Her Around and About Paris books have been universally acclaimed as the best travel books ever written on Paris, her Romantic Paris as the most exquisite. Her latest book, Aveyron, A Bridge to French Arcadia is a journey into the last hidden corner of France. Thirza has also appeared on PBS, BBC, the Travel Channel, the French Cultural Channel, Discovery, and CNN; has worked as a consultant for the BBC; has spoken on BBC Radio 4 and NPR in the U.S.; and has had her own program "Postcard from Paris" on one of London’s radio stations. She is a frequent contributor on French topics to British newspapers and U.S. and UK magazines. her award-winning "Three Perfect Days in Paris" was published in United Airlines’ Hemispheres and aired on their international flights and travel channels.