guests

Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley is a successful writer of both fiction and poetry with work regularly appearing in journals such as Redivider, PoemMemiorStory, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Superstition Review, and The Pinch. Several of her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Anthology, and she has twice won the Southern Women’s Writers Emerging Voice Award—fiction (2007) and poetry (2009). A cycle of her stories, Landfall, won the 2007 Everett Southwest Literature Award, and a chapbook of her poems, The Language of Horses, was recently published by Finishing Line Press. She is currently an associate professor at the Bluegrass Writers Studio, the brief-residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University. 

R. Dean Johnson

R Dean Johnson’s essays and stories have appeared in several national literary journals, including Ascent, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, Santa Clara Review, and The Southern Review. His fiction has previously been nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology and excerpts from his novel manuscript, Californium, have been anthologized in Tribute to Orpheus (Kearney Street Books) and Paradigm, Volume One (Rain Farm Press). Editor of the anthology Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education (University Press of America), he holds an MA in English from Kansas State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. Previously, he has taught at Prescott College, Cameron University, and Gotham Writers’ Workshop. He is currently an assistant professor at the Bluegrass Writers Stuido, the brief-residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University.

Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collection Venus Drive and three novels: The Ask, a New York Times Notable book for 2010, The Subject Steve and Home Land, also a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, Lipsyte's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review,The Quarterly, Tin House, Noon, and The Best American Short Stories 2011, among other places. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts. His new collection of stories, The Fun Parts, will be published in March.

Cyriaco Lopes

In the past few years Lopes’ work has been seen in the U.S. at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, at El Museo del Barrio, ApexArt and the America’s Society in New York, at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis, among other venues.  In the same period his work was also seen in France, Germany, Poland, Chile and Portugal. In his native Brazil the artist has shown at the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art of Salvador, and the Museum of Art of São Paulo, among other institutions.  His work was curated into exhibitions by artists such as Janine Antoni, Luciano Fabro and Lygia Pape, as well as by curators such as Paulo Herkenhoff.  Lopes was the winner of the Worldstudio AIGA and RTKL awards, the Contemporary Art Museum Project award (Saint Louis) and the Prêmio Phillips of a trip to Paris. His most recent New York City show, Crimes Against Love, was featured on the front page of The Advocate.

His collaborations with Terri Witek include Big Bronze Statues, chosen as one of the highlights of the 2009 season by Time Out New York, A Shelter on King’s Road, and Uma Cosia N'Outra.

Richard Zenith

Born in Washington DC, Richard Zenith is a long-time resident of Portugal, where he works as a free-lance writer, translator, researcher and critic. He has prepared numerous editions of Fernando Pessoa’s work and translated much of his prose and poetry into English (A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, The Book of Disquiet, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa and other titles). He has also translated poetry by the Galician-Portuguese troubadours, Luís de Camões, Cesário Verde, Sophia de Mello Breyner and contemporary Portuguese poets. His Education by Stone: Selected Poems, by Brazil’s João Cabral de Melo Neto, won the 2006 translation award from the Academy of American Poets. Zenith’s fiction translations include novels by António Lobo Antunes, José Luandino Vieira, and José Luís Peixoto. Author of a Fotobiografia de Fernando Pessoa, he has also published poems and a collection of short stories, Terceiras Pessoas.