Giving Voice Guest Writers for Feb. 11-12, 2010

Andrew Hudgins

Author of Ecstatic in the Poison (Sewanee/Overlook Press 2003), Babylon in a Jar (Houghton Mifflin 1998), The Glass Anvil (University of Michigan 1997), Saints and Strangers, After The Lost War: A Narrative, The Never-Ending: New Poems, The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. Articles on Whitman, Hawthorne, Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, and Jorie Graham. Articles on sentimentality in contemporary poetry. Articles on anthologies of contemporary poetry. Poems in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Poetry and other journals. Short stories in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and other journals. Personal essays in Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, The Oxford American, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The American Scholar, and The Washington Post Magazine. Recipient of the Writer Bynner Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Saints and Strangers, and finalist for the National Book Award for After the Lost War. Recipient of The Poet's Prize for After the Lost War. Recipient of the Haines Prize for poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, The Taft Distinguished Faculty Award, the Ohioiana Award for lifetime contributions to poetry in Ohio, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, he was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Andrew lives in Upper Arlington, just four miles from campus, with his wife Erin McGraw; Max, a labradoodle; and Sister, a coonhound mix adopted from the Union County shelter.

Leif Enger

Leif Enger was born in 1961 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota to Don and Wilma Enger, a band leader and a teacher, respectively, at Osakis High School.
Enger met Robin Reed when they were both students at Moorhead State University, he studying English and she studying Education. They have been married for 20 years.
Enger worked as a reporter and producer for the Minnesota Public Radio program “Mainstreet Radio”for 16 years before the success of Peace Like a River.
Writing with his brother Lin under the pen name L.L. Enger, Enger co-wrote five mystery novels about a retired baseball player named Gun Pedersen for Pocket and Simon & Schuster in the early 1990s.
His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome appeared in May 2008. It was called, “A superbly written, utterly compelling story of self-discovery and redemption disguised as a cracking good adventure tale . . . Enger has created a work of great humanity and huge heart, a riveting piece of fiction that while highly accessible is never shallow. This story of an ordinary man's discovery of who he is and his place in the world is exciting, admirable and ultimately very affecting. . ..After reading the final page, don't be surprised if you find yourself shaking your head and murmuring, Wow. What a good book.″—Peter Moore, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Enger currently lives on a 56-acre tract that includes farmland and forest near Aitkin, Minnesota with Robin, and their home-schooled sons, Ty and John. Peace Like a River is his debut novel.

Sari Fordham

Sari Fordham teaches creative writing at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. She is currently working on a memoir (titled: Wait for God to Notice) about growing up in Uganda during Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Her work has appeared in Brevity, among other magazines. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota where she was the recipient of the Gesell Award for Excellence in Literary Nonfiction (2005 and 2006), the Marcella DeBourg Fellowship (2006), the Prague Summer Program Eda Kiseova Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction (2006), and was an honorable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest (2007). Each summer she spends a week running a writing workshop, alongside Eugene Peterson, for ministers at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research.

Traci Letellier

Traci Rae Letellier is a poet and singer-songwriter from Northwest Arkansas. She has studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and University of Oxford, U.K. Letellier has completed three recording projects, Grey Shore (2001), Elegies (2005), and '58 Transtar Deluxe (2006). Letellier's songs have appeared on NPR's The Folk Sampler. In 2007, Maverick Magazine (U.K.) gave '58 Transtar Deluxe four stars–declaring Letellier "an accomplished folk-rock singer-songwriter," and her songs "well-written Americana classics." In 2009, "Wish You Were Here," a song written and performed by Letellier, appeared in the film Coyote County Loser. Her recordings are available via iTunes and CDBaby.com. Letellier is currently writing songs for an upcoming album about Depression-era life in the Ozarks.