Wednesday, January 21, 2009

February 17: Susan Holahan and Lewis Robinson

Susan Holahan came to New Haven to study, and stayed. She took a few degrees from Yale then worked as a teacher, a lawyer, a restaurant reviewer, and a newspaper editor as well as a single parent. Her first book of poetry, Sister Betty Reads the Whole You, won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. It bears her photograph of a Whalley Avenue gas station on the cover. She's had poems in American Letters & Commentary, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, The Prose Poem, Sentence, Volt, and many other magazines, as well as The Starving Poets' Cookbook and Off the Record, an anthology of poems by lawyers.

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, winnerof a Whiting Award and the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, and WaterDogs, due out from Random House in January 2009. A graduate of the IowaWriters' Workshop, he teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at theUniversity of Southern Maine and coaches middle-school basketball inPortland, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and dog.