Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Caryl Phillips and Matt Debenham

Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts, West Indies, and brought up in Leeds. He is the author of numerous books of non-fiction and fiction. Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, and A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was also short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has written extensively for the stage, television, and film, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Professor of English at Yale University, he currently lives in New York City.

Matt Debenham's story collection The Book of Right and Wrong (published in 2010) won the Ohio State University Press Prize for fiction and featured the Pushcart Prize-nominated title story “The Book of Right and Wrong.” Matt holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Roanoke Review, The Pinch, Weston Magazine, Dogwood, Painted Bride Quarterly, and North Atlantic Review. He teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, writes a blog and twitters.