December 14: Phillip Lopate and Cynthia Zarin

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. The most recent of his many books is At the End of the Day, a collection of his selected poems published in 2010. He has written prolifically in many genres: personal essay, novel, poetry, memoir, criticism, and biography, in addition to editing a number of anthologies. His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays , several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

Among Phillip's many awards are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants.

After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Cynthia Zarin 's newest poetry collection is The Ada Poems, published in September. She has written three other books of poetry—The Watercourse, Fire Lyric, and The Swordfish Tooth—and five books for children. Born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia, Cynthia is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. Her recent articles include “An Enlarged Heart,” an autobiographical essay on a child’s sudden illness, which was selected for the 2004 “Best American Essays,” and “Big Cheese,” about the reincarnation of Murray’s Cheese Shop, in Greenwich Village, which appeared in “Best Food Writing,” in 2005. Cynthia's Profiles include “Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the Perils of Childhood,” which won a 2006 Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and “Seeing Things: The Art of Olafur Eliasson.” “Green Dreams: A Queen, A Shipwreck, and the Mystery Behind a Rare Set of Jewels” won the 2006 Richard T. Liddicoat Award for Consumer National Reporting. She has also written for the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Gourmet, where she is a contributing editor.

The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Cynthia teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.

November 16: Paul Beckman and Mark Wunderlich

Paul Beckman is a real estate salesman, writer, snorkeler, traveler and photographer. His most recent collection is the chapbook Maybe I Should Sit Quietly In A Dark Room For A While, published by Silkworms Ink. His earlier collection Come! Meet My Family and Other Stories was published by Weighted Anchor Press. Paul specializes in the short story, flash fiction and micro stories. His work has appeared in a large number of journals including The Connecticut Review, The New Haven Review, Onthebus, Playboy, 5 Trope, Exquisite Corpse, and Opium. Three of his six-word stories about New York City were selected as winners in the competition sponsored by the 92 Street Y. Paul holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives with his wife in Madison, Connecticut.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Amy Lowell Trust. Individual poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Paris Review, Slate, Boston Review and Yale Review and his work has been widely anthologized. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Ohio University and San Francisco State University, and currently teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.