January 19th: Sheila Kohler and Lisa Siedlarz

Lisa Siedlarz's debut poet collection, I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, was published in 2009 by Clemson University Digital Press. Lisa holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Western Connecticut State University. She is the editor of Connecticut River Review and managing editor of Connecticut Review. She has won the John Holmes Poetry Prize and the Leo Connellan Award and was nominated for the 2009 Best New Poets Award. She also facilitated a 16-week writing workshop with Vietnam veterans and edited a collection of their work called The Season of Now. Lisa works for Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven.

Sheila Kohler’s most recent novel, Becoming Jane Eyre, will be published in January 2010 by Viking, Penguin. She has written six other novels: The Perfect Place (1989) ; The House on R Street (1994); Cracks (1999); Children of Pithiviers (June, 2001); Crossways (2004); and Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness (, 2007); and three collections of short stories: Miracles in America (1990); One Girl (1999); and Stories from Another World (2003). Her work has been translated in a variety of languages including Hebrew and Japanese and published widely abroad.

Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a host of top publications. A very abbreviated list includes The Antioch Review, the Yale Review, the Boston Globe, Bomb magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Story. Sheila has received the O.Henry twice, the Open Voice Award, the Smart Family Foundation prize, The Willa Cather Prize, and the Antioch Review Prize. In addition, Sheila was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2003-4.

An acclaimed instructor, Sheila has taught creative writing in many programs such as the Bennington Writing Seminars, City College, The New School, the West Side YMCA, and Columbia's program in Montolieu, France. She currently teaches at Princeton.

December 15: April Bernard and Jude Stewart

April Bernard is an author and teacher from Bennington, VT. She teaches at Bennington College and at Skidmore College in New York.

Romanticism, April's most recent poetry collection, was published in June 2009. Her prior publications include three books of poetry: Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, and one novel, Pirate Jenny. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books and is included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English and By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. She has also received a Guggenheim Award.

Jude Stewart has written on design, art and culture for Slate, the Believer, I.D., Metropolis, BusinessWeek, Nextbook and Print, as well as a column on color for STEP Inside Design Magazine which she is developing into a book. She has lectured about design at RISD, the Adult Education series in Brooklyn, and the Fachhochschule Mainz in Germany and been interviewed on related topics on NPR's Day to Day and by Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Her introduction to mobile architecture appears in More Mobile: Portable Architecture Today (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

A recipient of the Free University Berlin's European Journalism Fellowship, in 2005 - 2006 she pursued a year-long independent project on the influence of the former East Germany's design on current visual culture in Berlin. Jude divides her time between Berlin, Germany, and New Haven, USA, where she is also co-curator of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series. Read more at www.judestewart.com or follow her daily tweets on color at twitter.com/joodstew.