This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: formatting, citations, wikilinks, cites etc.(May 2014) |
Ron Tanner (born December 5, 1953, San Diego, California) is writer of fiction and nonfiction and Professor Emeritus of Writing at Loyola University Maryland. [1]
Tanner grew up in North Carolina but also lived in New Jersey and the Marshall Islands. In his twenties he was a professional musician, playing drums in California. He earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1986, where he was recruited to participate in the influential “20 Under 30” anthology, which included Ann Patchett, Lorrie Moore, and David Leavitt. Tanner won a post-graduate James Michener fellowship from the Copernicus Society, then went on to earn a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1989, where he was one of four University Fellows.
Tanner joined the writing faculty of Loyola University-Maryland in 1991 and served as writing department chair for four terms. From 2005-10, Tanner served as a board member and a two-term president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus of Writing at Loyola University-Maryland and lives on an historic farm, where he directs Good Contrivance Farm Writers Retreat, a 501 C-3 nonprofit. [2] [3] [4]
Tanner’s books are the short stories collections Far West (2022) and A Bed of Nails (2003); the novel Missile Paradise (2016); the memoir From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story (2012); a novel, Kiss Me, Stranger (2011); and a chapbook, Wheels (2009). His stories and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Literary Review, Story Quarterly, West Branch, and many others. Tanner has served as contributing editor to Defunct magazine, West Branch, and the Pushcart Press . [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
Missile Paradise, a novel set in the Marshall Islands, was named a "notable" novel of 2017 by the American Library Association. A starred Kirkus review stated,"The themes here are major—global warming, imperialism, America’s role in the world (the story is set soon after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal). But Tanner displays a light touch, favoring snappy dialogue over didacticism. The result is winning." [12] In 2020, Tanner won the Elixir Press book competition for an unpublished manuscript of fiction, Far West, which was published in 2022. [13] [14] [15]
Tanner’s awards include the G.S. Chandra Prize and Towson Prize in Literature for A Bed of Nails, a Pushcart Prize for fiction, Gertrude Press chapbook prize for fiction, First Prize in Fiction from New Letters, the Charles Angoff Prize for fiction, the Jack Dyer Award for Fiction, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Gold Medal for the short story, Best of the Web award, Story South's Million Writers Award, Best of the West award, a Maryland Arts grant (twice), and numerous fellowships, including a James Michener Copernicus Society Fellowship and a Walter Dakin Fellowship (Sewanee Writers' Conference), as well as many residency fellowships (e.g., Ledig House, Yaddo, Millay Colony, and others). [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] In 2014, Tanner was awarded the Nachbahr Award for outstanding achievement in the humanities at Loyola University. [23]
In 2008, Tanner was awarded a grant by the National Park Service to collect, translate, and preserve the oral stories of Marshallese elders in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The project set a standard in the Pacific region for teaching students community engagement and communication skills. [24] Translation of the oral stories was completed in 2014 and they are available at www.mistories.org.
In 2016, Tanner founded Good Contrivance Farm, Inc., as a 501 (c) (3) non-profit dedicated to the preservation and restoration of small historic farms in Maryland. Part of the organization's outreach includes a writer's retreat. [25]
Edward Falco is an American author, playwright, electronic literature writer, and new media editor.
Josip Novakovich is a Croatian Canadian writer.
Bruce Holland Rogers is an American author of short fiction who also writes under the pseudonym Hanovi Braddock. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Micro Award, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and Spain's Premio Ignotus.
Melanie Rae Thon is an American fiction writer known for work that moves beyond and between genres, erasing the boundaries between them as it explores diversity, permeability, and interdependence from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives.
B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is An Ordinary Life, and his poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review. His third poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe, winner of the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award, brought Fairchild's work to national prominence, garnering him a large number of awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, California Book Award, Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, National Book Award (finalist), Capricorn Poetry Award, and Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships. The book ultimately gave him international prominence, as The Waywiser Press in England published the U.K. edition of the book. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched...workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music."
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Casualty Reports, Because What Else Could I Do, Night Unto Night, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
David Samuel Levinson is an American short story writer and novelist.
Deb Olin Unferth is an American short story writer, novelist, and memoirist. She is the author of the collection of stories Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation, both published by McSweeney's, and the memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, published by Henry Holt. Unferth was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Revolution.
Andrew J. Porter is an American short story writer.
Nam Le is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer, who won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his book The Boat, a collection of short stories. His stories have been published in many places including Best Australian Stories 2007, Best New American Voices, Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space and One Story. In 2008 he was named a 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation.
Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Pushcart Prize winner and Best American Short Stories author Mark Wisniewski's third novel, Watch Me Go, received early praise from Salman Rushdie, Ben Fountain, and Daniel Woodrell. Mark's first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, was praised by the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly. Wisniewski's second novel, Show Up, Look Good, was praised by Ben Fountain, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Psychology Today's Creativity Blog, Jonathan Lethem, Christine Sneed, Molly Giles, Richard Burgin, Kelly Cherry, Diana Spechler, DeWitt Henry, and T.R. Hummer.
Erin Pringle-Toungate is an American fiction writer.
Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Cecilia Woloch is an American poet, writer and teacher, known for her work in communities throughout the U.S. and around the world. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient and the author of six collections of poems, a novel, and numerous essays.
Lisa Olstein is an American poet and non-fiction writer.
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of three novels, Beautyland (2024), Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize for her short stories.
Jerald Walker is an American writer and professor of creative writing and African American literature at Emerson College.