Stephen Emerson (born 1950 in Sylva, North Carolina), is an American writer of fiction and other prose.
Emerson wrote his early stories while at Duke University, where he met Robert Creeley, worked with novelist Reynolds Price, and wrote a directed thesis on Samuel Beckett. He then moved west and worked with novelists Wright Morris and Kay Boyle at San Francisco State University.
During the 1970s Emerson met several more of the writers he admired, forming influential friendships with Fielding Dawson and Edward Dorn, as well as Tom Raworth, Bill Berkson, Lucia Berlin, and Ted Pearson. A portion of his early novel The Wife appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry No. 37 (1978). His critical writings on Gilbert Sorrentino and Paul Bowles appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Additional work has appeared in Credences, Periodics, Zyzzyva, [1] Rolling Stock, Hambone, [2] and other small magazines.
Before returning to San Francisco in 1978, he lived in Bolinas, [3] California, Anchorage, Alaska, and Key West, Florida. During the 1970s he worked as an automobile mechanic and an editor. Later, he was a freelancer in the advertising business. [4] [5] [6] [7] Emerson resides in Oakland, California.
Emerson holds a BA (French literature) from Duke and an MA (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University
William Rose Benét was an American poet, writer, and editor. He was the older brother of Stephen Vincent Benét.
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. was an American short-story writer and poet. He is considered to be amongst America's greatest writers.
Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.
Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. His poems were often visionary, ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic, exploring the subconscious world of dreams and linking it to daily experiences, while sometimes incorporating typographical arrangements a la concrete poetry. He has posthumously been regarded as "the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation".
Zyzzyva is a triannual magazine of writers and artists. It places an emphasis on showcasing emerging voices and never before published writers in addition to the already established. Based in San Francisco, it began publishing in 1985. ZYZZYVA's slogan is "The Last Word," referring to "zyzzyva", the last word in the American Heritage Dictionary. A zyzzyva is an American weevil. The accent is on the first syllable.
David Talbot is an American journalist, author and media executive. He is the founder, former CEO and editor-in-chief of an early web magazine, Salon. Talbot founded Salon in 1995. The magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. It was described by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Net's "few genuine must-reads".
Charles Elgin Alverson was an American novelist, editor and screenwriter who sometimes used the byline Chuck Alverson. He co-scripted the film Jabberwocky (1977).
Aram Saroyan is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright, who is especially known for his minimalist poetry, famous examples of which include the one-word poem "lighght" and a one-letter poem comprising a four-legged version of the letter "m".
Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.
John Emerson was an American stage actor, playwright, producer, and director of silent films. Emerson was married to Anita Loos from June 15, 1919 until his death, and prior to that the couple had worked together as a writing team for motion pictures. They would continue to be credited jointly, even as Loos pursued independent projects.
Lucia Brown Berlin was an American short story writer. She had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame eleven years after her death, in August 2015, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux's publication of a volume of selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women, edited by Stephen Emerson. It hit The New York Times bestseller list in its second week, and within a few weeks, had outsold all her previous books combined. The collection was ineligible for most of the year-end awards, but was named to a large number of year-end lists, including the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015." It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
William Michaelian, is an Armenian-American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Born in Dinuba, California, a small town southeast of Fresno, Michaelian grew up on his family's farm. He has lived in Salem, Oregon, since 1987. His stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in literary periodicals in the United States and Armenia; his work has been performed on Armenian National Radio. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Ararat, a quarterly journal devoted to literary and historical work on Armenian subjects. He is also a contributor to the multilingual Armenian Poetry Project, curated and produced in New York by Lola Koundakjian. In 2003, he launched an open online literary dialogue, "The Conversation Continues", with John Berbrich, publisher and editor of the small press literary quarterly, Barbaric Yawp.
Howard Junker is an American journalist, author and editor who founded the literary journal ZYZZYVA.
Dean Rader is an American writer and professor who teaches at the University of San Francisco, in the Department of English, where he has also served as Department Chair. Rader holds a M.A.and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he studied translation, poetry, visual culture, and literary studies. He is primarily known for his poems that mix high and low art and his scholarly work on Native American poetry.
Andrew Foster Altschul is an American fiction writer. He is the author of the novels Deus Ex Machina, which Michael Schaub, in his NPR review, called "brilliant... one of the best novels about American culture in years," and Lady Lazarus, and his short fiction and essays have been published in Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Fence, and One Story. His short story "Embarazada" was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 and his short story "A New Kind of Gravity" was anthologized in both Best New American Voices 2006 and the O.Henry Prize Stories 2007.
Eugene Taylor Sawyer was a newspaper editor and author of dime novels, particularly for the Nick Carter series.
John Collins Dawson IV, nicknamed "Marmaduke", was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He was best known as the leader and co-founder of the country rock band the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He sang lead vocals on most of the band’s songs.
Nathaniel Rich is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of "Losing Earth: A Recent History" (2019); the novels "King Zeno" (2018), Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), and The Mayor's Tongue (2008); and the 2005 non-fiction book San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. Rich has written essays and reviews for The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Slate.
George Parks Hitchcock was an American actor, poet, playwright, teacher, labor activist, publisher, and painter. He is best known for creating Kayak, a poetry magazine that he published as a one-man operation from 1964 to 1984. Equally important, Hitchcock published writers under the "Kayak" imprint including the first two books by Charles Simic, second books by Philip Levine and Raymond Carver, translations by W.S. Merwin, and early books by Robert Bly and James Tate.
Stephen Ratcliffe is a contemporary U.S. poet and critic who has published a number of books of poetry and three books of criticism. He lives in Bolinas, CA and is the publisher of Avenue B Press. He was the director of the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he has been an instructor for more than 25 years, and continues to teach Creative Writing (poetry) and Literature courses there.
