Meet our Staff, Faculty & Guests
Bill Roorbach — The Hog Island Lecturer for Summer 2012
Bill Roorbach is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Flannery O'Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winner Big Bend (University of Georgia Press, 2001), Into Woods (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), and Temple Stream (Random House, 2005). Life Among Giants, a novel, is due from Algonquin in 2012. The 10th anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories (Story Press, 2008), is used in writing programs around the world.
Recently, Bill was a judge on Food Network All Star Challenge, evaluating incredible Life Stories cakes made under the gun, so to speak. Bill knows nothing about cake, but he knows a lot about life stories! His work has been published in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals. His story "Big Bend" was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts," read by actor James Cromwell at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Bill has taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, Colby College, and Ohio State.
His last academic position was the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. He has now retired from academia in order to write full time. A comic video memoir about his tragic music career, "I Used to Play in Bands," and all kinds of other work, including a current blog on writers and writing and just about everything else (with author David Gessner) is online at billanddavescocktailhour.com.
Todd Hearon — Visiting Faculty
Todd Hearon teaches in the English Department at Phillips Exeter Academy. His poems, plays and articles have appeared in AGNI, Essays in Criticism, The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, The New Republic, Slate and The Southern Review. His first book of poems, Strange Land, was published in 2010 by Southern Illinois University Press. Todd is the recipient of a Dobie-Paisano writing fellowship (University of Texas, Austin), a Paul Green Playwrights Prize (North Carolina Writers' Network), a PEN New England "Discovery" Award and he won the Rumi Prize for Poetry in 2011 and the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine..
He earned his M.A. in Irish Studies from Boston College and his Ph.D. in Editorial Studies from Boston University; while in Boston, he co-founded The Bridge Theatre Company, a troupe committed to the production of classical and contemporary verse drama from Aristophanes to Yeats. His directing credits include Aristophanes's Lysistrata; Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss; Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; The Love of the Nightingale by Timberlake Wertenbaker, and Bloody Poetry by Howard Brenton.
Laura van den Berg — Visiting Faculty
Laura van den Berg's debut collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Award. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV.
She has taught fiction at Gettysburg College, as the 2009–2010 Emerging Writer Lecturer, the Gilman School, as the 2010–2011 Tickner Fellow, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and Goucher College. Laura currently lives in Baltimore, where she is working on a novel. Her website is www.lauravandenberg.com.
John Casteen — Writers' Conference Faculty
John Casteen is the author of For the Mountain Laurel (2011) and Free Union (2009), part of the VQR Poetry Series from The University of Georgia Press. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry. He has contributed prose on gun policy, professional ethics, and environmental policy to Slate.com, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other magazines and newspapers.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he was self-employed for ten years as a designer and builder of custom furniture. Casteen teaches at Sweet Briar College, where he founded and directs the Sweet Briar Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference. He has also taught on Semester at Sea, at the University of Virginia, and as Visiting Artist Faculty in Residence at New York University. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia.
Ralph Sneeden — Writers' Conference Director
Ralph Sneeden was born in Los Angeles and grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts and Long Island. He has been teaching English since 1995 at Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he also directs the George Bennett Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and is the Continuing Professional Development Coordinator. He has also taught at the Pingree School and Lake Forest Academy. The title poem of his first book Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt, 2007) received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY Magazine/Poetry Foundation and the book also received honorable mention for Washington and Lee University/Shenandoah Magazine's Glasgow Prize.
He has been a Klingestein Fellow at Columbia University, the Chubb/LifeAmerica Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Bergeron Fellow at the American School in London, and has received an artist grant-in-aid award from the St. Botolph's Foundation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, The New Republic, Slate, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Zócalo Public Square and other magazines.
