Michael Putnam

Michael C. J. Putnam is MacMillan Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where he has taught since 1961. Educated at Harvard, he has written 11 books on Latin literature and has edited four others. He is widely regarded as one of the leading interpreters of the work of Virgil. He has been closely associated with the American Academy in Rome for many years and is a summer resident of Rockport, Maine.

Martha Tod Dudman

Martha Tod Dudman’s first novel, Black Olives, turns her unflinching candor and sharp wit on reconstructing the end of a love affair. Dudman is the author of the powerful memoirs Augusta, Gone (which was adapted into an award-winning Lifetime Television movie) and Expecting to Fly. A professional fundraiser, Dudman lives in Northeast Harbor with her son and daughter. She has lived in Maine since 1975.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was nineteen when her father took his family to live among the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Fifty years later, after a life of writing and study, Thomas returns to her experiences in The Old Way: A Story of the First People. She recalls life with the Bushmen, one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on earth, and discovers among them an essential link to the origins of all human society. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is the author of many books, including The Hidden Life of Dogs. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Penelope Schwartz Robinson

Penelope Schwartz Robinson, a 2004 Stonecoast graduate in Creative Nonfiction, won the first Stonecoast Book Award for her essay collection Slippery Men. She received an honorarium and a publishing contract with New Rivers Press, a teaching press at Minnesota State University, Morehead. Slippery Men will be published and distributed nationally in the fall of 2008. Robinson’s work has already appeared in Ascent, Willow Springs, Fourth Genre, and River Teeth, among others. At this reading, Robinson, who currently teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Maine, Farmington, was introduced by finalist judge Katha Pollitt.

Flower and Song

“A Dialogue of Flower and Song” is a one-act play written by Stonecoast student Cindy Williams Gutiérrez and performed here by Bridget Madden, Elsa Colón, Julie Manon, Luis Luque, and Kathleen Clancy. Gerardo Calderón of Grupo Condor provides live pre-Columbian music. The play re-imagines a 15th century Aztec literary event, drawing together three women poets from different periods in Mexico’s history—pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan, colonial New Spain, and the current Mexican Diaspora. This recording begins with an introduction and acknowledgements from the playwright.

The play is a work-in-progress. All rights are reserved by the playwright. For permission to reproduce, perform or publish this work, please email Cindy Williams Gutiérrez or call her at (503) 631-4113. If you would like to provide feedback on the piece as part of the development process, please leave comments here.

Charles Martin

Charles Martin is a renowned poet and translator. He is the author of six poetry collections, three of which have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His verse translation of Ovid”s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with the coveted Award for Literature. Martin lives in Manhattan and teaches at CUNY and Syracuse University.

Here at Stonecoast, he is introduced by Patricia Smith. Please submit your comments on Martin's work.

Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood with the exception of the one year she and her family spent in Nigeria, West Africa. As a visiting writer at Stonecoast, Jones read from her newer novel, The Untelling (Warner, 2005). Her debut novel, Leaving Atlanta (Warner, 2002), won the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. Currently, Jones is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark University.

Jones gave this reading at the 2008 Stonecoast winter residency. In the recording, she is introduced by poet Tim Seibles. Please leave your thoughts on the reading here. Thank you!