Verlyn Klinkenborg
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KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Verlyn Klinkenborg
The E.B. and Katharine White Memorial Lecture
"Writing and the Perception of Nature"
Verlyn Klinkenborg was born in Colorado in 1952 and raised in Iowa and California. He graduated from Pomona College and received a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of Making Hay (1986), The Last Fine Time (1991), The Rural Life (2003), and Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (2006). His work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Mother Jones and The New York Times Magazine, among others. He has taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University and Harvard University and is a visiting professor at Bard College and the visiting writer in residence at Pomona College . Klinkenborg has been a member of the editorial board of the New York Times since 1997, where his essays on rural life appear regularly. He is the recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. Klinkenborg and his family live on a small farm in rural New York State . |
Ruth Reichl
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Ruth Reichl joined Gourmet as Editor in Chief in April 1999. She came to the magazine from The New York Times, where she had been the restaurant critic since 1993. As chef and co-owner of The Swallow Restaurant from 1974 to 1977, she played a part in the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California. In the years that followed, she served as restaurant critic for New West and California magazines. In 1984, she became restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times, where she was also named food editor. Ms Reichl began writing about food in 1972, when she published Mmmmm: A Feastiary. Since then, she has authored the critically acclaimed, best-selling memoirs Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, and Garlic and Sapphires, which have been translated into sixteen languages. She has been honored with four James Beard Awards (two for restaurant criticism, in 1996 and 1998; one for journalism, in 1994; and Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America, 1984) and with numerous awards from the Association of American Food Journalists. In 2007, Ms. Reichl was named Adweek's Editor of the Year. She received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, presented by the Missouri School of Journalism, in October 2007. She is also the recipient of the YWCA's Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Award. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan and lives in New York City with her husband and son. |
Bernd Heinrich
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UVM professor emeritus of biology and wildlife biologist Bernd Heinrich is the nation's leading expert on thermoregulation of insects. He has published scientific books-including the National Book Award nominee and natural history classic, "Bumblebee Economics"-as well as popular books on natural history that have attracted a widespread following. Heinrich's latest book, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, 2008 was featured in a full-page article in the science section of the New York Times in January, on the date the book was published; it continues to reap critical praise. His previous books, including Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds, also merited kudos by national media. The New York Times Book Review, for example, lauded the German native and record-breaking ultra-distance runner as possessing "a rare ability to embed dense scientific explications within graceful, light-footed nature writing." Heinrich, who maintains an aviary at his Richmond , Vermont home and provides the detailed drawings and photographs for his publications, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Harvard Fellow and recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Fellowship Award. He contributes articles in national publications including Science, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Natural History and the New York Times . |
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Kate Braestrup
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Kate Braestrup is one of the first chaplains ever appointed to the Maine Warden Service. She is the author of a novel, Onion (Viking, 1990), and has written for Mademoiselle, Ms., City Paper, Hope and Law and Order. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Here If You Need Me, is her powerful story of a personal tragedy that led to an outpouring of love and support that inspired her to help others in turn. Suddenly a widow and single parent of four, Kate found love and support in the community that rallied around her, providing comfort and casseroles whenever needed. Kate decided to pursue and fulfill her husband's dream of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister and soon found a role that allowed her to give back to the community that had helped her through her own tragedy: she eventually became the chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, which conducts the state's search-and-rescue operations when people are reported missing. She lives in Lincolnville, Maine with her husband, Simon van der Ven, and their six children. |
Ardis Cameron
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Ardis Cameron is Professor of American and New England Studies, University of Southern Maine. She was named a Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships in 2002 and received a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship in 2001. Both for her project "Tales of Peyton Place: The Biography of a Big Book." Cameron is the author of Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence Massachusetts, 1880-1912, (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Looking For America: The Visual Production of Nation and People (Blackwell Publications, 2004). She also has authored numerous articles about women, cultural politics, and working class history. |
Kathleen Ellis
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Kathleen (Lignell) Ellis has published four collections of poetry, Vanishing Act, Entering Earthquake Country, Red Horses, and The Calamity Jane Poems, and a translation of the work of Ecuadorian poet Nancy Cerda, Hilos Invisibles/Invisible Threads. She is currently completing a poetry/photo project, "Circling Katahdin," with support from a Maine Arts Commission Good-Idea Grant. Kathleen has received individual artists fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission, and she co-edited the anthology, The Eloquent Edge: Fifteen Maine Women Writers. Her poetry and translations have appeared in the Antioch Review, New England Review, Latin American Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Rhino, Maine Speaks!, and Woman Poet: The East, among others. She won the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize from Nimrod and poetry awards from Southwest Review and Carolina Quarterly. Kathleen has led the summer poetry workshop at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland since 1996, and she coordinates the annual POETS/SPEAK! event at the Bangor Public Library. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives near the Penobscot River in Orono and teaches English and Honors at the University of Maine. |
Annie Finch
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Poet, critic, translator, editor, and librettist Annie Finch is the author of three books of poetry, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, Eve, and Calendars. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and textbooks and has been featured in venues including Voice of America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Def Poetry Jam. Her collaborations with theater, art, and dance include the libretto for the opera Marina. She has also published a book of French poetry in translation and numerous books on poetics, most recently The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (2005). The themes of her poems often draw upon earth-centered spirituality and the natural world, especially the landscapes of Maine. She is Professor of English and Director of the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. Poems, essays, and further information are available at her website, www.anniefinch.com. |
Sam Hayward
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Sam Hayward received his education in music schools and conservatories and worked as a traveling and recording musician. In 1974, he changed his career plans when offered a "working vacation" in the kitchen of the Shoals Marine Laboratory on the Isles of Shoals offshore the coast of Maine, where he served as the laboratory's chef. Later, as chef and owner of Twenty-two Lincoln in Brunswick, Maine, he initiated enduring relationships among Maine's growing community of small farms and organic gardeners. Since 1996, with Dana Street, their restaurant Fore Street has been recognized for its close connections to local agriculture, and for its earthy, rustic preparations of superb raw foods cooked without fuss over live wood fires. Mr. Hayward works closely with local farmers, cheesemakers, foragers, and fishing communities to supply Fore Street with exemplary Maine produce, wild harvest, seafoods, and meats. He is a frequent panelist and advocate for sustainable fisheries and agriculture and his articles have appeared in a number of magazines. Sam serves as trustee of the Maine Organic Farmers' and Gardeners' Association, and the Bowdoin International Music Festival. In 2001 and again in 2006, Fore Street was rated among Gourmet Magazine's Top Fifty Restaurants in the United States. In May 2004, Sam was named Best Chef-Northeast by the James Beard Foundation. In May 2007 Fore Street was inducted into the Fine Dining Hall of Fame. |
Melissa Kelly
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Melissa Kelly is Executive Chef and proprietor of Primo Restaurant in Rockland, ME. She could attribute her success to her close-knit family, the Italian blood that courses through her veins, or her unrelenting Yankee spirit—and she would be right. Inspired by her grandfather Primo, a butcher, and encouraged by her grandmother, who ruled the kitchen, Ms. Kelly learned that food at its best is simple, seasonal, and fresh. That approach to food and family has informed everything she does. She is a leader in the movement to make food at restaurants sustainable, eco-friendly, and seasonally delicious. Primo has organic gardens, biofuel-heated greenhouses, Italian honeybees, and an extensive recycling program. Ms. Kelly is the recipient of countless awards and accolades, including the James Beard Foundation American Express Best Chef, Northeast award and the 2002 Golden Whisk Award from Women Chefs and Restaurateurs. Most recently Primo was recognized by Bon Appétit as having one of the most ecologically minded restaurants. Ms. Kelly is a member of Slow Food Maine, Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, Chef's Collaborative, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Society and The Congress of Chefs for Wild and Sustainable Seafood. |
Gary Lawless
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Gary Lawless is a Maine native, now living in Nobleboro. He is co-owner of Gulf of Maine bookstore in Brunswick, editor/publisher of Blackberry Books, and a widely published poet. He has published fourteen collections of poems in the U.S. and three collections in Italy (in Italian). He has read poetry at festivals and gatherings in Italy, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Cuba. He has led long-term writing projects working with adults with disabilities, homeless and low income adults, refugees, prisoners, and combat veterans. In May of 2008 he received an honorary Doctor of Humanities Award from the University of Southern Maine. |
Sy Montgomery
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Sy Montgomery writes for adults and children, for print and broadcast, in America and overseas in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible at what she considers a critical turning point in human history. "We are on the cusp of either destroying this sweet, green Earth—or revolutionizing the way we understand the rest of animate creation," she says. "It's an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures. It's a great time to be alive." Ms. Montgomery lectures widely on conservation topics at zoos, museums, universities and schools, for both adults and children. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Rainforest Conservation Fund, an Advisor to the Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation at Antioch/New England Institute, and on the Advisory Board of the New England conservation group, RESTORE! The North Woods. She has been honored with the Edward Hyde Cox Medal for work which "advances the well-being of animals and acknowledges the power and beauty of the relationship that humans share with them" by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Ms. Montgomery is a graduate of Syracuse University, a triple major with dual degrees in Magazine Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and in French Language and Literature and in Psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees. |
Molly O'Neill
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For ten years, Molly O'Neill was a reporter with The New York Times and the food columnist for its Sunday magazine. She is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook, A Well Seasoned Appetite, and The Pleasure of Your Company, and hosted the PBS series "Great Food." Ms. O'Neill won the Julia Child/IACP Award for cookbooks and was awarded three James Beard citations for books, journalism and television as well as the society's Lifetime Achievement Award. She has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and over the past twenty-five years has become one of the most recognized and respected food writers in America. Mostly True, her memoir of growing up in a major league baseball family, was published by Scribner in May 2007. Her work has appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker and the New York Times to Readers Digest and Life. Her next book, One Big Table: Portrait of a Nation will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2009. |
Michael Ruhlman
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Michael Ruhlman is a freelance journalist and writer, the author of eight books and co-author of four cookbooks. His most recent book is The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft For Every Kitchen (Scribner: November 2007), an opinionated glossary of cooking terms modeled on the Strunk & White classic, Elements of Style. He is the author of The Making of a Chef, the The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef, co-author of The French Laundry Cookbook and Bouchon with Thomas Keller and Susie Heller, A Return to Cooking, with Eric Ripert, and Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing with Brian Polcyn. His other non-fiction books include Boys Themselves, about an all-boys school, Wooden Boats, about life at a New England boatyard, Walk On Water about a surgical team specializing in the repair of neonatal and infant hearts, and House: A Memoir, a story about the importance of house and home. He has been a freelance journalist and writer for nearly fifteen years; his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, Saveur, and Food Arts, and has received several IACP awards and a James Beard Award. He lives in Cleveland Heights, OH, with his wife and two children. |
Marina Schauffler
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Marina Schauffler, a resident of Camden, has done environmental writing in Maine for more than two decades. She is the author of Turning to Earth: Stories of Ecological Conversion (2003), which explores the dynamic inner process by which people come to ally themselves with the natural world and speak out on its behalf. Her essays have appeared in numerous Maine publications, and she is the founder/editor of Natural Choices, Maine's new green travel website. She holds an MA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and a PhD in Ecological Ethics and Spiritual Values. |
Jonathan Skinner
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Jonathan Skinner edits the review ecopoetics, focused on creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology, and Field Books; teaches Environmental Studies at Bates College; and lives in Bowdoinham, Maine. His Political Cactus Poems are available through Palm Press. His essays on field poetics have recently appeared in how2,in Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation) and in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa). He writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics—essays exploring the role of aesthetics in intersections between nature and culture, and the role of language in our perceptions of the natural world. He takes an active interest in soundscape studies, including the art of bird song. Skinner's emphasis on relations between cultural diversity and biodiversity has also led him to work in ethnopoetics, the dialogical engagement with cultures based in non-western languages. |
Candice Stover
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Candice Stover's poetry collections include Holding Patterns (Muse Press, 1994), selected by Mary Oliver for a Maine Chapbook Award, Another Stopping Place (Oyster River Press, 2001), and Poems from the Pond (Deerbrook Editions, 2007). Her work also appears in several anthologies (A Coastal Companion, Sailing Maine, Maine Voices, and The Other Side of Sorrow: Poets Speak Out About Conflict, War, and Peace), as well as a variety of journals and magazines. A native of Maine, she has traveled and taught widely, including two years in Shanghai, China and workshops in New Zealand, and has worked as a reporter for The Boston Globe. She lives on Mount Desert Island, where she teaches at College of the Atlantic, designs and facilitates independent writing workshops, and swims in, bicycles by, or walks to the pond on her road almost every day. |
Martha White
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Martha White is the editor of Letters of E.B. White, Updated and Revised, released in late November 2006 by HarperCollins. The book replaces the now out-of-print original edition and includes the final decade of previously unpublished letters, as well as many other new letters and photographs. For over fifteen years, Martha was a contributing writer and editor for Yankee and The Old Farmer's Almanac, and for several years wrote two weekly columns for the United Features Syndicate. Her essays, articles, and fiction have been published in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Country Journal, Family Circle, Garden Design, Early American Life, Hope Magazine, Maine Boats & Harbors and other national publications. |
Joy Williams
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Joy Williams has written four novels: State of Grace (nominated for the National Book Award); The Changeling; Breaking and Entering; and The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000). She also has written three collections of short stories: Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest. Her collection of essays, Ill Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Her widely anthologized work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Granta, and Grand Street. A short story published in Antaeus won a National Magazine Award. Joy was born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Marietta College and a MFA from the University of Iowa. She has taught creative writing at the University of Houston, the University of Florida, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arizona. Joy is Eminent Writer in Residence at the University of Wyoming for the 2008-2009 academic year. In 2008 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. |
Sandip Wilson
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Sandip Wilson teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in children's literature and literacy at Husson College and the University of Maine. She works with teachers in the schools, shares books with the youngest readers as well as older elementary and middle school children, and has been a guest speaker for the Bangor Public library and the children's collection. She has served as member and chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Orbis Pictus Award Committee for Children's Nonfiction Literature, and is co-editor of Dragon Lode, the journal of the Children's Literature and Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association. She has writing published in the Journal of Children's Literature and is a co-author, with Jan Kristo and Penny Colman, of a chapter on nonfiction literature in Shattering the Looking Glass, edited by Susan Lehr. Sandip serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Nonfiction Children's Literature of the University of Maine and on the Executive Board of the New England Reading Association, where she serves on the Editorial Committee. Her interest in nonfiction literature continues as she learns more about the magic of picture books and the challenges and delights of graphic literature for young readers, especially nonfiction. She is interested in how technology has inspired changes in content and presentation of books, people's attitudes toward them, and how people read. |
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