RopeWalk Writers Retreat

2010 Summer Faculty

Kim Addonizio Poetry	Kim Addonizio is the author of four poetry collections including Tell Me, A National Book Award Finalist. Her fifth collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, will be published by W.W. Norton in October 2009. Addonizio has also authored two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton. Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback inJuly 06. Little Beauties was chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2007. She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil. Addonizio's awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day,Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.

Kim Barnes Creative Nonfiction	Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two novels, most recently A Country Called Home, which was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian. She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction. Her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including MORE, O Magazine, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her next novel, American Mecca, an exploration of Americans living in 1960s Saudi Arabia, is forthcoming from Knopf. Barnes lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain and teaches writing at the University of Idaho.

Joe Meno Fiction	Joe Meno (born 1974) is a novelist, writer of short fiction, playwright, and music journalist based in Chicago. After attending Columbia College Chicago, Meno spent time working as a flower delivery truck driver and art therapy teacher at a juvenile detention center. His first novel Tender as Hellfire was published when he was only 24 and received strong reviews from sources like Library Journal. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines like Tri-Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Other Voices. Meno's work is known for the use of natural language and realistic dialogue, as well as frequent forays into absurdity. He currently teaches fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is a frequent contributor to Punk Planet magazine, where his comic strip Iceberg Town is featured.

Robert Wrigley Poetry	Robert Wrigley was born in 1951, in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He is the first member of his family ever to graduate from college and the first male in many generations--in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany--never to work in a coal mine. In 1971, with a draft lottery number of 66, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After four months of training and duties, he filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection and spent the next five months attached to "Special Training Detachment #2" at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. For two weeks in October of that year, he dug a trench eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches deep by 80 yards long. It took him only four days to fill it back up. That November, he was honorably discharged. Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, as well as with Madeline DeFrees and John Haines, and where he developed an abiding love for the western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College, in Lewiston, and since 1999, at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing. He has also taught at the University of Oregon, where he served as acting director of the MFA program, and twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. He has also taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina. He has published seven books of poetry: The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979); Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986); What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995); Reign of Snakes (Penguin Putnam, 1999), and Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003). His most recent book is Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. In 1987-88, he served as the state of Idaho's Writer-in-Residence. Among his awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, as well as the Frederick Bock Prize, from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and four Pushcart Prizes. His poems have twice been selected for reprint in Best American Poetry. In the Bank of Beautiful Sins received the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award for 1996; it was, in addition, one of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is the 1997 recipient of the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest. In 1996, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Reign of Snakes was awarded the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry; Lives of the Animals won The Poets’ Prize, in 2005.He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, near Moscow, Idaho.
Holly Goddard Jones Guest Reader	Holly Goddard Jones was born and raised in western Kentucky, the setting for her fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review,Epoch, and elsewhere, and they’ve been anthologized in two volumes of New Stories from the South (2007 and 2008) and in Best American Mystery Stories 2008. She was honored with a Peter Taylor Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2006 and was the winner in 2007 of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a prize of $25,000 given to only six emerging women fiction writers each year. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University, she has taught at Denison University, the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, Murray State University, and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives there with her husband, Brandon, and two dogs, Bishop and Martha.

Nicole Louise Reid, Editor

Contact the editor