Black Forest Writing Seminars 2018
Adrianne Kalfopoulou is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She lives and teaches in Athens, Greece where she is currently the Writing Program Director at Deree College. She is also part of the faculty in the low residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University. She has taught in the Masters Program of the English Department at the University of Freiburg, and is on the faculty of the summer Black Forest Writing Seminars where she teaches nonfiction and poetry workshops. She has taught writing workshops at the University of Edinburgh, in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University, and the Aegean Arts Circle on the island of Andros. Her scholarly work has focused on 19th and 20th century American literature, particularly the contributions of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson. She is currently at work on a monograph that explores Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influence on Sylvia Plath's poems.
Her publications include two poetry collections, Wild Greens and Passion Maps, from Red Hen Press and scholarly work on Sylvia Plath in Women’s Studies and Plath Profiles. An essay collection, Ruin, Essays in Exilic Living was published in 2014; one of the essays from Ruin was a “Notable Essay of the Year” in Best American Essays (here’s a preview). Samples of her work can be read at: www.adriannekalfopoulou.com. A review of her book Ruin: Essays in Exile Living can be found here.
Deborah Reed is the author of the forthcoming novel, Olivay, to be published July 7th, 2015. Her most recent novel, Things We Set On Fire, sold over 100,000 copies in the first six months. Her novel, Carry Yourself Back to Me, was a Best Book of 2011 Amazon Editors’ Pick. She wrote the bestselling thriller, A Small Fortune and its sequel, Fortune’s Deadly Descent, under her pen name, Audrey Braun. All of her novels have been translated or are forthcoming in German. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Poets & Writers, and the Literarian. Deborah holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (fiction) and teaches at UCLA’s Extension Writing Program. She is also co-director of the Black Forest Writing Seminars at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She lives in Manzanita, Oregon. www.deborahreed.me
Praise for Things We Set on Fire:
“What a finely made, complex, and wholly engrossing novel this is. The people who inhabit Things We Set on Fire seem to be squeezed into some catastrophic critical mass, like the Big Bang in reverse, and yet the prose is completely under control, precise and lucid, sometimes electric with nuance, sometimes strangely musical, and always convincing. The moral pressures on these characters become almost unbearable, yet the radiance of grace and pardon and understanding shines on. Reed has given us a beautiful book.”
-Tim O’ Brien, author of The Things They Carried, and winner of the National Book Award
Click here to read an interview Deborah did for Vice Magazine
Director of Black Forest Writing Seminars
Sieglinde Lemke is the author of the upcoming book Poverty, Inequality, and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture (Palgrave, 2016), Vernacular Matters in American Literature (Palgrave, 2009) and Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford UP, 1998). She studied at the University of Konstanz and at UC Berkeley and was a guest professor at Harvard. After teaching at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University in Berlin for 15 years, she took up her current position in the English Department at the Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg where she also initiated The Black Forest Writing Seminars.
Read more here: Department of English / North American Studies.