Academics
&NOW/Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF) > Featured Authors/Artists
William H. Gass
Two-time National Book Critics’ Circle Award winner William H. Gass will be the featured writer at &NOW/LFLF 2006. His work in fiction and the literary essay has been cutting edge for decades. His novels, which he calls “experimental constructions,” feature an acrobatic style, mixing witty word-play with bravura displays of visual and typographic artistry.
A Midwesterner through-and-through, Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, raised in Warren, Ohio, and was educated in the best liberal arts tradition at Kenyon College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University with a dissertation called “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor,” eventually returning to the Midwest to teach at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was the David May Distinguished Professor of Humanities and director of the International Writers Center.
Gass’ books include the novels Omensetter’s Luck, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and The Tunnel, the short fiction collections In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Cartesian Sonata, and the essay collections Fiction and the Figures of Life, On Being Blue, The World within the Word, and Finding a Form.
Michael Silverblatt of The Los Angeles Times called Gass’ most recent novel, The Tunnel, “the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime,” while Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times says that Gass’ “haunting evocations of a small-town childhood are so sensually rich in detail that the prose is sometimes hypnotic.”
Jason Salavon
Working around art, information technology, and daily life.
Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material to present new perspectives on the familiar. Though formally varied, his projects frequently manipulate the roles of individual elements arranged in diverse visual populations. This often unearths unexpected pattern as the relationship between the part and the whole, the individual and the group, is explored. Reflecting a natural attraction to popular culture and the day-to-day, his work regularly incorporates the use of common references and source material. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context.
Born in Indiana, raised in Texas, and based in Chicago, Salavon earned his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from The University of Texas at Austin. His work has been shown in museums and galleries around the world. Reviews of his exhibitions have been included in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Examples of his artwork are included in a number of prominent public and private collections. He has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was employed for numerous years as an artist and programmer in the video game industry.
Shelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, hypertexts including the classic Patchwork Girl, several children¹s books, and Skin, a story published in tattoos on the skin of 2095 volunteers. With the artist Christine Hill she is co-founder of the Interstitial Library, Circulating Collection. Shelley Jackson lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the New School University. Her first novel Half Life is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
http://www.ineradicablestain.com/
Nambi Kelley
Ms. Kelley is an award-winning, published, and produced playwright, including projects for the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and Lincoln Center in New York. Her honors include: TCG Candidate for Playwriting, Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 2004-05, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference nomination, 2004, The Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project, Paramount Studios, finalist, 2004; 3 children’s plays commissions for Unibooks, Seoul, Korea, 2004; ACT Theatre/Seattle Repertory Nomination for Women’s Playwright Festival, 2003, Ovation Awards Nominated Production, Los Angeles (How Kintu Became A Man) 2003,Williams College Playwright-in-Residence, 2003 Stalwart Originality, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Peace Maker of the Year Award, The Peace Museum and Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream (Health Works Theatre commissioned violence prevention play),Prop Thtr New Plays Festival (He, She & My White Mama and Bus Boyz) ,Best Original Writing Nomination (Hoochie Mama), Black Theatre Alliance. Professional affiliations include, The Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, The Playwright’s Center Minneapolis, The Dramatists Guild, and playwright-in-residence with Chicago Dramatists and MPAACT.
http://www.nambikelley.com/id2.html
Robert Adamson
Robert Adamson has long been recognized as one of Australia’s major poets, from his early writing as a poet maudit in Sydney through twenty books of verse and prose. In more recent work, he has explored the landscape of the Hawkesbury River, sounding its waters and wildlife for psychological resonances.