Emerson College

John Byran Gantos, Jr., better known as Jack Gantos is an American author of children's books renowned for his fictional character Joey Pigza, a boy... with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder . Gantos has won several literary awards including the Newbery Honor, the Printz Honor, and the Sibert Honor from the American Library Association, and he has been a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest book, Dead End in Norvelt won the 2012 Newbery Medal. Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh to construction superintendent John Gantos and banker Elizabeth Gantos. The seeds for Jack's writing career were planted in sixth grade, about age twelve, when he read his sister's diary and decided he could write better than she could. Raised in South Florida and the Caribbean, he began collecting anecdotes in grade school and later gathered them into stories. Hole in My life is autobiographical, featuring Jack Gantos' life in jail. The book is about the time Gantos sailed a boat that was full of hashish from St. Croix to New York City, and the time he spent in prison after being busted.
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Don Lee is an American novelist who spent his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul as the son of a State Department officer. He received his B.A. in English... Literature from University of California, Los Angeles and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He has also served as the primary editor of the literary journal Ploughshares for 17 years. Lee's earlier work have appeared in GQ, New England Review, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Glimmer Train, with Voir Dire anthologized in Charlie Chan is Dead 2. He has also received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His first collection of short stories, Yellow, documents the lives of various Asian American characters living in the fictional Rosarita Bay. Yellow won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He followed that collection with the novel Country of Origin, which earned an American Book Award and an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. In 2008, Lee finished a new novel called Wrack and Ruin. The book, which revisits the fictional town of Rosarita Bay, was published by W.W. Norton in April 2008.
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Peter O'Brian is a Canadian film producer and broadcast executive. Films produced by O'Brian's company, Independent Pictures, have won nineteen... Genie Awards. His production credits include The Grey Fox, Outrageous!, John and the Missus and My American Cousin. O'Brian was educated at the University of Toronto and Emerson College in Boston, graduating in 1969 with a double major in mass communications and film. He returned to Toronto and began working as an assistant director and production manager. In 1975, he produced his first film, the Dan Aykroyd movie Love at First Sight. In 1977, he founded Independent Pictures. He took a sabbatical from producing in the early 1990s to run the Canadian Film Centre for its first three years of operation. In 1997, he became president of Mission Pictures. On September 29, 2005, O'Brian was appointed chair of the board of TVOntario, the province of Ontario's public television network. O'Brian is married to federal Member of Parliament Carolyn Bennett.
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Thomas Lux is an American poet. Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, son of a milkman and a Sears & Roebuck switchboard operator,... neither of whom graduated from high school. Lux was raised in Massachusetts on a dairy farm. He was, according to those who knew him in high school, very good at baseball, basketball and golf. Classmates also recall that he had a " Terrific sense of humor. " He graduated from Emerson College in Boston, where he was also poet in residence from 1972-1975. His first book — Memory's Handgrenade — was published shortly after. Since 1975, Lux has been a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. Lux is also a core faculty member of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. In 1996 he was a visiting professor at University of California, Irvine. A former Guggenheim Fellow and three times a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lux received, in 1995, the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his sixth collection, Split Horizons. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets and many other anthologies.
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Melanie Rae Thon is an American writer, "widely regarded as one of the most original stylists writing fiction today." Thon has received grants from... the National Foundation for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. She has taught at Emerson College, Syracuse University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ohio State University, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Born in Montana, Thon currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah. Thon is the author of three novels, Meteors in August, published in 1990; Iona Moon, published in 1993, and Sweet Hearts, published in 2001, and two short story collections, Girls in the Grass, published in 1991 and First, Body, published in 1997. Thon's short story "Letters in the Snow," is included in the The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006. The story was first published in the June 20, 2004 issue of One Story, a literary journal. "Letters in the Snow" is subtitled "for kind strangers and unborn children -- for the ones lost and most beloved." Her fiction has also been included in the anthology series Best American Short Stories .
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William Matthews was an American poet and essayist. Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Matthews earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University, and a... master's from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to serving as a Writer-in-Residence at Boston's Emerson College, Matthews held various academic positions at institutions including Cornell University, the University of Washington , the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Iowa. He served as president of Associated Writing Programs and of the Poetry Society of America. At the time of his death he was a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at City College of New York A reading series has been named for him at City College of New York. His sons are Sebastian Matthews and Bill Matthews. During his 27 years as an author, Matthews received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1980, Matthews was the poet in residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and in 1997 he was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
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James Tate is an American poet whose work has earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is a professor of English at the... University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He received his B.A. from Kansas State University in 1965 and then went on to earn his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in their famed Writer's Workshop. Tate has taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has worked since 1971. He is a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi. Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Tate won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1991 for his Selected Poems.
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