Reed College

Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.... His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council. Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later. At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident.
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Kate Christensen is an American novelist. She won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for her fourth novel, The Great Man, about a painter and the three... women in his life. Her previous novels are In the Drink , Jeremy Thrane , and The Epicure's Lament . Her fifth novel, Trouble , was released in paperback by Vintage/Anchor in June 2010. Her forthcoming novel, The Astral, was excerpted in the Summer 2010 issue of Open City and will be published in hardcover by Doubleday in June 2011. She is a graduate of Reed College, Class of 1986, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her essays, articles, reviews, and stories have appeared in many anthologies and periodicals, most recently The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, The Wilson Quarterly, The B&N Review, and Fivechapters.com.
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Eric Overmyer is a writer and producer. He has written and/or produced numerous TV shows, including St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street, Law... & Order, The Wire, New Amsterdam, and Treme. He graduated as a theater major from Reed College in 1973. He credits his time at the college for helping him find and claim his identity as a writer. Overmyer joined the crew of The Wire as a consulting producer and writer for the fourth season in 2006. He had previously worked with series creator David Simon on Homicide: Life on the Street where the two became friends. Overmyer wrote the teleplays for the episodes "Margin of Error" and "Misgivings". from stories he co-wrote with producer Ed Burns. Overmyer was hired to replace George Pelecanos as a full-time writer and producer. Simon has said that he was impressed with Overmyer's writing, particularly in synthesising the story for "Margin of Error" as the episode is the height of the show's political storyline but must also progress other plot threads. As a member of the fourth season writing staff, Overmyer has been credited as overseeing the domestic storyline of Jimmy McNulty and "smartly fleshing out" some of his key scenes.
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Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry... of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is married to the painter Richard Tuttle, with whom she has frequently collaborated. Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing to Chinese and Dutch-American parents, but grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. She is of Dutch, Austrian, and Chinese descent. Her brother, Richard, is an engineer and Japanese calligrapher and sister, Annie, is a doctor. She was educated at Barnard, Reed, and Columbia University. After receiving her M.F.A. from Columbia in 1974, she settled in rural northern New Mexico, which has remained her primary residence ever since. After receiving her degree, Berssenbrugge became active in the multicultural poetry movement of the 1970s along with her good friend Leslie Marmon Silko as well as Ishmael Reed, theater director Frank Chin, and political activist Kathleen Chang. Berssenbrugge taught at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, where she co-founded the internal literary journal Tyuonyi.
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