The course is free and open to the public.

Writers scheduled to participate this fall are:

• Jack Bass, professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. Bass has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University and is author or co-author of six books about the American South, including The Orangeburg Massacre, Ol' Strom, Unlikely Heroes, and Taming the Storm, a biography of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. that won the Robert Kennedy Book Award. Bass was executive editor for the PBS documentary, "A Different Dixie" and for "The American South Comes of Age," a 14-part television course in documentary format. He twice was named South Carolina journalist of the year and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
  
  
• Kelly Cherry, a prominent Southern poet, novelist, literary critic, and the writer of the critically acclaimed memoir The Exiled Heart. Her stories have won both the O'Henry and Pushcart awards, and have been represented in Best American Short Stories. Her poetry has received the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Born in Baton Rouge, she spent her childhood in Virginia. She was for many years Eudora Welty Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, but has recently retired and returned to the South. She and her husband live on a small farm in Virginia.
  
  
• Leslie Epstein, director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. Epstein was born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers. His father and uncle, the legendary Epstein twins, wrote the screenplays for The Man who Came to Dinner, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Casablanca, among many others. Epstein was educated at Yale and—on a Rhodes Scholarship—at Oxford. He has published eight books of fiction, of which the best-known, King of the Jews, has become a classic of Holocaust Fiction. His articles and stories have appeared in such publications as Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Yale Review, New York Times Book Review, and Washington Post. San Remo Drive is a novel about growing up Jewish in Hollywood during the McCarthy era.
  
  
• Percival Everett, a novelist whose 15 novels (several of which have won awards) include Suder, Watershed, God's Country, Glyph, and Erasure. Born and raised in South Carolina, he teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He lives with his wife on a ranch in Southern California and on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
  
  
• Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary (his third) for the columns which are collected in Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11. He became the NYT's foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. Friedman joined The Times in 1981 and was appointed Beirut bureau chief in 1982. In 1984 he was transferred from Beirut to Jerusalem, where he served as Israel bureau chief until 1988. He was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel). His book, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1989. The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) won the 2000 Overseas Press Club award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy and has been published in 20 languages. Born in Minneapolis, Friedman received his B.A. from Brandeis and an M.Phil. in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.
  
  
• Elizabeth George, an award-winning mystery writer. George is a very literary, very "English" mystery writer who actually is an American who lives on the California coast, though she also has a flat in London and does meticulous research at Scotland Yard. Her first novel, A Great Deliverance, was honored with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards and received the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. Her third novel, Well-Schooled in Murder, was awarded the prestigious German prize for mystery fiction, the MIMI. Last year, PBS broadcast the BBC production of A Great Deliverance, thus making George the first American writer to be featured in the PBS Mystery series. Adaptations of four more George mysteries will air this year.
  
  
• Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees, a debut novel which won the 2003 SEBA Book of the Year award. A New York Times best seller, the novel was a finalist for the 2002 Orange Prize in England. It was chosen for Good Morning America's Read This! Book Club and has been optioned for a movie. Kidd is the recipient of a Katherine Ann Porter Fiction Award and the South Carolina Literary Fellowship. She has authored several non-fiction books, including The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. Kidd lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
  
  
• John Kinsella, one of Australia's most distinguished poets. He is professor of English at Kenyon College (Ohio), a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University (England), adjunct professor of Literature, Edith Cowan University (Australia), and international editor of The Kenyon Review. He has published over twenty books of poetry (including The Silo, Poems 1980-1994, Visitants, The Hunt, and The Hierarchy of Sheep), a novel (Genre), a volume of plays (Divinations: 4 Plays), collection of short stories (Grappling Eros), and numerous essays and reviews. He is senior poetry critic for the Observer
  newspaper (London). He is editor of Salt, and international editor for Arc publications (UK). His Selected and New Poems: Peripheral Light (selected and introduced by Harold Bloom) is due out with W.W. Norton in Fall 2003.
  
  
• Susan Ludvigson, a poet whose work has been published in some 70 journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Ohio Review, and Paris Review. She has represented the U.S. at writers' congresses in France, Canada, Belgium, and Yugoslavia. Her latest collection, Sweet Confluence, New and Selected Poems, is her seventh from LSU Press; Escaping the House of Certainty is forthcoming, also from LSU Press. Among her awards are fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Witter Bynner, and Fulbright foundations, and the NEA. In the spring semester of 2000, Ludvigson served as poet-in-residence at USC. She is professor of English at Winthrop University.
  
  
• Derek Walcott, 1992 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Walcott was born in 1930 on the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays. Though thoroughly cosmopolitan, Walcott has always felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic, and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. His many collections of poetry include The Arkansas Testament (l987) and Omeros (1990), a Caribbean version of Homer's Odyssey.
  

05/03