Writers on Writing: Maxine Chernoff and Keith Ekiss
Maxine Chernoff
Chernoff is professor and chair of the Creative Writing Department. She is the author of six books of fiction and 13 books of poetry. Of Among the Names, Cole Swenson said, “Exploring complexities of ‘the gift,’ Chernoff’s is an economy of the uncanny — each exchange is strikingly new.” Her recent books of poetry are Here, Without, To Be Read in the Dark, A House in Summer and The Turning. Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. With Paul Hoover, she translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which received the 2009 Pen U.S.A. Translation Award. Chernoff edits the long-running and award-winning journal New American Writing, an annual anthology funded in part by the College of Liberal & Creative Arts.
Keith Ekiss
Keith Ekiss is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University. He was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford from 2005 to 07. His poems and translations have appeared in Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. He is the recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley Writers’ Conferences, Santa Fe Art Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts and the Petrified Forest National Park. His creative nonfiction has been anthologized in Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks (Bona Fide Books, 2011). He is the translator of Eunice Odio’s The Fire’s Journey (Tavern Books, 2012).
Writers on Writing
The Creative Writing Department opens its Writers on Writing course to the public on Mondays this semester. Taught by Peter Orner, the course features faculty and visiting writers reading from their works and discussing their creative process.