Authors Vol. 2 No. 4

  • Emily Alpert

    When Emily Alpert was three, she wanted to be a writer. Then she wanted to be a princess, a veterinarian, the first female President, a zoologist, an actress, a baseball player, an operetta singer, a painter, a genetics researcher, a human rights activist, a National Geographic photojournalist, and a rabbi. Now she wants to be a writer again. She is a three-time Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards nominee, a graduate of the University of Chicago, and a pretty decent vegan chef. Currently, she covers public safety issues for The Gilroy Dispatch, a daily newspaper in Gilroy, California, the self-declared Garlic Capital of the World. Also, in ninth grade she was almost homecoming queen, but she is way too cool to care about that.

  • Sarah Adair Frank

    Sarah Frank is only in the MAPH program. She hopes one day to live in a freezing climate and write novels.

  • Achy Obejas

    Achy Obejas is a widely-published, award-winning writer whose work includes fiction, journalism and other non-fiction, poetry, plays, and translations. After a smashing noir debut in “Chicago Noir” this year, she’s been brought in by Akashic Press to edit “Havana Noir,” which will be released in fall 2006. Her most recent novel, the critically acclaimed Days of Awe, was published by Ballantine in 2001. A former staff writer for more than a decade with the Chicago Tribune (where she won a team Pulitzer), her work has also appeared in The Nation, Village Voice, Ms., Playboy, Vogue, and scores of other publications. She served as the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawaii at Manoa this fall, where she hung out at the beach every single day, and is still in shock over her return to cold weather, frost on her windows, and the University of Chicago. She’s currently plotting a return to the tropics.

  • Josh Schonwald

    Josh Schonwald is a writer and satirist who has lived in Hyde Park for the past five years. Schonwald’s nonfiction has appeared in more than 20 publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Reader. Research for this piece was conducted in March and April of 2005, as part of his American Council on Germany-funded research project, “The Rise of German Comedy.” Schonwald is currently writing for the Miami newsweekly, Miami New Times, and is completing work on the ContrarianTraveller.com, a travel web site for people who hate tourism.

  • Megan Stielstra

    Megan Stielstra teaches Fiction Writing at Columbia College, Chicago, and is a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. She is co-editor of Sleepwalk magazine, the director of Story Development for the Serendipity Theater Company, and artist-in-residence for Barefoot Productions where she creates collaborative storytelling with musicians and filmmakers. She’s performed for the Storyweek Festival of Writers, Undershorts Film Festival, Piece by Piece, The Dollar Store, the 2d Hand and 2d Story. She just returned from a year in Prague, teaching the works of Franz Kafka and working on a novel.

  • Miklós Vámos

    I am a Hungarian Writer, born in 1950 (Budapest), who believes life is more important than literature. I am the father of Anna (1977) and of the twin boys Peter and Henrik (2003). I live on the bank of the Danube river on which I like to row and in which I like to swim. The internet is my other international swimming place. I received quite a number of literary awards but my interest lies elsewhere. My wife is an opera singer (bold soprano) and also the author of novels. Our dog is an Austrian poet called Rilke, but we almost never talk about poetry.

    I am or have been or was: the author of 7 novels, 67 short stories, and a few plays, the host of popular cultural TV talk shows, an East European correspondent to The Nation magazine (USA), a literary consultant at the Objective Film Studio (Budapest) where we produced the Oscar-winning Hungarian film Mephisto, a visiting professor at Yale University (USA) teaching playwriting and screenwriting, a Columnist of the Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature, literary weekly, Budapest). One of my novels, Book of Fathers (Apák könyve, published in Hungarian in 2000), came out in German in 2005 at Random House, and will be published in France (Gallimar), England (Little Brown), Canada (Little Brown), Spain (Lumen), Italy (Einaudi) and the Netherlands (Contact) in 2006.

  • Zachary Werner

    Zachary Werner is a second year in the college majoring in Fundamentals. After working as a DNA evidence technician for the nation’s leading crime lab, he decided to devote his life to literature instead of forensic science. His work has appeared in the Online Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Chicago Weekly, and the Chicago Maroon, for which he covers literature, death, and their intersection.

Otium