2006 Winter Wheat Featured Readers

David Baker

David Baker is the author of six books of poems: Changeable Thunder (2001), The Truth about Small Towns (1998), After the Reunion (1994), Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991), Haunts (1985), and Laws of the Land (1981). His two books of criticism are Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (2000) and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996). Among his awards are fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation.

Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon's book of short stories, Among the Missing, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. His stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and have been included in Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003, the Pushcart Prize 2000, 2002, and 2003, and the O'Henry Stories 2001, where his story "Big Me" was chosen as the 2nd Prize winner. His other books include Fitting Ends (Ballantine, 2003) and You Remind Me of Me (Ballantine, 2004).

Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series (Verse Press, 2006). He received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004, and was a 2004-5 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000 - 2001, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. He was the featured poet in MAR 26.1.

Debra Marquart

Debra Marquart won the Mid-American Review 2003 Creative Nonfiction Award with her essay, "Agricultural Mysticism: Twenty Fragments on Desire" (MAR 24.2). Her most recent book is the memoir The Horizontal World: Growing Up in the Middle of Nowhere (Counterpoint Press, 2006). Her other books include a poetry chapbook, A Circle of Four (Dacotah Territory Press, 1989), poetry collections, Everything's a Verb (1995) and From Sweetness (Pearl Editions 2001); and the fiction collection The Hunger Bone: Rock and Roll Stories (New Rivers Press, 2001).

Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson is the author of four novels, Wide Blue Yonder, The Woman Driver, My Wisdom, and City Boy; and three short story collections, Little Face and Other Stories, The Gasoline Wars, and Who Do You Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book.