11.27.05: CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL RETROSPECTIVE
featuring Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, Barbara Burkhardt, Edward Hirsch, and Annie Proulx
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and later in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Ms. Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history and books for children. Much of her work is internationally acclaimed and has been published in over thirty-five countries. Some of her best-known novels include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996) and the 2000 Booker Prize winner, The Blind Assassin. Her latest novel is the stunning and provocative Oryx and Crake.
Ms. Atwood is the recipient of numerous honors, including The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., and Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. She also holds the distinction of being the first winner of the London Literary Prize and has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, including one from Oxford University in England.
Ms. Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson. They have three grown children.
Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Baxter is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works.
Barbara A. Burkhardt is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield. A close acquaintance of William Maxwell, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she organized his correspondence for the Maxwell archives.
Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950. In October 1958 he "wandered down to the basement of our house to pick through some of my grandfather's forgotten books" and read a verse (Emily Bronte's 'Spellbound') that entranced him. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with poetry, which he explored at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.
He was a professor of English at Wayne State University and in 1985 he joined the faculty of the University of Houston where he still holds tenure as professor of English. He was appointed the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation on September 3, 2002. He holds honorary degrees from several institutions.
He is the poetry editor of DoubleTake magazine. His essays have also been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. He writes a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World.
His first collection of verse For the Sleepwalkers (1981) received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection Wild Gratitude received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987 and the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association for the best scholarly essay in Proceedings of the Modern Language Association for the year 1991.
His self-explanatory book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry was a surprise bestseller in 1999 and remains in print through multiple printings.
Edna Annie Proulx was born August 22, 1935. She is best known for her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.
Proulx has twice won the O. Henry Prize for the year's best short story. In 1998, she won for Brokeback Mountain, which had appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. She won again the following year for The Mud Below, which appeared in The New Yorker June 22 and 29, 1999. Both appear in her 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
E. Annie Proulx currently lives in her adopted home of Arvada, Wyoming.
Listen to the Chicago Humanities Festival retrospective on The Lit Show (RealMedia Streaming)