| 2007 | Spring Writing Festival - April 18-20, 2007 "For Such a Time as This" | |
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Guests:
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 Leslie Leyland-Fields is
professor of Creative Nonfiction in Seattle Pacific University's MFA
program. She has written five books including Surprise Child and
Surviving the Island of Grace. She has also published numerous
essays and poems in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and
The Seattle Review. Leslie is the recipient of the Virginia
Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and has been Image's
Artist of the Month, among other honors. She also runs a professional
business mentoring writers called The Northern Pen, and has worked in an
extended family commercial salmon fishing operation. She is in demand as
a speaker on topics of the integration of faith and literature,
wilderness and nature writing, family relationships, and the writing
life. |
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 Jean Janzen lives in Fresno,
California, where she has taught poetry at Fresno Pacific University.
She has also taught at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. She is
a graduate of Fresno Pacific University and California State
University's master's program, where she studied with Philip Levine and
Peter Everwine. She has six collections of poetry, the latest entitled
Piano in the Vineyard, and a book of essays based on lectures,
Elements of Faithful Writing. Her poems have appeared in numerous
anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Gettysburg Review,
Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received an
NEA fellowship as well as other awards. Janzen also has written hymn
texts which have been published in various hymnals in the last decade. |
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 Susanna Childress began her
pursuit of creative writing as an undergraduate at Indiana Wesleyan
University under the tutelage of Dr. Mary Brown. She has won a literary
competition held by the National Society of Arts and Letters and her
first volume of poetry, Jagged with Love, was selected by Billy
Collins for the Brittingham Poetry Prize as well as by the University of
Southern Illinois-Carbondale for their Devil's Kitchen Literary Award.
She has received writing fellowships from the James Michener Center and
Florida State University. Her work can be found in journals including
The Missouri Review, Notre Dame Review, Image,
Runes, Fugue, and Crab Orchard Review. She is a PhD
Candidate in English at Florida State University and teaches at Hope
College in Holland, Michigan. |
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| 2006 | Spring Writing Festival - March 29-31, 2006 "The Writer in History" | |
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Schedule of Events Guests:  John
Wilson is the
founding editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly reviewpublished by Christianity Today International, and editor at large for Christianity Today magazine. His essays and reviews appear in a variety of publications. He is the editor of a series of anthologies, the most recent volume of which is Best Christian Writing 2006 (Jossey-Bass). He and his wife Wendy have four children and--as of December 31, 2005--one grandchild. |
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 Tim Stafford is a senior writer for Christianity Today. He is the author of a trilogy of historical fiction: The Stamp of Glory, Sisters, The Law of Love. Among his many other books are Knowing the Face of God; As Our Years Increase; The Student Bible (with Philip Yancey); Love, Sex and the Whole Person; and Never Mind the Joneses. He has served on the editorial staff of Campus Life Magazine, and helped found Step Magazine in Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana. |
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 Julia Kasdorf has published two collections of poetry with the University of Pittsburgh Press, Eve’s Striptease and Sleeping Preacher which won the Agnus Lynch Starrett Prize and the Great Lakes Award for New Writing. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biography, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. She is associate professor of English and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is currently editing an anthology of poetry about Brooklyn titled Broken Land and is working on a third book of poems, Poetry in America. |
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 Justin Niati spent 11 years as a professional journalist in the Republic of the Congo, Paris, and London. He has been editor of the Orphan's Voice, and in addition to his current role as Assistant Professor of French at Houghton College, serves as the editor of Taget French Africa, a church newsletter focusing on French speaking African countries. He was imprisoned for his writings in 1990. |
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| 2005 |
Spring Writing Festival - March 2-4, 2005 |
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Schedule of Events Guests: 
Alison Gresik grew up in Kingston, Ontario, and her early education included three years of homeschooling. In 1995, Alison completed a B.A. in English and Chemistry at Redeemer University College in Hamilton, Ontario. While at Redeemer, she worked for two years as Assistant Editor and Editor for the CROWN, the student newspaper. She started writing fiction at Redeemer for several creative writing courses she completed with Hugh Cook. Her poem "Communion Sunday" took third place for poetry in the 1995 Conference on Christianity and Literature Student Writing Contest. "Communion Sunday" and another poem, "The Fall", were published in Mars Hill Review in 1996. In September 1996 Alison commenced studies for her M.A. in English. She started writing Brick and Mortar in her advanced fiction workshop. The book was eventually published by Oberon Press and was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award in 2001. Alison now works part-time at Adobe Systems as a technical editor and continues to write fiction on her days off. Her short fiction has appeared in Descant (November 2001) and Grain (May 2003). She gave a paper titled "Bearing Witness: The Christian Writer As Other" at the Open Book and Scholarship conference at Redeemer University College in August 2000. She was also a speaker at the Wheaton College Writing and Literature Conference in September 2002. In June 2004, her writing group published an anthology called The Company We Keep, in which her story "Play Dead" appears. You can visit Alison's website at www.gresik.ca.
Sally Sampson Craft majored in English at Illinois Wesleyan
University and later earned her MA in English and Creative Writing from
the University of Illinois at Chicago. While there, she
apprenticed in poetry writing with two poets: Michael Anania and Ralph
Mills.
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| 2004 | ||
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Guests:
Shirley Nelson earned her undergraduate degree at Barrington College in Rhode Island, and a Masters Degree in English at the University at Albany, New York. Her professional writing career began in FM radio, scripting and producing, followed by several years writing and editing for a Christian film company and other independent film projects. While raising a family, she turned to print media and began publishing short stories, essays, poetry and plays, and in time an award- winning novel, The Last Year of the War, published first by Harper and Row, New York, and reprinted by Harold Shaw Publishers. After a decade of research, Fair, Clear and Terrible, a history of a New England cult in which her parents were raised, was published by British American. Her work has appeared in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion and The Christian Century, as well as other periodicals, and in a variety of anthologies. Nelson has taught and tutored in creative writing at Barrington College, at the Wheaton College Summer School of Writing, and at the University at Albany.
In addition to a number of
essays on literature and religion, Nelson is the author of
The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward
Carnell (Cambridge University Press, 1987), an intellectual
biography that uses the controversial career of an evangelical
philosopher-theologian to bring to focus the far-reaching changes that
took place in American religion in the first half of the 20th century. The Nelsons are the writers and directors of the recently produced "Precarious Peace: God and Guatemala," a documentary covering the role of religion in the 36 year war and the subsequent struggle for a just and enduring peace in that country.
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| 2003 | ||
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He has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Goethe University in Frankfort, and for over twenty years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he twice directed the graduate creative writing program and is now professor emeritus of English. He is married to the teacher Ann Hill Siegel and lives and writes on the coast of Maine. |
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| 2002 | ||
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Paul
Willis, poet and fiction writer.
Author of two fantasy novels, No Clock in the Forest and The
Stolen River as well as several collections of poetry including
Poison Oak. Willis is Professor of English at Westmont College. He will
be speaking at Earth Day functions, visiting classes, and reading from
his poems. March 15 Robert
Hudson, senior editor at Zondervan.
Co-author of three books, A Christian Writer's Manuel of Style
(with Shelley Townsend-Hudson), Companions for the Soul (with
Shelly Townsend-Hudson), and Beyond Belief (with W.H. Arnold).
He is editor of the ezine Working POET.
He will be speaking on the topic "What's Good About
Christian Publishing?" March 14-15 James Schaap, novelist. Author of many novels, collections of short stories, and nonfiction prose. Among his award winning books are The Secrets of Barneveld Calvary, Home Free, and most recently, Paternity. Schaap, the current president of The Chrysostom Society, an organization of Christian writers devoted to fostering excellence in Christian writing, is Professor of English at Dordt College. He will be visiting classes and reading from his fiction. Read the transcript of a panel discussion with Robert Hudson, James Schaap, James Zoller, and Linda Mills Woolsey |
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| 2001 | ||
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Gregory
Wolfe, writer in residence at Seattle Pacific University and the
founder and editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion.
Author of Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography, and Sacred
Passion: The Art of William Schickel.
He is co-author of many books, with his wife Suzanne, on moral
development, and is the editor of The New Religious Humanists: A
Reader.
March 15 Brenda Tremblay, writer and producer for WXXI and National Public Radio. Judy Yuen, Assistant News Editor for Newsday.
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| 2000 | ||
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David
Aikman. A specialist in the Middle East, Russia, and China, is
Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former Senior
Correspondent with Time Magazine.
His books include Love China, Pacific Rim: Area of
Change, Area of Opportunity, Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography,
and most recently, Great Souls. A witness to the Tiananmen Massacre in China, with other Time
correspondents, he co-authored Massacre in Beijing. David Aikman's lectures were funded by a grant from the Fieldstead Journalism Lecture Series to highlight the importance of journalism in American Life and its validity as a calling for Christians.
October 5 Linda Underhill, prose writer. Author of The Unequal Hours.
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Lawrence W. Wilson is an author,
speaker, and editor -- an ordained minister and honors graduate of
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Larry is the author two books:
Hugh
Cook was born in 1942 in The Hague, The Netherlands. His family
emigrated to Canada in 1950 when Cook was seven and settled in Burnaby,
B.C. He did his undergraduate studies at Calvin College in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, graduating 1964. In 1965 he enrolled in a Master's program at
Simon Fraser University, where he was one of SFU's charter students. He
graduated with an M.A. in 1967; his thesis was a study of the poetry of
Raymond Souster. After graduation he moved to London, Ont., where he
assumed a high school teaching position. His literary output during this
time consisted of poems published in Canadian literary journals. 
Rudy Nelson, Associate
Professor of English and Religious Studies (emeritus), University at
Albany, began his professional career as writer-producer for WPTL,
Rhode Island's first FM radio station, and in films, as Director for
Script and Research at Good News Productions/Valley Forge Films in
Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. His graduate studies include
English (M.A.), University of Rhode Island), Religion (S.T.B.), Boston
University School of Theology, and American Civilization (Ph.D.),
Brown University. He spent ten years as chair of the English
department at Barrington College before his appointment to the faculty
at University at Albany.
Thom Saterlee began
teaching at the collegiate level in 1994 and is currently Assistant
Professor of English at Taylor University. He holds an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. He has
translated and published many works of Henrik Nordbrandt and is a
frequent conference speaker on the topic of translation. He
published English Composition Instructors' Guide with John
O'Hare for the University of Miami's English Composition Department
and has more recently published The Hangman's Lament: Poems of
Henrik Nordbrandt (October 2003). Thom is the author of
various articles as well as works of poetry and short fiction that can
be found in such publications as Christianity and Literature,
Paragraphs, Aetheon: The Journal of Sport Literature,
and Paragraph. He is the recipient of numerous honors and
awards including the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation
Prize and most recently second runner-up in the Poetry Fellowship,
Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of five books of poetry
including Fugitive Angels, and Coming Into History. Her latest is
Gaining Time (Copper Beech, 1998). Her poems have appeared in
Poetry, Image, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The
Kenyon Review, The Nation, Christian Century, and many other journals
and anthologies. Her work has been honored with awards including
The Prairie Schooner-Strousse Prize, six Pennsylvania Council on the
Arts Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. An
Atlantic Monthly Fellow at Bread Loaf School of English, Jeanne was
given a coveted Pew Fellowship in The Arts in 1998. She is on the
Editorial Board of Shenandoah and her work has appeared with Poetry in
Motion on busses and trains. Jeanne is also a playwright whose
work has won many new play awards and been produced across the United
States and in London. Married and the mother of two children, she
lives in Philadelphia and is a Professor of English at the University of
Delaware.
Robert
Siegel is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction,
including the Whalesong trilogy, which received the Golden Archer
Award and the Matson Award. His books of poetry are The Beasts
& the Elders and In A Pig's Eye. His poetry has
appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and received awards from a
number of sources, including Poetry magazine, The Friends of
Literature, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment
for the Arts.