DAVID LAZAR's books include The Body of Brooklyn and Truth in Nonfiction: Essays (Iowa), Michael Powell: Interviews and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (Mississippi), Powder Town (Pecan Grove), and the forthcoming anthology, Essaying the Essay. His essays and prose poetry have appeared widely. Several of his essays have been named "Notable Essays of the Year" by Best American Essays. He has taught and lectured on nonfiction and editing at Ohio University, the Chautauqua Institution, Goucher College, the Indiana University Writers' Conference, Rice University, the Wexner Center, and Columbia College Chicago, where is is a professor and the founder of the Nonfiction Program. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.
Praise for The Body of Brooklyn:
“Lazar's prose renews in our time a kind of writing that is a treasure of literature wherever it is found: what is often called the personal essay. He is intent upon making private, particular experience enter into the language we share in a way that will convey the startling perspectives of memory and insight, and it is obvious that he means to produce writing that will be heard and remembered in itself. His talent for so demanding an ambition, and his devotion to it, is clear. And he's funny!”—W. S. Merwin
“I've read these essays with much delight. As a fellow-essayist, David Lazar has my intense envy for his deceptively calm, wonderfully amused style. The writing is silky and full of little surprises. These essays form a book which should be read for its pleasures as well as studied diligently by all would-be writers.”—Barbara Ehrenreich
JENNY BOULLY is the author of four books, most recently
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky Press). Her other books include
The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books),
[one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and
The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, first published by Slope Editions). Her chapbook of prose,
Moveable Types, was released by Noemi Press. Her work has been anthologized in
The Best American Poetry,
The Next American Essay,
Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and other places. Born in Thailand, she was reared in Texas by parents who farm and fish. She attended Hollins University, where she double majored in English and philosophy and then went on to earn her MA in English Criticism and Writing. At the University of Notre Dame, she earned an MFA with a poetry concentration. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She lives in Chicago, Illinois with her husband and daughter and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.
Praise for The Book of Beginnings and Endings:
"I do not know of a single essayist working right now who can match Jenny's drive for innovation in nonfiction, her keen sense of form, her playful use of the genre's conventions, and her vigorously subversive engagement with a heritage that she simultaneously seems deeply in love with. Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch."—John D'Agata
Praise for The Body: An Essay:
“A strange and magical performance. It resembles a novella overheard through a keyhole, or a nouvelle vague film beheld through a plume of Babylonian smoke. Jenny Boully's mini-epic makes its statement quietly, and with a devilish, terraced charm, like a Derridean outburst turned into topiary. If only Fauré were alive to set this magical Nocturne for the Left Hand to music!”—Wayne Koestenbaum
She holds an MFA from The University of Iowa in Nonfiction writing, an M.A. from Boston University’s Creative Writing program in poetry, a Cértificat Supérieur from the Sorbonne, and a B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University in the Writing Seminars and the History of Art.
