WRITERS OF ROCHESTER

This page features writers of adult fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

John Ashbery

A Rochester native, and arguably the greatest and most influential living American poet.

John Ashbery, born in Rochester and raised on a farm by Lake Ontario, studied art from the age of eleven to fifteen at the Rochester Art Museum, with the intention of becoming a painter.

Ashbery has met or known virtually everyone in the world of contemporary poetry, and won virtually every award that world bestows. The literature on him is massive. The Wikipedia entry on John Ashbery may be the best place to start.

Nicholson Baker

Born in Rochester, and a former student at the Eastman School of Music, Nicholson Baker is the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and author of several of the most discussed and debated novels of recent years, including The Mezzanine, Vox, U And I, and the controversial Checkpoint.

As a writer, Baker has taken minute introspection of his character's thoughts to an extreme that recalls the French nouveau roman, and which some critics find unreadable. But a fan page dedicated to the man, and online interviews with Salon, Slate, and Identity Theory magazines make fascinating reading indeed.

Andrea Barrett

Andrea Barrett is winner of the National Book Award for Ship Fever, and finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Servants Of The Map.

Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction, and her work reflects her lifelong interest in science. Many of Barrett's characters are scientists, often nineteenth-century biologists. Her titles include Lucid Stars, Secret Harmonies, and The Voyage of the Narwhal.

Andrea Barrett recently gave an interview to Salon Magazine.

Charles Benoit

Charles Benoit's first mystery novel, Relative Danger, was nominated for an Edgar Award, and was named Best Mystery/Suspense Book of the Year by the Publishers Marketing Association writer. The best-selling author works locally in the education and advertising fields, and has an impressive Flash-based web site at www.charlesbenoit.com/

Peter Conners

Peter Conners is one of Rochester's most active and dynamic literary figures -- poet, writer of fiction, co-founding editor of Double Room, and Fiction Editor and Marketing Director for BOA Editions, Ltd.

Peter Conners' writing appears regularly in such journals as Mississippi Review, Fiction International, Salt Hill, Beloit Fiction Journal, Luna, Sentence, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, American Book Review, Paragraph, and, Quick Fiction. He's also served as literary critic and reviewer for such alternative newspapers as Buffalo New York's ArtVoice, and reviews books for American Book Review.

His prose poetry collection, Of Whiskey and Winter, is forthcoming from White Pine Press in fall 2007. He is editor of PP/FF: An Anthology, which was published by Starcherone Books in July 2006. His own full-length collection of verse poetry, prose poetry, and flash fiction, While In The World, was released by Foothills Publishing in 2003. A limited edition prose poetry chapbook, The Names of Winter, was released by FootHills in 2004.

Peter also writes an (ir)regular fiction feature for City Newspaper, coupling his flash fiction writing with paintings by artist Steve Smock. Samples of his collaborations with visual artists and musicians can be found throughout his web site, www.peterconners.com

Norm Davis

Norm Davis is a retired school psychologist and editor and publisher of Hazmat Review, arguably Rochester's principal literary journal.

Norm is co-host of Writers & Books' Wide Open Mike and the Pure Kona Poetry series. His writings have appeared in numerous local and national publications, and he is one of the leading figures in the independent poetry scene in Rochester, N.Y.

Norm served in the U. S. military during the Korean War, loading nuclear weapons onto American bombers, is well versed in liberation theology and Maoist dialectic, and is the author of the chapbook, Rome Gothic.

Nick DiChario

Nick DiChario is co-owner of The Write Book and Gift Shop in Honeoye Falls, NY, teaches creative writing, and has been a writing professor at St. John Fisher College and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

His short fiction has appeared in The Year's Best Science Fiction, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, among many others. Selections from his first novel, A Small And Remarkable Life, may be read at the author's web site.

Nick has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, and two Hugo Awards. Nick is also fiction editor of HazMat Literary Review. His plays have been presented in Geva Theatre's Regional Playwrights Festival in upstate New York.

Joe Flaherty

As founder and Executive Director of Writers & Books, Joe has been one of the most influential figures shaping the Rochester literary scene and building the local literary community. He has been writing grants successfully for more than twenty-five years, but is a playwright as well, whose work has been read as part of the Latter Day Playwrights.

Sarah Freligh

A former sports reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Sarah Freligh teaches creative writing at St. John Fisher College. Her short stories and poems have appeared in may literary journals including Cimarron Review, Third Coast, Elysian Fields, and Hazmat Review. Her first chapbook, Bonus Baby, was published in 2002 by Polo Grounds Press.

Vincent F. A. Golphin

Vincent F. A. Golphin is an American poet and author of fiction and memoir, as well as an editor, essayist, journalist and educator.

His articles, poems, essays and stories have appeared for over 25 years, in publications ranging from Christianity Today, National Catholic Reporter, Emerge, Washington Living, about... time Magazine, to Upstate New Yorker.

His creative work has appeared in literary journals such as Bridges, Mental Satin, and The Southern Poetry Review. He once wrote a nationally distributed weekly column through the Newhouse and New York Times and American News services.

Vincent Golphin's books include Life and Other Things I Know: Poems, Essays and Short Stories, Take Two, They're Small, and An African-American Children's Anthology.

In March of 2006, Foothills Publishing released his latest collection of poems, Like A Dry Land: A Soul Journey Through the Middle East, based on a visit to Jordan.

George Grella

Noted for his acerbic reviews in Rochester's City Magazine, George Grella is also the author of hundreds of reviews of fiction, nonfiction, and film, as well as articles on detective fiction, gangster novels, baseball, such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, Georges Simenon, and Ross Macdonald.

William Heyen

Though born in Brooklyn, New York, William Heyen received his undergraduate degree at SUNY Brockport, where he is currently an English professor and poet-in-residence.

A one-time senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature to Germany, he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

His writing has appeared in more than a hundred anthologies, and in periodicals including American Poetry Review, Harper's, TriQuarterly, Ontario Review, and The New Yorker.

Here are some selections from his work.

Edward D. Hoch

Voted Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and author of over 900 short stories, Edward D. Hoch is one of the most prolific mystery writers of all time, as well as one of the more private.

Frank Judge

Frank Judge is a poet, editor, publisher, translator, and film critic.

His poetry and translations have been published in New Directions, The Bellingham Review, Bitterroot, Poetry Now, Invisible City, Combinations, The Greenfield Review, Poesia verde and Rapporti (both Italian), and numerous other journals.

He was Foreign Editor of the Vanderbilt Poetry Review while in Italy on a Fulbright Fellowship, and his anthology of contemporary Italian poetry has been called one the best collections of contemporary Italian poetry in translation.

Frank has taught at SUNY Brockport, SUNY Albany, RIT, and has conducted creative writing workshops at Attica Prison, St. John Fisher College, and at Genesee Community College.

He was Director of the Writers Program and the Creative Writing Workshop at Pyramid Arts Center in Rochester, New York, before founding the Syndicated News Service in 1981. In 1978 he began publishing Exit, a literary journal which has since evolved into an online publication, Exit Online. He also served as Associate Editor of the online literary journal, Writer Online.

Frank is currently president of Rochester Poets, the oldest ongoing literary group in the upstate New York region, and Coordinator of the Rochester Poetry Workshop.

Frank is also the Rochester Coordinator for Poets Against the War, a coordinator for Rochester's World Poetry Day, and a founding member of the Rochester Area Haiku Group, which was formed in 2004 by retired NTID faculty member Jerome Cushman.

Frank has been anthologized in such publications as Poets Against the War (2003), voicesinwartime.org, Summer Songs (2004), and Knocking on the Silence (2005), an anthology of poetry inspired by the Finger Lakes region of New York State. His books include Two Voices and Approximations.

There is a Wikipedia entry devoted to Frank Judge's achievements at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Judge.

Nancy Kress

Winner of the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Award, as well as every other major award in the world of science fiction, Nancy Kress is one of the greatest science fiction writers in the field today, as well as Fiction Columnist for Writers Digest.

Her books include the classic Beggars In Spain trilogy, the Probability Sun trilogy, Crossfire, and the critically acclaimed Nothing Human. She is also the author of a growing and very well regarded series of volumes on writing, reflecting her experience as a teacher at Writers & Books and at Clarion.

Nancy Kress has won three Nebula Awards for her fiction -- in 1985 for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” in 1991 for the novella version of “Beggars In Spain,” which also won a Hugo, and in 1998 for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian.

More about Nancy Kress is available at her web site at www.nancykress.com/

Gary Lehmann

Gary Lehmann teaches writing and poetry at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His essays, poetry and short stories are widely published -- about 60 pieces a year.

Gary is director as well of the Athenaeum poetry group, which recently published its second chapbook, Poetic Visions. He himself is the author of Public Lives And Private Secrets (Foothills Press, 2005), and co-author and editor of The Span I Will Cross, both books of poetry.

His poem "Reporting from Fallujah" was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize, and his short play, "My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry" was selected for professional production in January 2006 by Geva Theatre in Rochester.

You can visit Gary Lehmann's web site at www.garylehmann.blogspot.com/

Lydia Lunch

Writer, poet, singer, actress, and underground rock legend, described by the Bostom Phoenix as "one of the 10 most influential performers of the 90's".

Lydia Lunch was born Lydia Koch in Rochester, NY, on June 29, 1959. At sixteen, she came to New York City and moved into a large communal household of artists including Kitty Bruce, the daughter of Lenny Bruce. Influenced by the post-punk No Wave bands who performed there, in 1976 she co-founded the short-lived but infamous band Teenage Jesus & the Jerks with musician James Chance.

Lydia's subsequent solo career included collaborations with Nick Cave, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Birthday Party, Die Haut, J.G. Thirlwell, Kim Gordon, Billy Ver Plank, Sadie Mae, Michael Gira, and many others. She also acted in, wrote, and directed and number of underground films, sometimes in collaboration with underground film maker Richard Kern.

Lydia has also recorded and performed as a spoken word artist with such notable artists as William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr., and collaborated with artists including Exene Cervenka, Henry Rollins, Don Bajema, and Emilio Cubeiro.

She is the author of several books including Fingered, The Right Side Of My Brain, Toxic Gumbo (with award-winning graphic novel artist Ted McKeever), Incriminating Evidence, As.fix.e.8, and Paradoxia, which has been published both in French and Czech.

More information about Lydia Lunch is available on the Lydia Lunch entry on the Wikipedia and on Ms. Lunch's web site at www.lydia-lunch.org.

Chuck Lyons

Chuck Lyons is a retired weekly newspaper editor and a freelance magazine writer with more than 65 publications in local, regional, and national periodicals, as well as a life-long Rochester area resident. He was first place winner of the 2001 Lake Affect Magazine short story contest. He was also among the winners in the 2006 Writers and Books Two Characters/Two Pages playwriting contest, and the play thus selected was performed by members of Geva.

Chuck has written hundreds of newspaper articles, co-authored four books, and has written on contract for, among others, SUNY at Geneseo, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Finger Lakes Association.

Donna M. Marbach

Donna M. Marbach is a painter, poet and free-lance writer.

She is also involved with a number of publishing ventures and organizations. She is co-founder of Pensamientos, a bi-lingual literary magazine by and for middle school students in Guadalajara, Mexico, a city where she lived for three years. She also provides editing services on a project basis for FootHills Publishing, for whom she has edited anthologies such as Knocking on the Silence and Summer Songs. And she is in the process of solidifying a joint purchase/ownership of the twenty-five year old magazine By-Line, where she is expected to become poetry editor in Fall 2006.

Donna owns a business called Palettes and Quills as well, which offers writing, consulting, and teaching services in both creative writing and the visual arts. The company is also a newly established small press.

Donna has published non-fiction, fiction, and poetry in a variety of anthologies and periodicals from Philadelphia Medicine and The Friend to The Poetry Shell and New Author Journal. Her recent non-fiction has been published in the Messenger Post newspapers and the Catholic Courier, and her poetry in The MacGuffin, Hazmat Review, A Woman’s Voice, and Daylight Burning Lanterns.

Donna’s first play, Synchronized Swimming, was part of GEVA Theatre’s “Latter Day Playwrights” festival. Her first chapbook The Silver Thimble, was released at the Writers and Books 2002 Music and Poetry Festival.

Donna is a listed member of the writers directory of Poets & Writers, and regularly teaches creative writing workshops for both children and adults under the auspices of Rochester’s Writer’s and Books, ArtisanWorks, and other community organizations.

She is a a founder and currently the president of Just Poets.

Len Messineo

Len Messineo is a highly respected author of fiction and drama. His stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Midwest Review, Tenessee Review, Rosebud, The Sun, and many other publications, and have been twice nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize Stories series. He has an MFA from Wichita State University, and an MA in Playwriting and Directing fromSt. Louis University. One of his plays was recently selected for performance the Regional Playwrights Festival by Geva Theatre.

Martin Naparsteck

Martin Naparsteck was born February 25, 1944, in Putnam,Connecticut. He is the youngest of the five sons of Samuel and Lee Naparsteck, and was raised mostly in Exeter, a town of about 3,000 people in the anthracite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Martin holds a B.A. in Political Science from Wilkes College (now Wilkes University) in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and has an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

He served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam as a SP/4 in 1966-67. Much of his writing comes out of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and as a vetean of the war, including two acclaimed novels, War Song and A Hero's Welcome.

David Willson, co-editor of Vietnam War Literature, wrote that Naparsteck's two novels are "two lost classics dealing with the American War in Viet Nam....Two brillant novels of love gone wrong in the world of the 1960's. The early 1960's come alive in A Hero's Welcome... an all-American novel. War Song has been unjustly neglected. No novelist has dealt more honestly with the tragedy of the Viet Nam War and its impact on the Vietnamese people."

Martin Naparsteck has taught at ten colleges in New York, Pennsylvania, and Utah. He is a recipient of several teaching awards and nearly two dozen writing awards. His first major writing award was a $3,000 Creative Writing Fellowship from the Book-of-the-Month Club in competition judged by William Styron and Ralph Ellison.

Since February, 1997, he has been the book reviewer for the Salt Lake Tribune, speciailzing in contemporary literature of the American West. Almost every Sunday since then one of his reviews has appeared in the Tribune in a column called "The West Under Cover."

His short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, North American Review, Mississippi Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. He has published two novels, War Song and A Hero's Welcome, a collection of short stories, Saying Things, and a book on writing, Honesty in the Use of Words.

Novelist Colin Hester (author of Diamond Sutra) said Naparsteck's writing "takes risks and survives, indeed prospers because of its honesty... As readers and human beings we all too seldom reflect on truth until we've the fortune to read authors like the one here."

A short film based on Naparsteck's short story, The 9:13 (orignally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) has been made in Australia.

You can learn more about Martin Naparsteck on his web site at http://martinnaparsteck.com.

John Roche

John Roche is an Assistant Professor in the English department at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, and advises the campus literary magazine, Signatures.

He's also organized visits to Rochester by poets like Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Clayton Eshleman, and Janine Pommy Vega, and is on the Board of Directors of BOA Editions.

John Roche earned his Ph.D. is from SUNY/Buffalo, where he worked with Robert Creeley and John C. Clarke. While teaching at Michigan State University, he coordinated and served as master of ceremonies for the mid-Michigan reading series at the Archives Bookshop in East Lansing.

His chapbook, Ground Effects, was published in 1993, and in 2005 Foothills Publishing released a full-length collection of his pieces called On Conesus.

John has published poetry and poetry-related essays and articles in numerous magazines including House Organ, The Woodstock Journal, Jack Magazine, intent, Rolling Stock, Buff, MidWest Miscellany, Pinnacle Hill Review, Le Mot Juste, and The Burning World, as well as Knocking on the Silence: An Anthology of Poems Inspired by the Finger Lakes (Foothills 2005), and a forthcoming anthology of Susquehanna rivershed poetry.

Several of his poems can be found online at Jack Magazine and at Big Bridge.

The author himself can be contacted at jfrgla[at]rit.edu.

Joanna Scott

Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannon Award, and finalist for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel The Manikin.

She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Arrogance, Make Believe, Tourmaline, Liberation, and Everybody Loves Somebody.

Joanna Scott is currently Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Jonathan Sherwood

Born in the Rochester area, Jonathan Sherwood received his Masters degree in English from the University of Rochester, where he is now the senior science writer.

An author of fiction as well, Jonathan's novella, Under the Graying Sea, appeared in the February 2006 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Jonathan is one of the leading figures at R-Spec, the Rochester Speculative Literature Writers Association.

More about Jonathan can be found on his web site at www.JonathanSherwood.com and on his well-reviewed blog, The Fictionist. His input is a significant part of at the R-Spec website at www.r-spec.org.

Camy Sorbello

Award-winning teacher, journalist with over two hundred published articles to her credit, novelist, translator, Western aficianado, and businesswoman, Camy Sorbello is also the author of one of the few really amusing blogs on the internet.

Claudia M. Stanek

A linguist and small dog enthusiast, Claudia Stanek graduated magna cum laude from the SUNY Albany in the post-disco era. She has served as a facilitator for an English as a Second Language program for Cuban refugees, and has been a tutor. Claudia recently completed her MFA Program in Creative Writing - Poetry at the Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Vermont, and graduated in January 2007.

Claudia has been active in the literary arts in Rochester since 2002. She is a founding member and former Vice-President of Just Poets, as well as former editor of the organization's newsletter, Poet Talk. Claudia is currently host of the Just Poets Featured Reading and Open Mic at Barnes & Noble.

 

Her editorial credits include co-editing the 2005 and 2006 Le Mot Juste anthologies, as well as Common Intuitions - A Women Celebrating Women Anthology (2005, with Donna M. Marbach and Wanda Schubmehl). She is Managing Editor of the January 2007 issue of Bennington Review.

Claudia's work has appeared in such journals as The Gihon River Review, Words of Wisdom, Third Muse Poetry Journal, Writer's Digest Online, The Hazmat Review, Poets Canvas, and in the anthologies Knocking on the Silence, Common Intuitions.

 

Claudia has also begun a poetry submission service: Poetic Effect. The web site of the service is: www.poeticeffect.com.

When not writing, Claudia spends her time indulging her three rescued shih-tzus. For more information on Claudia Stanek and her work, visit her blog at multiversepoet.blogspot.com/.

Thom Ward

Thom Ward is one of Rochester's, and America's, leading poets. He is the author three collections of poetry, Small Boats With Oars Of Different Sizes; Tumblekid, winner of the 1998 Devil’s Millhopper Poetry Contest; and Various Orbits.

Ward's poetry has been published widely in literary journals, newspapers and anthologies, and has also been read by Garrison Keillor on Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Writers Almanac.”

Thom Ward's stature in American poetry is also a result of his long and productive efforts as Editor and Development Director for BOA Editions, one of the principal independent publishers of American poetry and poetry translation, which has its headquarters in Rochester, NY.

Over the course of a dozen years at BOA, Ward has edited more than 50 collections of poetry. And he is the only editor to edit two poetry collections nominated in a single year for The National Book Award for Poetry -- Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me and Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats.

Thom Ward holds degrees in English from The College of Wooster and SUNY College at Brockport. He is a past recipient of five grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, and has served as chair of the Literature Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts. He also teaches creative writing workshops and has taught and appeared at the Writers & Books literary center.

An interview with Thom Ward is available online at Poetry Daily.

T. Lucien Wright

T. Lucien ('Tim') Wright has published five novels since 1991, including the vampire classic, Blood Brothers. Wright has been Director of Adult Education at Writers & Books, and taught the Saturday Young Writer's Club there for two years.

Tim currently teaches at the Write Book and Gift Shop at Honeoye Falls, is working on a mainstream novel called Confessional, and is one of the most active members of Rochester Mensa.

T.M. Wright

T.M. Wright is the author of more than twenty-three novels many of which have been classified as horror fiction, but many of which seem more atmospheric tales of detective fiction featuring involving ghost figures -- and, in fact, Wright has been called one of the greatest authors of ghost stories since M. R. James.

His books include Strange Seed, The Waiting Room, Carlisle Street, The Playground, the surreal The Island, and the best-selling A Manhattan Ghost Story, which at one point had been contracted to be made into a film featuring Sharon Stone. Wright has also written screenplays, short fiction, and has taught at Writers & Books.

An interview with Wright on writing is available online at the web site of Critique magazine.