Visiting Faculty and Distinguished Writers in Residence

Albert Wendt was appointed Citizen's Chair in the Department of English in 2004 and will be here through 2008. Professor Wendt is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of poetry and a play. Leaves of the Banyan Tree won the New Zealand Wattie Book of the Year Award, and is considered a classic of Pacific literature. His work has been translated into many languages. Recent books include Sons for the Return Home and his newest landmark novel The Mango's Kiss which was eighteen years in the making. His most recent book of poetry, The Book of the Black Star, combines words and images in short poems, drawing on Samoan language and myth, on dreams and memoires, as well as one the daily life of the poet. His play The Songmaker's Chair was a highlight of the first Auckland International Arts Festival, and at the Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu (March, 2006).

As well as being the pioneer of Pacific writing, he is a mentor to many writers, and has been responsible for anthologizing the literature of the region.

Recent honours include New Zealand's Senior Pacific Islands Artist's Award, and the Companion of the Order of New Zealand for services to literature. In May 2005, Albert Wendt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Literature by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The film "A New Oceania: Albert Wendt, Writer" premiered at the Auckland Film Festival in July and was shown at the Hawai‘i Film Festival in October 2005. His play, "The Songmaker's Chair" was staged in Honolulu by Kumu Kahua Theatre in Spring 200

Victoria Kneubuhl - Distinguished Writer in Residence for Fall 2007
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl was born in Honolulu and holds a Bachelor’s degree from Antioch University and a Master’s degree in Drama and Theatre from the University of Hawai’i. She worked for eleven years in the field of museum education and is now a free lance writer and consultant. As a playwright, she has had twelve plays produced, several of which have toured to Britain, America, the Pacific and Asia. Her anthology of three plays, Hawai’i Nei, was published by the University of Hawaii Press. She has also written ten documentary scripts for television and is a producer/writer for the documentary series Biography Hawai’i. She has had several published sort stories and her first mystery novel, The Portrait Murders, is slated for publication by the University of Hawaii Press in 2008. Ms. Kneubuhl has also been actively involved in producing many community programs that reflect the unique history and lifestyle of her island home. She was named one of the Extraordinary Women of Hawai’i in 2001 by the Foundation for Hawaii Women’s History and the Native Hawaiian Library of ALU LIKE, Inc. In 1994, she was honored with the Hawai’i Award for Literature, and she received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature in 2006.

R. Zamora Linmark - Distinguished Writer in Residence for Spring 2007
Zack Linmark is the author of the acclaimed 1995 novel Rolling the R’s and a collection of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions (2005). His new novel, Leche, will appear in 2007 with Carroll & Graf. Over the years, his work has appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Zyzzyva, Indiana Review, and the Philippine Free Press; it is also anthologized in Inside Him (2006), Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World (2004), Screaming Monkeys (2003), Asian American Studies: A Reader (2002), Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (2001), Take-Out: Anthology of Queer API Writings (2000), The Best of Honolulu Fiction(2001), The Best Gay American Short Stories 1997, and other collections. Zack Zamora is a UHM graduate, a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in poetry (2001) and a Fulbright Senior Lecturer/Researcher in the Philippines (2005-2006). He has taught creative writing at UC-Santa Cruz and in the Philippines at the De La Salle University and the University of Santo Tomas.

Veronica Chambers - Slated to be our Distinguished Writer in Residence for Spring 2007, Veronica Chambers is regretfully unable to join us for family reasons.

Anne Kennedy, Distinguished Writer in Residence for Fall, 2006, is from Aotearoa/ New Zealand. She has published five books of fiction and poetry including the novel, A Boy and His Uncle (Picador, 1998) and the poetry sequence, Sing-song (Auckland University Press, 2003). Her newest book is the narrative poem, The Time of the Giants (Auckland University Press). She has also written many short stories. Among several awards, she has won the BNZ/Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the Montana New Zealand Award for Poetry, and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship. She has worked as a critic, a script editor and a screenwriter, co-writing the screenplay for Crush with director Alison Maclean and adapting Dorothy Porter’s novel in poetry, Monkey’s Mask, for the screen. Anne is a co-editor of Trout: an online journal of arts and literature from Aotearoa and the Pacific Islands.

W.S. Merwin (2006) W. S. Merwin is a thirty-year Maui resident and environmental activist whose career as a poet and translator spans five decades.  In 1952, he was awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize by W. H. Auden.  In addition to the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, he has received the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.  While on Maui, Merwin has written nine books of poetry and five of prose.  His largest work, The Folding Cliffs, is the story of the struggle of Ko‘olau, a victim of Hansen’s disease, to remain with his family on Kaua‘i shortly after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.  In 2005, he published an autobiographical book, Summer Doorways; a new volume of poems, Present Company; and Migration.

Patricia Grace (2006) Patricia Grace, honored in 2005 as a living icon of New Zealand art at the second biennial Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Awards, is widely recognized as a key figure in contemporary world literature and in Maori literature in English. In 1975, Grace published the first collection of short stories by a Maori woman writer. Since then she has written six award-winning novels, Mutuwhenua (1978), Potiki (1986), Cousins (1992), Baby No-Eyes (1999), Dogside Story (2001), and Tu (2004); five more short-story collections, and several children’s books both in English and Maori. Widely anthologized, her fiction has been translated into Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Reissued by Penguin in 2005, Dogside Story won the 2001 $15,000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for fiction, was longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in August 2001, and was also shortlisted in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Patricia Grace’s latest novel Tu (Penguin Books)
won the Deutz Medal for Fiction or Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2005. Patricia Grace's new collection of short stories previews in late 2006.

Achy Obejas (Fall 2005) Achy Obejas brings her talents as fiction writer, poet, journalist, and translator to our Department as the 2005 Distinguished Writer in Residence. She is the author of Days of Awe, a novel (Ballantine/Random House) about the tensions between public and private identities set against the backdrop of the Jewish community in Cuba.

Her other books include Memory Mambo, a novel, and We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?, a collection of short stories (both from Cleis). Her poetry and stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. An award-winning journalist, she worked ten years for the Chicago Tribune writing and reporting about arts and culture. Among literally thousands of stories, she helped cover Pope John Paul II’s historic 1998 visit to Cuba, the arrival of Al-Queda prisoners in Guantanamo, the Versace murder, and the AIDS epidemic.

She is the recipient of a Pulitzer for a Tribune team investigation, the Studs Terkel Journalism Prize, several Peter Lisagor journalism honors, two Lambda Literary awards, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Arts, and more honors. She has lectured and read her work in the U.S., Cuba, Mexico, Spain and Australia. Most recently, she was teaching as the Springer Writer-in-Residence in the English department at the University of Chicago.

Nora Okja Keller (Fall 2004) Nora Okja Keller, born in Seoul, Korea, lives with her family in Waipahu, Hawai'i. The author of Comfort Woman and Fox Girl, both out of Viking/Penguin, received the Pushcart Prize in 1995 and the American Book Award in 1998. Her children's play "When Tiger Smoked His Pipe," cowritten with her 10-year old daughter, was produced by Honolulu Theater for Youth in the Fall of 2003. In addition to her novels, Keller has co-edited two Bamboo Ridge anthologies: Intersecting Circles: Voices of Hapa Women (1999) and YOBO: Korean Americans Writing in Hawai'i (2003). She is currently working on her third novel and a collection of essays.

Joy Harjo (Fall 2003) Joy Harjo, poet, musician, writer and performer has published several books, including She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and A Map to the Next World from W.W.Norton, and her recently released How We Became Human and New and Selected Poems, also from W.W.Norton. Her first children's book is The Good Luck Cat, from Harcourt. She has also co-edited an anthology of native women's writing: Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Native Women's Writing of North America, and Secrets from the Center of the World, a book of poetic prose with photographs by Stephen Strom.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Spring 2003) Professor Spivak, Avalon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, is the author of many important books and essays, including In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Outside in the Teaching Machine, and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Professor Spivak is also conducting a graduate seminar on Narratives of the Multiple Politics of Culture.

Sia Figiel (Fall 2002)

John Pule (Spring 2002)

Robert Sullivan (Fall 2001) Robert Sullivan has published three books of poetry, Jazz Waiata and Piki Ake! and Star Waka (AUP), as well as a graphic novel, Maui: Legends of the Outcast (Godwit, 1996) illustrated by Chris Slane. He has co-edited, with Reina Whaitiri, a contemporary Maori literature issue of the American journal Manoa and is one of the editors of an anthology of Polynesian poetry provisionally titled Journeys (AUP). He also co-edits the online literary journal Trout. Sullivan's work is widely anthologised and appears in many New Zealand and overseas literary journals. He has won or been a finalist for several national literary awards, and in 1998 he was the Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland.

Paul Millar (2001) Paul Millar teaches in the Department of English, Film,, and Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand/Aotearoa. His publications include the editions Beyond the Palisade by James K. Baxter. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998; Dweller on the Threshold by Noel Ginn. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 1998; Autumn Testament by James K. Baxter. Auckland. Oxford University Press, 1997; and Cold Spring by James K. Baxter. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1996.