Authors join creative writing faculty

By Robert Brickhouse

Two noted fiction writers, Ann Beattie and Christopher Tilghman, have joined the English department faculty this semester to teach in the highly regarded graduate Creative Writing Program.

Short story writers and novelists whose work has won wide critical praise, they join a fiction writing faculty that includes award-winning writers Deborah Eisenberg, Sydney Blair and John Casey.

“Ann Beattie and Chris Tilghman will both bring wonderful strengths to our program,” said Lisa Russ Spaar, director of the Creative Writing Program. “Both have taught here before and our students have enjoyed working with them.”

Beattie, who will hold the Edgar Allan Poe Professorship in English, is well known for her work that often depicts the generation that came of age in the 1960s. She has published seven story collections, including most recently Perfect Recall and Park City. Her six novels include My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, Another You and Picturing Will. Her stories have been re-printed in many anthologies.

Among her many honors is an award of excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has also been elected to membership in the academy, one of the country’s highest honors for creative work. She has taught at U.Va., among other universities, and has lived in Maine and Key West, Fla.

Tilghman, author of the novel Mason’s Retreat and story collections In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run, was a visiting professor at U.Va. last year. His work, which has appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines and several times in the annual Best American Short Stories collections, has been acclaimed for its descriptions of characters’ inner lives and for its vivid sense of place, including the Chesapeake Bay region.

Tilghman was previously writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Massachusetts. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award and the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award.