Spring Conference 2007 was held at Elliott University Center in Greensboro, NC. The conference is over, but we have left this conference information on the site so that you can refer to it as a model of what our Spring Conference is like.

Faculty Biographies: Spring Conference 2007

Keynote
	Keynote Fred Chappell is an author and poet who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Chappell was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002. He attended Duke University. He has written thirty books in forty years, work that has been honored with dozens of prizes, including the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. He is a 2006 honoree in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Fiction Faculty
	Quinn Dalton is the author of a novel, High Strung, and a story collection, Bulletproof Girl. Stories have appeared in literary publications such as Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2006. She was the recipient of a 2002-2003 NC Arts Council artist fellowship.
	Michael Parker is the author of three novels -- Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, and Virginia Lovers -- as well as a collection of novellas and stories, The Geographical Cure (Scribner's, 1994), which won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. In 2004 he was awarded fiction fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has two books forthcoming from Algonquin Books. He teaches creative writing and literature at UNC-G.
Poetry Faculty
	Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road, Evenings & Avenues, and Dig Safe, and the forthcoming Backwards Days -- all published by Penguin. His poetry has won awards from the National Poetry Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
	James Clark directs the UNC-Greensboro MFA Writing Program, James Clark edits The Greensboro Review and coordinates the visiting writers' series. He has published fiction and a variety of non-fiction, in addition to serving as an editorial consultant for numerous presses and magazines. He supervises graduate tutorials in publishing and editing and directs teaching internships for MFA students.
	Costa Rican-American Mark Smith-Soto is Director of the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he edits International Poetry Review. He was 2005 winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, and his poetry has appeared in many journals. His award-winning chapbooks include Green Mango Collage and Shafts, and his full-length collections include Our Lives Are Rivers (University Press of Florida, 2003) and Any Second Now (Main Street Rag Press, 2006).
	Carolyn Beard Whitlow's second book, Vanished, won the 2006 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Cold Mountain Review, and The Massachusetts Review, and her essays and poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women and Writing Your Rhythm. She is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Guilford College, where she has taught creative writing since 1993.
Creative Nonfiction Faculty
	Marianne Gingher has published four books of fiction and nonfiction, including Bobby Rex's Greatest Hit and the memoir A Girl's Life: Horses, Boys, Weddings & Luck. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Southern Review, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Redbook, Seventeen, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Rambler, the Washington Post Magazine, and the New York Times. She has taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill for many years.
	Recent nonfiction by Lee Zacharias has appeared in Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Humanities Review, and North Carolina Literary Review among other journals and is regularly cited in the annual Best American Essays. Her books include Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night (stories) and the novel Lessons. A former fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council and recipient of several teaching awards, she is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.