How I Write Stanford University

"Harriet Scott Chessman is the author most recently of the acclaimed novel ""The Beauty of Ordinary Things"", the story of the unexpected love between a young Vietnam veteran and a Benedictine nun. Her other books include the novels ""Someone Not Really Her Mother"", ""Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper"", and ""Ohio Angels"" as well as ""The Public Is Invited to Dance"", a book about Gertrude Stein. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She has taught literature and writing at Yale, the Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford Continuing Studies. She received a PhD from Yale.

Join Hilton Obenzinger, an accomplished fiction and nonfiction writer and lecturer in the Stanford Department of English, American Studies Program, and Stanford Continuing Studies, as he engages Harriet Scott Chessman in conversation, focusing on the techniques, quirks, and joys of writing.

This program is co-sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking."

"From 1968 through 2002, Albert Gelpi taught American literature, particularly American poetry, from its Puritan beginnings to the present day. Gelpi’s books include Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet and The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet,which centers on American Romantic poetry; its sequel, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950,continues the historical argument by relating American Modernist poetry to its Romantic antecedents. He is also the author ofLiving in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis and has edited The Poet in America 1650 to the Present; Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism; Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism; and (with Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi) Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. With Robert Bertholf he edited The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. His latest book is American Poetry After Modernism: The Power of the Word, and his next project is the selected prose of C. Day Lewis, The Golden Bridle.

Join Hilton Obenzinger, an accomplished fiction and nonfiction writer and lecturer in the Stanford Department of English, American Studies Program, and Stanford Continuing Studies, as he engages Gelpi in conversation, focusing on the techniques, quirks, and joys of writing."

Join Hilton Obenzinger, an accomplished fiction and nonfiction writer and lecturer in the Stanford Department of English, the American Studies Program, and Stanford Continuing Studies, as he engages Ian Morris in conversation, focusing on the techniques, quirks, and joys of writing.

Marilyn Yalom is the author of numerous books and articles on literature and women's history, including Maternity, Mortality ,and the Literature of Madness; Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory; A History of the Breast.

Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York, a second-generation American of Italian descent. She began writing at the age of seven, and at the age of fourteen, decided to live her life as a poet. After attending Swarthmore College for two years, she moved to Greenwich Village, becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. She co-founded the Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre and founded Eidolon Editions and the Poets Institute. After joining Timothy Leary's international community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968.

Di Prima has published more than forty books. Her poetry collections include 'This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards', 'Revolutionary Letters', the long poem 'Loba', 'Seminary Poems', and 'Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems'. She is also the author of the short story collection 'Dinners and Nightmares', the semi-autobiographical 'Memoirs of a Beatnik', and the memoir ' Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years'.

In this special event, Diane di Prima will read some of her poems and join Hilton Obenzinger in a "How I Write" conversation.

Hilton Obenzinger sits down with Dr. Terry Root, Senior fellow at Woods Institute for the Environment and professor of Biological Sciences to talk about her writing process.