2008 Nonfiction Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Robert Finch

Robert Finch has published seven books of essays, most recently The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore (Counterpoint Press, 2007). He also edited A Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader and co-edited (with John Elder) The Norton Book of Nature Writing. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals and has been widely anthologized. In October 2005 Finch began producing weekly radio commentaries for WCAI, an NPR affiliate of Boston’s WGBH public radio station, and in 2005 he received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for Radio Writing. He has taught at numerous colleges and writers conferences and is currently on the nonfiction faculty of the MFA program in writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, with his wife, the writer Kathy Shorr, and spends summers in Newfoundland.

Dr. Kevin M. Lyons

Dr. Kevin M. Lyons (moderator) has been interested in literacy education since his practice teaching experience with high school students in 1974. That experience, he says, “shook my understanding about how well average high school students read and process information.” After several years teaching reading at the elementary and middle school levels, he spent many years at Suffolk University and Boston College teaching teachers at the master’s and doctoral levels about effective literacy practices. Since July 2006 he has been superintendent of Newburyport public schools.

William Sargent

William Sargent is a consultant for PBS’s NOVA series. His books include The House on Ipswich Marsh (UPNE, 2005), Crab Wars: A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health (UPNE, 2002), and A Year in the Notch: Exploring the Natural History of the White Mountains (UPNE, 2001). Formerly director of the Baltimore Aquarium and a research assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Sargent has taught at the Briarwood Marine Science Center and at Harvard University. He lives in Ipswich.

Lou Ureneck

Lou Ureneck teaches journalism and serves as chair of the journalism department at Boston University. He has worked at newspapers in Providence, Rhode Island; Portland, Maine; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ureneck was a Nieman Fellow and editor-in-residence at Harvard University in 1994-95 and a Barach Fellow in nonfiction writing at the Wesleyan Writers Conference in 1995. His memoir Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, tells the story of a wilderness trip he took with son following his divorce. It won a 2007 National Outdoor Book Award and was named a book-of-the-month pick by National Geographic Traveler.

Alan Weisman

Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist, nonfiction writer, and radio producer whose reports have appeared on NPR and in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and numerous other publications. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Colombia and a John Farrar Fellow in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the author of The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007); An Echo In My Blood: The Search for a Family’s Hidden Past (Harcourt Brace, 1999); Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998); La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); and We, Immortals (Pocket Books, 1979).