Bill Roorbach & Wyn Cooper

The 2022 Brattleboro Literary Festival is celebrating the 21st year with its first live and in person festival since 2019. Bill Roorbach is the author of Lucky Turtle and five previous books of fiction, including The Girl of the Lake, the Kirkus Prize finalist The Remedy for Love, the bestselling Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection Big Bend.  His memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award in nonfiction. Roorbach has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He held the William H. P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.  His craft book, Writing Life Stories, has been in print for twenty-five years. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York Magazine, and other publications.  Roorbach lives in Maine with his family. Wyn Cooper has published five books of poems: The Country of Here Below, The Way Back, Postcards from the Interior, Chaos is the New Calm, and Mars Poetica. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Slate, Crazyhorse, AGNI, The Southern Review, and more than 100 other magazines.  His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including Poetry: An Introduction (Sixth Edition), The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. His first novel, Way Out West, will be published in October, 2022. In 1993, “Fun,” a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.”  He lives in Vermont and Massachusetts.