We'll be announcing the full faculty for the 2011 Port Townsend Writers' Conference in a couple of days, but I'm delighted to report that in the past week Carl Phillips (pictured), Pam Houston, and Dorianne Laux have accepted invitations to teach!

Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Quiver of Arrows and Riding Westward. His collection The Rest of Love won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Other books include Rock Harbor, The Tether, and From the Devotions, another finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

Pam Houston (pictured right) is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My  Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat.

Her stories have been selected for the 1999 volumes of Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Awards. She is a regular contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine. Her novel Sight Hound, was released in January, 2005.

Dorianne Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. She is the author of Facts About the Moon which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Other collections include Smoke, What We Carry, and Awake. With Kim Addonizio, she is the co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her poems have been widely translated. About Laux's work, the poet Tony Hoagland has said, "Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion." Laux lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.

We'll have more soon. Stay tuned to this channel!