Russell Banks

Russell Banks, visiting faculty member in the M.F.A. program, has written a dozen novels and short story collections that have won him Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts grants and a St. Lawrence Prize for fiction.

Banks’s titles include “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” which were adapted into critically acclaimed, award-winning feature films; Martin Scorcese is producing the film of “Cloudsplitter” for HBO; “Searching for Survivors”; “Family Life”; “Hamilton Stark”; “The New World”; “The Book of Jamaica,” which is being adapted into a feature film; “Trailerpark”; “The Relation of My Imprisonment”; “Continental Drift,” also being adapted into a feature film; “Success Stories”; and “Rule of the Bone.” His latest novel, “The Darling,” set in 20th-century Liberia, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2004.

Banks’s poems, stories and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Vanity Fair and Harpers.

The New York State Author from 2004 to 2006, he has received numerous awards, including the Ingram Merrill Award, the John Dos Passos Award and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is president of the International Parliament of Writers and the founding president of the North American Network of Cities of Asylum.