Jay Parini

Jay Parini is an award-winning novelist, poet and the Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. His six published novels include Benjamin's Crossing (Holt & Co 1997) and The Apprentice Lover (HarperCollins 2002). Jay's most recent volume of poetry is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (George Braziller 2005).

In addition to critically acclaimed biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner, Jay has written a volume of essays on literature and politics as well as the art of teaching. He edited the Oxford Encyclopaedia of American Literature (Oxford University Press 2004) and writes regularly for The Guardian and other publications.