We are buoyed by the news that Sena Jeter Naslund and Hilma Wolitzer will join us for Session 1 of our upcoming Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, January 8-11 2009. Wolitzer also joins the faculty for our writers' workshop program January 12-15.

Naslund is the current Kentucky Poet Laureate and editor of The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. She is the author of 4 novels, including the immensely popular Ahab's Wife, which tells the story of Una Spenser, wedded to Melville's white whale-hunting captain; and her most recent book, Abundance, which reimagines the world of Marie Antoinette.

Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels including, most recently, The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, and Summer Reading; and a book on the craft of fiction titled The Company of Writers. She has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; and has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and right here at the Key West Literary Seminar.

To register for the 2009 Seminar or Writers' Workshops, click here.

We are proud to announce a collaboration with PennSound, the digital poetry archive project at the University of Pennsylvania. PennSound, founded by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis as part of UPenn's center for contemporary writing, maintains perhaps the finest collection of audio recordings by 20th century poets on the web. Among the more than 1,500 recordings on their site are such rarities as Jack Spicer's 1956 Vancouver lectures; a 1967 recording of George Oppen reading his masterpiece "Of Being Numerous" in its entirety; James Schuyler reading "Hymn to Life" from the Chelsea Hotel in 1986; several recordings of Gertrude Stein in the 1930s; and major collections of readings by Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. We've been working with managing editor Michael S. Hennessey for the past month developing PennSound's KWLS page, which debuts with KWLS readings by John Ashbery, Meghan O'Rourke, James Tate, and Charles Simic. You can read Hennessey's blog post announcing the page here. You'll find the complete list of PennSound recordings, indexed by author, here. And you can read the PennSound manifesto here. Many thanks to Hennessey and all the good people at PennSound for their work in making KWLS recordings part of this important online collection.

We are honored to announce that Joyce Carol Oates will join us as a special guest this January 2009 for Session 2 of Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, our 27th annual Seminar. Oates's readings and discussions during our 2007 event are memorable for many of us, and we enthusiastically welcome one of the great talents of our time back to the Seminar.

To call Oates prolific is akin to calling water wet. She is the author of more than 50 novels or novellas, more than 30 short story collections, a dozen collections of essays and nonfiction, several poetry collections, and several more collections of plays. She has published stories, essays, poems, and reviews in nearly every major (and minor) publication of the last 40 years; she has written psychological thrillers under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly;" and an Oates book has been on The New York Times Notable Books of the Year list for 35 of the last 40 years. Oates has written about such diverse American icons as Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Stephen King, Sylvia Plath, and extensively on the enigmatic boxer Mike Tyson, whose precipitous rise and squalid fall she covered in the 1980s and 1990s for publications including Life, The Village Voice, and Newsweek. In addition, she founded and edits The Ontario Review, serves as the Roger S. Berlind Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the Prix Femina.

Oates's most recent book, Wild Nights!, is a collection of short stories about the last days of five American writers. Based on letters, diaries, biographies, unpublished manuscripts, and their own canonical works, Oates creates haunting final chapters for Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. It is, wrote The New York Times, "a gem of a book ... about creativity and age and the complicated, anxiety-ridden relationship between the two."

Oates joins William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, Barry Unsworth, Russell Banks, and others on the list of speakers scheduled for Session 2 this January 15-18 2009. Session 1 is already sold out, and we expect Session 2 will also sell out early. Click here to register or call 1-888-293-9291.