Sarah Willis

SARAH WILLIS, Paralegal: Born in Nashville, Tennessee and raised in Gainesville, Florida. Received a B.A. in Political Science cum laude with honors from Wake Forest University in 2002, a Paralegal Certificate from the Center for Legal Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002 and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. Sarah worked at the firm from 2002-2004 and returned in the fall of 2008. In the intervening years, she worked at the American Red Cross in Tucson, Arizona and as a paralegal for a local commercial real estate and small business practice. She resides in Durham.


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A winner of New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction 2000, and The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature 2000.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, and fiction. She is married to the historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Here is a short list of the books she has written.

• Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974) (poems)
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) (nonfiction narrative)
• Holy the Firm (1977) (nonfiction narrative)
• Living by Fiction (1982) (non-fiction narrative)
• Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) (narrative essays)
• Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984) (nonfiction narrative)
• An American Childhood (1987) (memoir)
• The Writing Life (1989) (non-fiction narrative)
• The Living (1992) (novel)
• Mornings Like This (1995) (poems)
• For the Time Being (1999) (non-fiction narrative)
• The Maytrees (2007) (fiction)

Mayakovsky In New York: A Found Poem

New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.

For many hours the train flies along the banks
of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

Bridges leap over the train with increasing frequency.

At each stop an additional story grows
onto the roofs. Finally houses with squares
and dots of windows rise up. No matter how far
you throw back your head, there are no tops.

Time and again, the telegraph poles are made
of wood. Maybe it only seems that way.

In the narrow canyons between the buildings, a sort
of adventurer-wind howls and runs away
along the versts of the ten avenues. Below
flows a solid human mass. Only their yellow
waterproof slickers hiss like samovars and blaze.
The construction rises and with it the crane, as if
the building were being lifted up off the ground
by its pigtail. It is hard to take it seriously.

The buildings are glowing with electricity; their evenly
cut-out windows are like a stencil. Under awnings
the papers lie in heaps, delivered by trucks.
It is impossible to tear oneself away from this spectacle.

At midnight those leaving the theaters drink a last soda.
Puddles of rain stand cooling. Poor people scavenge
bones. In all directions is a labyrinth of trains
suffocated by vaults. There is no hope, your eyes
are not accustomed to seeing such things.

They are starting to evolve an American gait out
of the cautious steps of the Indians on the paths of empty
Manhattan. Maybe it only seems that way.

Ernest James Gaines

Ernest James Gaines was born January 15, 1933, on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a small town in Pointe Coupee Parish, near New Roads, Louisiana. The oldest of twelve children, he was raised by his great-aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, who provided the inspiration for the lead protagonist Miss Jane in the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, as well as other strong black female characters, such as Miss Emma and Tante Lou in A Lesson Before Dying. Gaines’ birthplace serves as the model for his fictional world of Bayonne and St. Raphael Parish. With the exception of his fourth novel, In My Father’s House, all of Gaines’ fictional work is set in Bayonne. Although he has spent much of his life since age fifteen in San Francisco, he writes exclusively about life in the South. He is perhaps best known for his 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, featuring Cicely Tyson, which was made into a TV movie and won several Emmys. In May 1999, HBO debuted its made-for-television movie of A Lesson Before Dying.

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• Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
• 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
• October 1997 choice of Oprah's Book Club