List Of Writers

SOLOW, HARRISON

Harrison Solow is Writer in Residence for the University of Wales, Lampeter. In addition to the duties attendant on this appointment and her lectureship in the English Department, Harrison is the Director of The Saint David’s Institute for Wales in the World hosted by the University of Wales, Lampeter in which capacity she represents the university and the country in international intercultural and academic ventures, particularly in America and Canada.

A Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and Special Projects Editor for the University of California Press in the 1980s and 1990s, Harrison is an award-winning writer (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) with extensive experience in literary and academic publishing, the arts, the corporate world and the entertainment industry, including Hollywood. She is published by major publishing houses, university presses, magazines and journals, in America, Wales, Canada and England. To date, she has written, edited and/or executed over 400 publications and productions.

Harrison was educated at several universities in the United States and Canada where she read for undergraduate honours in Philosophy, Theology and English Literature, which she cites as an "invaluable background" for her creative work. In addition to her undergraduate degrees, she holds an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Mills College, a prestigious women’s liberal arts college in California, where she was recently honoured as a Notable Graduate. She receives her PhD in 2009.

Her current literary pursuit, and personal passion, is the language, literature and culture of Wales for which she has a deep love and inexplicable affinity. This enigmatic relationship to Wales and to her central character, Timothy Evans, world class tenor and one of Ceredigion’s most illustrious sons, is the central theme of the mixed genre work, "Bendithion", on which she is currently working. An excerpt of "Bendithion" won the 2008 Pushcart Prize for Literary Non-Fiction,  the most honoured literary prize for short published works in America. Harrison is also working on a series of poems about Timothy called "Postal Codes". In 2006, Harrison won a first place award in the Abroad International Short Fiction Competition for her story, ’Mater Amabilis’. She also won a Faulkner Award for Short Fiction in November 2005. Her latest short story ’The Postmaster’s Song’ is one of ten winning stories in the 2007 Cinnamon Press Short Story Competition. Set in Lampeter, it appears in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, an anthology of short stories, by Cinnamon Press, in September 2008.

Harrison’s book tours across the USA and Canada have included readings, discussions and performance of her work. Before moving to Wales, she was a frequent guest on American national (network and cable) television and radio and a public speaker/lecturer at conferences, writing workshops and conventions on a wide variety of topics and themes derived from her work. Recent interviews and appearances in Wales include "Two and More Worlds" a BBC Wales Interview July 2008; "The Strange Story of Harrison and Timothy" in the Cambrian News, January, 2008; "Bendithion", Cambrian News, November 2007 "An Inspirational Little Town": Feature Article in the Cambrian News, June, 2007 "From California to Ceredigion": Radio Wales Arts Show (1/2 hour interview programme. May, 2007). In the last three years, Harrison has conducted a number of writing workshops and lectured in over a dozen seminars, symposiums and colloquiums on various topics in Wales. She is a Mentor in the Women’s Universities Mentoring Scheme (WUMS) out of the University of Glamorgan and a member of several academic and professional organisations.

Harrison is married to producer, writer and director Herbert F. Solow, the former Head of MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Inc. and Desilu Studios, whose shows, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible are among the most iconic productions in television history.

She is becoming fluent in Welsh.

Selected Publications:
Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation (University of California Press, Harper Collins UK and Simon & Schuster, 1994, 1995, 1996)
The Star Trek Sketchbook (co-author) (Simon & Schuster, 1996)
Enriched Classics Series (introductory & supplemental material) (Simon & Schuster, 2004)
’The Apricots and the King’ (Farbrengen Magazine, 2003)
’Mater Amabilis’ (Driftwood Literary Journal, June 2006)
" Erstaz Fidelis " in The Ukraine and Other Poems (Leaf Books, 2007)
’Bendithion’  in AGNI Literary Journal, October 2007
’The Postmaster’s Song’  in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Cinnamon Press, 2008)