Biography for William
Alba
William Alba wrote and designed An Oz Album, an artful arrangement of visual and formal poetry. He currently works at Carnegie Mellon University as the Director of the Science and Humanities Scholars Program and as the Director of the Advanced Placement Early Action Program.
As a faculty associate with the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, Alba has taught in affiliated writing workshops at Bard, Lake Forest, and Kenyon. He is the founder and director of the Monte Sol Workshop, a summer writing program for high-school students. He has previously been on the faculties of Phillips Academy (Andover), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, St. John's College in Santa Fe, and Bard College, both as a visiting professor and as the associate dean of studies of Bard High School Early College, in New York City.
An Oz Album was inspired after he reexamined a poem ("Kansas") which he wrote years ago while in college. Wishing to assemble a book of poetry that would delight adults in the way that children turn and return to picture books, from 1995 to 2001 he developed this fictional autobiography of a single person seeking love in a big city. He gratefully acknowledges the encouragement on his writing from his poetry group that met weekly in Chicago as well as from his colleagues at the Institute for Writing and Thinking. He is likewise thankful for the critique he received on earlier book drafts in graphic design classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alba holds a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, where he was a College Scholar and summa cum laude in chemistry. In 1992 he earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. One of his poems recently appeared in the anthology Signs and Portents edited by Arthur Sze and may be read in the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. Alba is the designer for the second book to be published by Pulley Press, More Openings & Closings.
Here is a link to his weblog, Best Let or Get.
