BEST AUTHOR BEST : TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS [ 2 ]

.-  How has being writer in residence of Harvard Divinity School changed you?

The students have changed me - their hunger, the power of their perceptions, their fierce and compassionate intelligence.

They are my teachers. I also began praying again, not to the God I prayed in growing up, but a more expressive one. It has become a practice of listening.

At its best, H.D.S. is a generative space, where one's moral imagination is both challenged and cultivated.

At its most challenging, I have felt out of my element, a feral interloper with a bushy tail tucked inside my pants - homesick for the desert. I have been known to howl.

.-  AS a writer what have you tried that's new and different in. '' The Glorians '' ?

In 1973, in my first year at the University of Utah, I took a poetry seminar taught by Robert Mezey. 

He said on Day 1, '' I am going to give you one rule in writing that you must never break. Never write about a dream.''

Somewhere that advice ' registered ' inside me as a protest. One day, I would break that rule. Fifty years later, I did exactly that : '' The Glorians '' begins with a dream.

.-  What's your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Fleur Pillager in Louise Erdrich's '' Tracks.''

.-  Your favorite anti hero or villain?

Fleur Pillager in Louise Erdrich's '' Tracks.''

.-  Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?

Denial. Complacency. Fear.

.-  You're organising a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Peter Matthiessen, as I believe we had unfinished things to say, to each other.

Albert Camus and Marianne Moore would join us. 

All three devoted themselves to a life of words in service or a just world, where beauty became its new form of resistance. And I would ask as an invocation and benediction that Moore read her poem '' A Jelly-Fish.''

.-  What books are on your night stand?

'' Oaxaca '' [ From Moon Travel ] ; '' Education and the Significance of Life, '' by J. Krishnamurti; '' Wild Girls '' by Tiya Miles ; '' Christianity at the Crossroads,'' by David N Hempton.

'' The Waves,'' by Virginia Woolf ; '' The Needle's Eye,'' by Fanny Howe; '' Vigil,'' by George Saunders; '' A Fire Runs Through All Things,'' by Susan Murphy.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.